While Boethius famously defined the person as "an individual substance of a rational nature," this definition turns out to be more a hindrance than a help today. The problem is not in the definition, but in our modern understanding of it. Because Catholic adults know more biology than they do theology, they do not entirely understand the definition, and they therefore tend to misunderstand everything associated with the relationship between God and man.
That is, we accept the definition without considering the theological context in which it was given. We see and understand the individual words, we find the distinguishing characteristic of man’s definition in the word "rational," and we associate the ability to be "rational" with a specific stage of brain development. This has far-reaching consequences. It results, for instance, in the spectacle of Catholics who attempt to defend abortion as something that assaults human beings but not human persons, because they incorrectly believe rationality to be a function of a physiological brain process when it is actually a quality of man’s spiritual soul.
Men and women who would never think to argue that God is anencephalic and therefore cannot be as much as one Person, much less three, are happy to draw that exact conclusion concerning human beings. In fact, the possession of a rational nature is independent of brain development. The brain is merely the tool through which rationality expresses itself. The rational nature of the human soul exists even when the tool through which it is meant to express itself is damaged or not present. Thus, it would be as absurd to say Michelangelo is only an artist while he uses his brush as it is to say a child is only a person if he has a fully-developed brain.
The Heart of the Problem
This misunderstanding outlines the heart of the problem uneducated Catholics face. We are persons because God calls us into relationship with Himself. The Boethian definition tells us the "what" in a superlative and explicit fashion, but the theological context of the "why" has been lost. We know the Three Persons of the Godhead are distinguished only by their relations: nothing else distinguishes the Three. Since we are made in the image and likeness of God, we are therefore likewise persons only because of our relations. Specifically, we are persons only because God calls us into relationship with Himself, into relationship with His own divine Personhoods.
If He did not call us, we would be human animals, not human persons. Our personhood depends on His call to us, not on something innate to ourselves. If it were otherwise, Christ would indeed be two persons: one human and one divine. He is not. Thus, the rational nature that Boethius refers to is the gift God gives us so that we can participate in the call He makes to us. That is, the Boethian definition is the result of a relationship already established with, for and by God, it is not the cause of that relationship.
But this leads to another realization. Since we are given rationality in order to be persons, this rationality must have substance on which to work. That is, we must have knowledge of God (revelation) and knowledge of how to derive more knowledge of Him (logic). Because He calls us into personal relationship with Himself, He must reveal Himself to us, and we must turn all that we are towards knowing Him. In short, God made us to know Him.
Three Ways to Know
Thus, it is no surprise to find the three theological virtues - faith, hope and love – are all just different ways of knowing. Faith is our response to who a person is, hope tells us about the person’s message, and love is intimate knowledge of that person.
Faith is the sure knowledge that someone can be trusted. When we are speaking of God, faith is two things at once: it is the ability or power to know one fact about God: He can be trusted. It is also the daily choice to act on that fact. God sends us the power as a free, unmerited gift, but it is never a blind leap. It requires evidence, facts.
Accurately predicting what someone will do based on what we know of him: this is an act of faith. For human relations, our knowledge is founded in other people’s testimony. We don’t know whether the banker is honest or the mechanic reliable. Someone told us. We trusted that person to know. "Faith is the evidence of things not seen" (Heb 11:1).
Likewise, prophecy, or "unseen" knowledge, only works if the universe is orderly and consistent. The universe’s order implies design (Rom 1:19-20). Thus, the gift of God’s power lifts our reason to a larger Truth: He exists, He made the universe, and He is perfectly reliable. I have faith in God because God lifts me up to see more than I normally could. The old saw is true: knowledge (faith) is power.
But, while Faith looks at the messenger’s reliability, Hope looks at message content. Good words from someone I trust: this breathes hope.
God’s message is simple: through His Church and sacraments, He gives Himself entirely to me so that I may have eternal joy. This promise, joyful communion with divinity, breathes hope. Unlike any hope we have in man, the source of our hope is the very Word of the absolutely trustworthy God. The Scripture, the Word of God, tells us about the Logos, the Word of God. But the knowledge of God’s message penetrates even more deeply.
The Kisses of Your Mouth
"Adam knew Eve..." The fullest form of knowledge is complete intimacy, the intimacy of Bridegroom and Bride. It is one person giving self entirely to another. God says He gives Himself entirely to me.
Unlike Faith, which looks at "the evidence of things not seen" (Heb 11:1), Love stands naked before the beloved and is not ashamed (Gen 2:25). Faith is knowledge without sight, Love is knowledge through full sight, but not just sight. Love is palpable, He can be touched. Love is the gift of self to another, with no wall, no barrier, nothing to impede full, total, intimate, penetrating knowledge.
Paul describes heaven, "At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known." (1 Cor 13:12). Moses describes one foretaste of heaven, "Adam knew Eve and she bore Cain" (Gen 4:1).
Man needs these three forms of knowledge. This culture understands that need. It does not understand it fully, but it does understand. The culture has become permeated with sex because it is not permeated with doctrine.
You see, sex between husband and wife is a pale foretaste God provides us in order to help us understand how He intends to live with us in heaven - He gives Himself entirely to us, we give ourselves entirely to Him. We are made to know God. Since we have not received the doctrines we need to know Him, we pursue the only other avenue of knowledge available: "Adam knew Eve." Put another way, when we lack Him, we pursue His images.
Every human person is an image of the uncreated eternal Persons within the Godhead. We need to know Him to the fullest extent of our being. Adults need to know Him at an adult level. When the Church, the primary means of knowing God, has marginalized herself by focussing most of her energies on children, adults will blindly seek out what they need on their own, wherever they can.
But those same adults know in their gut that the Church’s refusal to engage them as adults is unjust at best, cowardice at worst. They will respond to entreaties to return to her with derision and scorn. In America, the problems in the Catholic Church are problems she created for herself. She will not solve them until she decides to engage adults as her primary mission instead of leaving them the dregs of her attention.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Friday, August 27, 2004
The Shibboleth
"When a mother can kill her own child, what is left of the West to save?" -Blessed Mother Teresa
When Judge Tim A. Duket, Marinette County Circuit Court became aware of this quote, he responded:
"With your cite to Mother Teresa 'what is left of the West to save?' you are starting to sound like Osama bin Ladden. I'm sure if you look hard you can find some good things worth saving 'of the West' ".
Residual Culture
The good judge appears to miss the point. There is such a thing as residual culture. That is, some good things can continue to happen in a culture even though the rationale for the good thing no longer exists because all the support has been cut away. For instance, men are still compelled to pay child support in this country even though it is logically absurd, given the logic put forward and the laws passed and interpreted on abortion.
There is absolutely no logical, and really very little lawful reason, for holding a man responsible for child support anymore. He didn't create the child (the mother did - no child at conception, right?),. he didn't want the child (the decision to have sex is not a decision to have a child), he bears no responsibility for the child's existence (he didn't grow it - she did) yet we still act as if the man is somehow responsible for the child's existence even though we can no longer provide a rationale reason for drawing this conclusion. The fact that we understand the man is responsible is good. Our ability to continue to understand this as a culture probably won't last too much longer, however. We have deliberately blinded ourselves to it by pretending it is otherwise in order to allow mothers to kill their children.
So this "good thing" in our culture is residual. It is an anachronistic throw-back to the time when men were actually supposed to act responsibly and be held responsible for the existence of children. Most of the "good things" in American culture are anachronistic throwbacks at this point. Like buggy whips in a Model T, we insist on having certain things because they make us feel comfortable, not because they make sense. Unfortunately, they can't last because they aren't logically consistent with our attempt to redefine reality (not that we can successfully redefine reality, but we can fool ourselves into thinking we can).
Mother Teresa recognizes this in her comment about the bond between mother and child. If that bond is severable without remorse or repudiation, then the entirety of Western culture is a shibboleth waiting to collapse. After all, Western culture is built on the relationship between the Madonna and the Child. He died to save her. So, when the Moslems say Western culture is decaying, they are right.
Now, this is not to say that Moslems are any better off. Any culture which permits you to beat your wife to death, to marry and have sex with a nine-year old, any culture which denies that adoption can exist and sees polygamy as a good thing, is at least as decadent as an abortion-driven culture. So, it's just a case of the blind killing the blind.
The problem is precisely that Christian culture is dead or dying in most places around the world. Everything that attempts to replace it is pure dreck - useless if not actively harmful. Christian culture is the only rationale way to approach the world, and the world is attempting to slough it off. It works by attacking the root - the love between mother and child. To the extent that it succeeds in that attack, Christian culture is destroyed, and the whole of the culture it supports will die with it.
Anti-Americanism
And this explains the entire anti-American attitude of the intellectual elite. You see, they really, truly, finally understand this link between Western culture and the Madonna and Child - they understand it in their gut to an extent we simply don't realize. The absolutely accept the logic of the relationship, they simply deny the premise. They have never believed in the Madonna and Child. Thus, they can't believe in Western culture either. If Mary and Jesus didn't really have that divine relationship, then of course Western culture is built on a lie and worthy only of destruction. The logic is flawless and strikes at the very heart of the matter.
Anarchism has a long and sordid history in Euro-American affairs. Anarchists are always atheists, and they have tried all kinds of assaults on Western culture, assaults meant to demonstrate that Western culture is a facade, a Potemkin village on the verge of collapse. None of the assaults ever worked, until they finally hit on what the heart of Western culture really is: the relationship between mother and child. Destroy that relationship, destroy the divine image of that relationship, and Western culture must inevitably collapse. You know what? They are right. They instinctively understand Christianity better than most Christians.
The abortionists, the Moslems - these people are the new anarchists.
As I said, anarchism has a long and sordid history in Euro-American affairs.
Most of the time, they lose.
This time, they are winning.
When Judge Tim A. Duket, Marinette County Circuit Court became aware of this quote, he responded:
"With your cite to Mother Teresa 'what is left of the West to save?' you are starting to sound like Osama bin Ladden. I'm sure if you look hard you can find some good things worth saving 'of the West' ".
Residual Culture
The good judge appears to miss the point. There is such a thing as residual culture. That is, some good things can continue to happen in a culture even though the rationale for the good thing no longer exists because all the support has been cut away. For instance, men are still compelled to pay child support in this country even though it is logically absurd, given the logic put forward and the laws passed and interpreted on abortion.
There is absolutely no logical, and really very little lawful reason, for holding a man responsible for child support anymore. He didn't create the child (the mother did - no child at conception, right?),. he didn't want the child (the decision to have sex is not a decision to have a child), he bears no responsibility for the child's existence (he didn't grow it - she did) yet we still act as if the man is somehow responsible for the child's existence even though we can no longer provide a rationale reason for drawing this conclusion. The fact that we understand the man is responsible is good. Our ability to continue to understand this as a culture probably won't last too much longer, however. We have deliberately blinded ourselves to it by pretending it is otherwise in order to allow mothers to kill their children.
So this "good thing" in our culture is residual. It is an anachronistic throw-back to the time when men were actually supposed to act responsibly and be held responsible for the existence of children. Most of the "good things" in American culture are anachronistic throwbacks at this point. Like buggy whips in a Model T, we insist on having certain things because they make us feel comfortable, not because they make sense. Unfortunately, they can't last because they aren't logically consistent with our attempt to redefine reality (not that we can successfully redefine reality, but we can fool ourselves into thinking we can).
Mother Teresa recognizes this in her comment about the bond between mother and child. If that bond is severable without remorse or repudiation, then the entirety of Western culture is a shibboleth waiting to collapse. After all, Western culture is built on the relationship between the Madonna and the Child. He died to save her. So, when the Moslems say Western culture is decaying, they are right.
Now, this is not to say that Moslems are any better off. Any culture which permits you to beat your wife to death, to marry and have sex with a nine-year old, any culture which denies that adoption can exist and sees polygamy as a good thing, is at least as decadent as an abortion-driven culture. So, it's just a case of the blind killing the blind.
The problem is precisely that Christian culture is dead or dying in most places around the world. Everything that attempts to replace it is pure dreck - useless if not actively harmful. Christian culture is the only rationale way to approach the world, and the world is attempting to slough it off. It works by attacking the root - the love between mother and child. To the extent that it succeeds in that attack, Christian culture is destroyed, and the whole of the culture it supports will die with it.
Anti-Americanism
And this explains the entire anti-American attitude of the intellectual elite. You see, they really, truly, finally understand this link between Western culture and the Madonna and Child - they understand it in their gut to an extent we simply don't realize. The absolutely accept the logic of the relationship, they simply deny the premise. They have never believed in the Madonna and Child. Thus, they can't believe in Western culture either. If Mary and Jesus didn't really have that divine relationship, then of course Western culture is built on a lie and worthy only of destruction. The logic is flawless and strikes at the very heart of the matter.
Anarchism has a long and sordid history in Euro-American affairs. Anarchists are always atheists, and they have tried all kinds of assaults on Western culture, assaults meant to demonstrate that Western culture is a facade, a Potemkin village on the verge of collapse. None of the assaults ever worked, until they finally hit on what the heart of Western culture really is: the relationship between mother and child. Destroy that relationship, destroy the divine image of that relationship, and Western culture must inevitably collapse. You know what? They are right. They instinctively understand Christianity better than most Christians.
The abortionists, the Moslems - these people are the new anarchists.
As I said, anarchism has a long and sordid history in Euro-American affairs.
Most of the time, they lose.
This time, they are winning.
Monday, August 23, 2004
Family Values
The Doha International Conference for the Family follows upon the celebration of the International Year of the Family and will be a two-day conference in Doha, Qatar on November 29 and 30, 2004, under the patronage of Her Highness Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Misned, Consort of His Highness the Emir of Qatar, and President of the Supreme Council for Family Affairs, State of Qatar.
The Conference represents an international assemblage bringing together international VIPs, governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), scholars, academicians and civil society leaders who will be invited by the State of Qatar to participate for the purpose to call upon all nations of the world to restate the principles related to family life embodied in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and to adhere to values and endeavor to promote the role of the family as it is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and state.
That’s the press release. And it’s not a bad idea, as ideas go. But it is hard to believe it will go well. While Moslems and Christians both agree on the importance of the family, there are serious differences in what the word "family" means.
Marriage
Marriage is the first issue. While it is true that Moslems and Christians share equal antipathy for attempts at homosexual marriage, it is not the case that we share a similar view of marriage. Moslem societies, for instance, allow polygamy. Christian societies (apart from Martin Luther’s attempt to introduce it for German nobility) do not.
You see, the major difference between Moslems and Christians lies in their respective role models.
Christians attempt to model their lives after that of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom who gave His life up for His Bride (singular), the Church. Moslems, on the other hand, model their lives on Mohammed, who had numerous wives, concubines and sexual slaves.
After the death of his first wife, with whom he had four daughters, he married dozens of times – between 30 and 45 wives in all. That doesn’t count concubines or slaves that he used for sex. Just the wives. According to Ebn Abbas, "The highest member of Moslems who is the Prophet Mohammed has also the highest appetite for women." This is the man all Muslim men emulate. Think on this.
Adoption
In his endless quest for the perfect marriage, he took notice of the wife of his adopted son, Zaid Ebn Hares. He commanded Zaid to divorce her so he could marry her. Zaid was willing to do so, but there was one problem. Arabic custom and law forbad a man from marrying his daughter-in-law. Mohammed could not marry her. More fool Zaid. Mohammed had visions from God telling him that Zaid’s wife was not really his daughter-in-law.
How could that be?
Well, God pointed out that adoption is not possible. You can’t make a blood relative out of someone who isn’t blood. At best, such a person is a foster child, but certainly not a true relative in any binding sense. So, since adoption was not possible, Zaid was not his adopted son, but only a foundling he brought up. Since Zaid was not his son, Zaid’s wife was not his daughter-in-law. Who can contradict the prophet of God? Zaid divorced his wife and Mohammed had a new playmate, at the very small price of destroying the concept of adoption in all Arab countries.
To this day, it is not possible to adopt a child in a Moslem country. Adoption is not illegal. It simply doesn’t exist. At all. In contrast, Christian faith is built almost entirely on the concept of adoption. We are adopted sons and daughters of God. That's how we are saved.
Pedophilia
But Mohammed was not done. His appetite for women was so strong that he essentially legislated heterosexual pedophilia into Islamic law. The fifty-six year old man expressed his desire to marry a six-year old girl, the daughter of one of his first followers, Abu Bakr. Mohammed made his case by pointing out that he had had several dreams in which God commanded him to marry the girl-child. Abu Bakr agreed to the marriage on the condition that the marriage not be consummated until the girl was nine years old. That suited Mohammed. Thus, girls nine years of age (and sometimes younger) are able to be given in marriage under Islamic law and in all Moslem societies.
Sex with a nine-year old. Christians may do it, but it’s a sin and we know it. Muslims do it because God and His Prophet said it was virtuous.
Proper treatment of wives
Now, it should be noted that Mohammed was not entirely ungrateful. Once he had betrothed his six-year old bride, he gave his own daughter in marriage to Abu Bakr. Unfortunately, she was a rather disobedient wife. Islamic law permits men to beat their wives. Abu Bakr beat his wife, beat Mohammed’s daughter, to death for her disobedience. Mohammed responded by giving him another daughter. Thus, severe wife beatings, even beatings unto death, are sanctioned and blessed by the Prophet.
This lesson has not been lost on followers of Islam. Death is the penalty for both fornication and for apostasy from Islam. Certainly any woman who marries a non-Moslem is at great risk of apostasy. She is supposed to follow her husband in all things, after all, be totally obedient to him. That is the Moslem way. And any woman who marries without the permission of her father or brothers is a fornicator. So when a young girl marries outside of Islam and against the wishes of her male relatives, it is not uncommon for her father or brothers to kill her. It’s necessary, you see, for the honor of the family and to keep her from leaving Islam.
Now it is true that Christians have shotgun weddings, but we shoot the man if he reneges, not the woman. Some may see this as an insignificant difference, but Christians find it rather telling.
Likewise telling is the concept of "temporary marriage" or Muta. Any man engaged in jihad and away from his wife/wives can make a temporary marriage – three or four days – with any woman he meets as long as he pays her dowry price, a price which the man sets. The dowry can be as low as a handful of barley or dates, or a piece of cloth. Most cultures call this prostitution. Some call it rape. Mohammed calls it family time.
So, the Doha conference is a good idea, in the sense that it emphasizes the importance of family. But when Muslims and Christians have such a difference in their respective understandings of family, it may be worthwhile to ask one question. Are we supposed to accept the Muslim understanding of family? It seems rather unlikely that they will accept ours.
Monday, August 16, 2004
The Real Explanation
Many people have puzzled over the USCCB ruling that bishops can make up their own minds about whether to administer the Eucharist to pro-abortion politicians like Senator John Kerry. How can it be correct to receive in one diocese but sinful in another? Does this mean Catholic dioceses are not entirely in communion with one another anymore?
Of course not. The problem with interpreting this ruling lies in our failure to appreciate the importance of canon law, Christian charity and subtle nuance. When all these facts are taken together, the USCCB ruling is perfectly understandable.
Applying these principles, we quickly see what happened. The bishops are split into three groups. The first, very small group of bishops believe pro-abortion politicians and their ordinaries are essentially capable people. The second, rather larger group of bishops believe pro-abortion politicians are essentially capable people, but that many of their fellow bishops are simply incompetent to hold office. The third and largest group of bishops either believes pro-abortion politicians have IQs slightly below that of green jello or that their brother bishops are profoundly incompetent or both.
Group One
You see, everyone has been talking about canon 915 (those “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion”), but no one has taken the time to consider how canon 386 and 843 affect the application of canon 915. Canon 843’s application is obvious: “The sacred ministers cannot refuse the sacraments to those who ask for them at the appropriate times, are properly disposed and are not prohibited by law from receiving them.” Canon 386 is a little more subtle, but it is the interpretive key to the USCCB ruling: “The diocesan bishop is bound to present and explain to the faithful the truths of the Faith which are to be believed and applied to moral issues, frequently preaching in person…”
Six consecrated men - Archbishop Burke (St. Louis), Bishop Bruskewitz (Lincoln), Bishop Vasa (Baker), Archbishop Donohue (Atlanta), Bishop Baker (Charleston), and Bishop Jugis (Charlotte) – make up the group of bishops who believe both pro-abortion politicians and their ordinaries are competent men capable of understanding simple English and doing their duty, respectively.
Take Senator Kerry’s situation, for instance. Senator Kerry publicly and strenuously advocates a heresy: the idea that the gravely sinful act of child-murder is morally acceptable as long as the mother commissions it prior to birth. The six bishops above know that Archbishop O’Malley has, by now, certainly told Senator Kerry that this position is absolutely insupportable and must be publicly denied, since the archbishop must do this to be in accord with canon 386. Senator Kerry is a grown man and capable of obeying his archbishop. Since he clearly hasn’t obeyed, he is violating Archbishop O’Malley’s clear teaching and is therefore anathema.
Group Two
The second group of bishops is not so sure. They seem to believe pro-abortion politicians are ultimately capable of being taught, but they either aren’t sure the ordinaries (mostly archbishops and cardinals) who have such people in their dioceses are mentally competent to understand their duties under canon 386, or they don’t think them capable of carrying those duties out. So, the bishops in this second group publicly tell everyone to be sure to examine their consciences in the light of Church teaching and voluntarily refuse to come forward for the Eucharist. That is, the bishops in the second group are unobtrusively stepping in to relieve the confused situations that arise when unfit ordinaries dither. They have chosen to publicly teach pro-abort men and women because their incompetent brother bishops can’t.
Group Three
The third group of bishops, the largest group, apparently believe that any politician who supports abortion does not have the use of reason. Such people cannot be taught, no matter how good a teacher the bishop is. They are incapable of sin because they lack any sign of intelligence: mental infants cannot sin. Their admittance to First Communion was probably a mistake, but it’s too late to remedy that now, so these bishops will continue to hand out communion to the ambulatory human vegetables we elect to office, and they will pray for the miraculous infusion of a seven-year old’s intellect into these adult bodies.
This largest group of bishops, many of whom are bishops over pro-abortion politicians themselves, may very well also agree with the second group about their own incompetence to hold office. After all, if the ordinary is incompetent in his ability to provide moral teachings to others (maybe because his sheep are absolute idiots or because his teaching is just profoundly inadequate), he would know the sin lies with him for not teaching. It would not lie with his sheep, since they are only inadvertently failing to heed teachings his ineptitude had never clarified. In such a case, the bishop in question would continue to distribute the Eucharist to his pro-abort sheep because they cannot be held responsible for his sinful worthlessness as a teacher. Such inept leaders don't resign only out of charity towards the Pope. Given his health, they don't want to put on him the extra burden that would be required to replace all of them.
Clear as a Bell
So there you have it. This is, I believe, the only way to explain how all the American bishops are fully in line with canon law while also explaining how a public abortion supporter can be denied the Eucharist in one diocese and given the Eucharist in another, all without changing one letter of his public support for abortion. As I said, we must read and apply all the canons with Christian charity and a feel for nuance in order to understand what the bishops have already, in their wisdom, grasped. This kind situational assessment is a rare skill, but the bishops have it in spades. God bless them, and let’s continue to pray for them.
Of course not. The problem with interpreting this ruling lies in our failure to appreciate the importance of canon law, Christian charity and subtle nuance. When all these facts are taken together, the USCCB ruling is perfectly understandable.
Applying these principles, we quickly see what happened. The bishops are split into three groups. The first, very small group of bishops believe pro-abortion politicians and their ordinaries are essentially capable people. The second, rather larger group of bishops believe pro-abortion politicians are essentially capable people, but that many of their fellow bishops are simply incompetent to hold office. The third and largest group of bishops either believes pro-abortion politicians have IQs slightly below that of green jello or that their brother bishops are profoundly incompetent or both.
Group One
You see, everyone has been talking about canon 915 (those “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion”), but no one has taken the time to consider how canon 386 and 843 affect the application of canon 915. Canon 843’s application is obvious: “The sacred ministers cannot refuse the sacraments to those who ask for them at the appropriate times, are properly disposed and are not prohibited by law from receiving them.” Canon 386 is a little more subtle, but it is the interpretive key to the USCCB ruling: “The diocesan bishop is bound to present and explain to the faithful the truths of the Faith which are to be believed and applied to moral issues, frequently preaching in person…”
Six consecrated men - Archbishop Burke (St. Louis), Bishop Bruskewitz (Lincoln), Bishop Vasa (Baker), Archbishop Donohue (Atlanta), Bishop Baker (Charleston), and Bishop Jugis (Charlotte) – make up the group of bishops who believe both pro-abortion politicians and their ordinaries are competent men capable of understanding simple English and doing their duty, respectively.
Take Senator Kerry’s situation, for instance. Senator Kerry publicly and strenuously advocates a heresy: the idea that the gravely sinful act of child-murder is morally acceptable as long as the mother commissions it prior to birth. The six bishops above know that Archbishop O’Malley has, by now, certainly told Senator Kerry that this position is absolutely insupportable and must be publicly denied, since the archbishop must do this to be in accord with canon 386. Senator Kerry is a grown man and capable of obeying his archbishop. Since he clearly hasn’t obeyed, he is violating Archbishop O’Malley’s clear teaching and is therefore anathema.
Group Two
The second group of bishops is not so sure. They seem to believe pro-abortion politicians are ultimately capable of being taught, but they either aren’t sure the ordinaries (mostly archbishops and cardinals) who have such people in their dioceses are mentally competent to understand their duties under canon 386, or they don’t think them capable of carrying those duties out. So, the bishops in this second group publicly tell everyone to be sure to examine their consciences in the light of Church teaching and voluntarily refuse to come forward for the Eucharist. That is, the bishops in the second group are unobtrusively stepping in to relieve the confused situations that arise when unfit ordinaries dither. They have chosen to publicly teach pro-abort men and women because their incompetent brother bishops can’t.
Group Three
The third group of bishops, the largest group, apparently believe that any politician who supports abortion does not have the use of reason. Such people cannot be taught, no matter how good a teacher the bishop is. They are incapable of sin because they lack any sign of intelligence: mental infants cannot sin. Their admittance to First Communion was probably a mistake, but it’s too late to remedy that now, so these bishops will continue to hand out communion to the ambulatory human vegetables we elect to office, and they will pray for the miraculous infusion of a seven-year old’s intellect into these adult bodies.
This largest group of bishops, many of whom are bishops over pro-abortion politicians themselves, may very well also agree with the second group about their own incompetence to hold office. After all, if the ordinary is incompetent in his ability to provide moral teachings to others (maybe because his sheep are absolute idiots or because his teaching is just profoundly inadequate), he would know the sin lies with him for not teaching. It would not lie with his sheep, since they are only inadvertently failing to heed teachings his ineptitude had never clarified. In such a case, the bishop in question would continue to distribute the Eucharist to his pro-abort sheep because they cannot be held responsible for his sinful worthlessness as a teacher. Such inept leaders don't resign only out of charity towards the Pope. Given his health, they don't want to put on him the extra burden that would be required to replace all of them.
Clear as a Bell
So there you have it. This is, I believe, the only way to explain how all the American bishops are fully in line with canon law while also explaining how a public abortion supporter can be denied the Eucharist in one diocese and given the Eucharist in another, all without changing one letter of his public support for abortion. As I said, we must read and apply all the canons with Christian charity and a feel for nuance in order to understand what the bishops have already, in their wisdom, grasped. This kind situational assessment is a rare skill, but the bishops have it in spades. God bless them, and let’s continue to pray for them.
Sunday, August 15, 2004
The Brilliance of the Iraq War
Many people seem upset with the waging of war upon Iraq. Indeed, I must confess that I was long of two minds about it. Not that Saddam Hussein did not deserve overthrow - it is a wonderful thing to see him gone. I simply wasn't sure how this contributed to fighting a war on terror. There are many thugs in the world - why did we pick Hussein?
Now, three years after 9/11, the brilliance of the Bush strategy is clear.
We were attacked by Muslim Arabs who took the war into our country. Bush responded by taking the war into the geographical heart of the Arab world. Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia - each were arguably as good or better places to attack from an immediate geo-political perspective. Each is headed by Muslim thugs whose anti-Christian laws constantly violate the rights of the human person. But even more than Saudi Arabia, the heart of the Moslem faith, Iraq is the heart from which the Arab self-vision springs. It is the land of our common forefather, Abraham, the land Arabs hearkened to before Mohammed was a gleam in his father's eye. It is the Arab land surrounded by Arab nations, it is the center.
Muslim Arabs struck at what they perceived to be the heart of our identity - the towering symbols of our economic and military might. Bush struck at what we perceived to be the heart of their identity: the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates, the rivers of Genesis, the book of Abraham.
They guessed wrong about the heart of our identity. We guessed right about theirs.
Now, say what you want about the success of increased security and the brilliance of our intelligence gathering. Certainly these have decreased and denied attacks that might otherwise have gone forward. But we all know it is not that difficult to enter this country. It is not difficult to sabotage and destroy targets or terrorize Americans. There are too many of us, too little security, too many targets. No town, certainly no city, in the nation can be secured in any real way. Yet, despite these facts, we have had but two even remotely successful attempts at terror since 9/11 - the anthrax scare (still unsolved) and the Beltway shootings, which turned out to be the work of two American Moslems with no ties to external terror organizations.
Nothing else has happened here. It's almost as if the terrorists are otherwise occupied and can't be bothered to take the easy pickings our society affords an anarchist.
The absence of terror is easily explained. When faced with the choice - attack America or defend the land of Abraham's birth - Moslem Arabs who wish to engage in war have overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Bush's war strategy successfully shifted their focus.
Instead of blowing up targets in America, they are blowing up targets in Iraq. Instead of killing American civilians, they have the much more difficult task of killing American soldiers. Instead of killing on American soil, they must kill on Iraqi soil. America has so thoroughly infected Iraq that Arab Moslem terrorists are often not even killing Americans anymore - they are killing fellow Arab Moslems, widening the cracks of dissension within not only their own country, but within what might otherwise be a much more cohesive Arab Moslem front.
They are still waging a war of terror, but now they wage it on their own cousins.
Now, one might argue that this paints an overly rosy picture. What of the successful terror attempt to sway the Spanish elections? What of the American casualties? What of the civilian hostages from nations throughout the world?
Yes, the war on terror has not stopped every thrust our opponents have made. But the fact remains: apart from the casualties inflicted on Spain, the terrorist kill-zone has become very small indeed, confined within the borders of their own ancient homeland, and they are dying within that zone at a much higher rate than their enemies.
In World War II, the Battle of the Bulge caused immeasurable consternation, but it was the last offensive Germany was able to launch on the Western Front. Within weeks of the nearly-successful assault, German soldiers were forced back and trapped within the confines of their own homeland, fighting desperately to stay alive. It would appear the terrorists now find themselves in a similar situation.
Whatever motivated George W. Bush to take the war into Iraq, it was an inspired choice.
Now, three years after 9/11, the brilliance of the Bush strategy is clear.
We were attacked by Muslim Arabs who took the war into our country. Bush responded by taking the war into the geographical heart of the Arab world. Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia - each were arguably as good or better places to attack from an immediate geo-political perspective. Each is headed by Muslim thugs whose anti-Christian laws constantly violate the rights of the human person. But even more than Saudi Arabia, the heart of the Moslem faith, Iraq is the heart from which the Arab self-vision springs. It is the land of our common forefather, Abraham, the land Arabs hearkened to before Mohammed was a gleam in his father's eye. It is the Arab land surrounded by Arab nations, it is the center.
Muslim Arabs struck at what they perceived to be the heart of our identity - the towering symbols of our economic and military might. Bush struck at what we perceived to be the heart of their identity: the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates, the rivers of Genesis, the book of Abraham.
They guessed wrong about the heart of our identity. We guessed right about theirs.
Now, say what you want about the success of increased security and the brilliance of our intelligence gathering. Certainly these have decreased and denied attacks that might otherwise have gone forward. But we all know it is not that difficult to enter this country. It is not difficult to sabotage and destroy targets or terrorize Americans. There are too many of us, too little security, too many targets. No town, certainly no city, in the nation can be secured in any real way. Yet, despite these facts, we have had but two even remotely successful attempts at terror since 9/11 - the anthrax scare (still unsolved) and the Beltway shootings, which turned out to be the work of two American Moslems with no ties to external terror organizations.
Nothing else has happened here. It's almost as if the terrorists are otherwise occupied and can't be bothered to take the easy pickings our society affords an anarchist.
The absence of terror is easily explained. When faced with the choice - attack America or defend the land of Abraham's birth - Moslem Arabs who wish to engage in war have overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Bush's war strategy successfully shifted their focus.
Instead of blowing up targets in America, they are blowing up targets in Iraq. Instead of killing American civilians, they have the much more difficult task of killing American soldiers. Instead of killing on American soil, they must kill on Iraqi soil. America has so thoroughly infected Iraq that Arab Moslem terrorists are often not even killing Americans anymore - they are killing fellow Arab Moslems, widening the cracks of dissension within not only their own country, but within what might otherwise be a much more cohesive Arab Moslem front.
They are still waging a war of terror, but now they wage it on their own cousins.
Now, one might argue that this paints an overly rosy picture. What of the successful terror attempt to sway the Spanish elections? What of the American casualties? What of the civilian hostages from nations throughout the world?
Yes, the war on terror has not stopped every thrust our opponents have made. But the fact remains: apart from the casualties inflicted on Spain, the terrorist kill-zone has become very small indeed, confined within the borders of their own ancient homeland, and they are dying within that zone at a much higher rate than their enemies.
In World War II, the Battle of the Bulge caused immeasurable consternation, but it was the last offensive Germany was able to launch on the Western Front. Within weeks of the nearly-successful assault, German soldiers were forced back and trapped within the confines of their own homeland, fighting desperately to stay alive. It would appear the terrorists now find themselves in a similar situation.
Whatever motivated George W. Bush to take the war into Iraq, it was an inspired choice.
Friday, August 13, 2004
A Nation of Rapists
"I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the LORD your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore he would give..." Deuteronomy 30:19-20
For years, the abortion lobby has used a very pointed argument to push their agenda: rape. They keep insisting that abortion must be kept legal because of rape. "Would you force a raped woman to carry that fetus in her womb?" The question carries a tremendous resonance, a resonance so great that most of us cannot figure out how to answer the question without sounding like someone who has sympathies for the rapist. There’s a reason for that.
The Culture of Use
Years ago, Pope John Paul II noted that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is use. This is true precisely because we are each made in the image and likeness of God.
As you know, the only thing that distinguishes the three Persons of the Trinity is the relationship of love between them. Father begets Son, Son is begotten. Father and Son breathe forth Spirit, Spirit is breathed. Each of the three Persons of the Godhead gives Himself away as gift to each of the other two Persons. Each Person cherishes, treasures, cares for the Divine Persons who give Himself. Now, just as the persons of the Godhead are distinguished only by their relations, it is only our relationship to God that make us persons. Nothing more.
This is very important. It is God who makes us persons. His call to each of us, His invitation to communion with Him – this is what makes us persons. As part of the invitation, He gives us everything we need to participate in His communion: He gives us our intellects, our wills, and the capacity to love as He loves. As Boethius said, a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. That definition explains the "what," but it doesn’t explain the "why." Why is a rational nature important to being a person? Because rationality is necessary to do what God calls us to do: be in communion with Him, be a person. That is, our rational nature defines us as persons, but it is a consequence of something prior. That "something prior" is His call to us to be in communion with Him. Our personhood is really a response to His call, a response only made possible through the gift of intellect and will, the gift of rational nature, the gift of personhood. Our persons are responses to His Persons, our rational nature is the instrument through which we respond.
The Virtue of Justice
Now, justice means making sure another person receives his due. The only reason someone has something due him is precisely because he images God. Thus, justice is part of each person’s being. It is an innate recognition of every relationship: you to me, me to you, each of us to God. Because I am in the image of God, I must necessarily recognize God’s image wherever I find it, and I must give His image proper reverence.
And this is why use is the opposite of love. Someone who loves another person, reverences another person, thereby acknowledges that person’s relationship to God. But, oddly enough, someone who hates another person also acknowledges the other person’s relationship with God: he simply despises both that person and God for having such a relationship. Hatred at least has eyes for the truth. Hatred sees the relationships and acknowledges them, even if it is a negative acknowledgement. But with use, it is different.
When we treat others as mere objects to be used, we pretend that they have no relationship with God: God does not call them to Himself. Since personhood depends on relationship, we are actually pretending they are not persons at all. Deliberate use of another denies the intrinsic worth and beauty of the relationships between Persons and persons. But denying God’s call denies divine relationships and divine relationships are precisely what define the Trinitarian Persons. So, when we deny anyone’s personhood, we deny the very existence of the Trinity.
The Application
And this is why the connection between abortion and rape is so hard for us to talk about. You see, we have all forgotten these facts. We live in a culture of death which is to say, we live in a culture of use. Using people as objects is so basic to our lives that it is bred in our bones, it is part of the sea we swim.
Let me illustrate with an example. I know two young women. Both were raped in their teens, one raped on her sixteenth birthday, the other when she was eighteen. Both became pregnant as a result of the rape. Both had abortions. One repented of the abortion. The other did not.
In both cases, the young women had formed a relationship with the rapist: their rapists were a friend made at a party and a boyfriend, respectively. In both cases, the young men in question were called by God to reverence these young women as gifts. In each case, God gave an image of Himself, the woman, to the young man. If the men had treated them with respect, these men would have been gifted with the marvelous joy of counting these women as friends, possibly the young men were even called to lead a long life of loving care and service to these young women.
But instead, in both cases, the young men decided to treat the women as objects. They brutally attacked the divine images God had given unto them. Like the iconoclasts before them, these young men shattered the images of God so that they might worship their own human power instead.
Now, in both cases, God replied to the outrage perpetrated by the rapists by turning to the victimized woman and breathing forth in her the gift of life. He alone has the power to grant life, to breathe forth life in the womb. If He did not desire to grant this gift, the rape would have been sterile, as so many rapes are.
But instead, He gave unto each woman another image of Himself, a source of life and of healing implanted within her being. Just as He had called the young men to respect and revere the young women He had entrusted to their care, so He called the young women to respect and revere the young children He had entrusted to their care.
In the Image of the Rapist
In both cases, each woman, shattered by the violence of the sin visited upon her, turned and visited the same violence she had experienced upon one much weaker than herself. She focused the same level of violence upon not just an acquaintance or friend, but her own child. In each case, the child, being not so strong as her mother, died from this level of violence.
So, in each case, the rapist had made the woman into an image of himself. He had brutally attacked an innocent image of God; as a consequence of his evil, she had likewise brutally attacked an innocent image of God.
When these correspondences were pointed out to the first woman, she repented. She saw the truth, embraced it, and turned from this path.
When these correspondences were pointed out to the second woman, she did not repent. Instead, she said, "You have no right to pass judgement, it is not your place to do so… As I stated previously it is between God and myself…. You are being hypocritical in the fact that you want to quote God, but yet you wish to pass judgement… I believe I did the right thing and if you don't like it, you don't have to because you don't know me and you don't know what it is like to be mutilated on the inside like I was."
You see, the culture of use calls us to pass judgement on the rapist (the other), but not on the one who acts in the image of the rapist (me). Likewise, we can put God in the dock, accuse Him of all the evil we want, but I who am made in His image and likeness – I am innocent. As certain men said at trial in Germany years ago, "I was only doing what was expected. I am innocent of the blood of these people." The rapist made me do it. The devil made me do it. The Fuehrer made me do it.
Abortion is iconoclasm. Rapists are iconoclasts. That’s why the question resonates. That’s why we can’t figure out how to answer it. Abortion and iconoclasm are both very closely linked to rape. Famously Protestant America is built on famously Protestant iconoclasm.
Today, we shatter God’s image, destroy every reference to Him in the public sphere, destroy every image of Him we can find in the culture. Put another way, we rape the public sphere, we watch women get raped, then we insist they rape themselves because rape is an inalienable right found in the shadowy penumbra of the Constitution itself. More than a right: abortion/rape is a duty required to maintain the iconoclastic culture.
The choice is before us: we can be Deathocrats, whether Rockefeller Republicans, Clinton disciples or libertarian lurkers. Or we can oppose the iconoclastic heresy and fight for life. But we must choose a side. One thing is sure: as long as we tolerate abortion, we are all inexorably become a nation of rapists.
For years, the abortion lobby has used a very pointed argument to push their agenda: rape. They keep insisting that abortion must be kept legal because of rape. "Would you force a raped woman to carry that fetus in her womb?" The question carries a tremendous resonance, a resonance so great that most of us cannot figure out how to answer the question without sounding like someone who has sympathies for the rapist. There’s a reason for that.
The Culture of Use
Years ago, Pope John Paul II noted that the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is use. This is true precisely because we are each made in the image and likeness of God.
As you know, the only thing that distinguishes the three Persons of the Trinity is the relationship of love between them. Father begets Son, Son is begotten. Father and Son breathe forth Spirit, Spirit is breathed. Each of the three Persons of the Godhead gives Himself away as gift to each of the other two Persons. Each Person cherishes, treasures, cares for the Divine Persons who give Himself. Now, just as the persons of the Godhead are distinguished only by their relations, it is only our relationship to God that make us persons. Nothing more.
This is very important. It is God who makes us persons. His call to each of us, His invitation to communion with Him – this is what makes us persons. As part of the invitation, He gives us everything we need to participate in His communion: He gives us our intellects, our wills, and the capacity to love as He loves. As Boethius said, a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. That definition explains the "what," but it doesn’t explain the "why." Why is a rational nature important to being a person? Because rationality is necessary to do what God calls us to do: be in communion with Him, be a person. That is, our rational nature defines us as persons, but it is a consequence of something prior. That "something prior" is His call to us to be in communion with Him. Our personhood is really a response to His call, a response only made possible through the gift of intellect and will, the gift of rational nature, the gift of personhood. Our persons are responses to His Persons, our rational nature is the instrument through which we respond.
The Virtue of Justice
Now, justice means making sure another person receives his due. The only reason someone has something due him is precisely because he images God. Thus, justice is part of each person’s being. It is an innate recognition of every relationship: you to me, me to you, each of us to God. Because I am in the image of God, I must necessarily recognize God’s image wherever I find it, and I must give His image proper reverence.
And this is why use is the opposite of love. Someone who loves another person, reverences another person, thereby acknowledges that person’s relationship to God. But, oddly enough, someone who hates another person also acknowledges the other person’s relationship with God: he simply despises both that person and God for having such a relationship. Hatred at least has eyes for the truth. Hatred sees the relationships and acknowledges them, even if it is a negative acknowledgement. But with use, it is different.
When we treat others as mere objects to be used, we pretend that they have no relationship with God: God does not call them to Himself. Since personhood depends on relationship, we are actually pretending they are not persons at all. Deliberate use of another denies the intrinsic worth and beauty of the relationships between Persons and persons. But denying God’s call denies divine relationships and divine relationships are precisely what define the Trinitarian Persons. So, when we deny anyone’s personhood, we deny the very existence of the Trinity.
The Application
And this is why the connection between abortion and rape is so hard for us to talk about. You see, we have all forgotten these facts. We live in a culture of death which is to say, we live in a culture of use. Using people as objects is so basic to our lives that it is bred in our bones, it is part of the sea we swim.
Let me illustrate with an example. I know two young women. Both were raped in their teens, one raped on her sixteenth birthday, the other when she was eighteen. Both became pregnant as a result of the rape. Both had abortions. One repented of the abortion. The other did not.
In both cases, the young women had formed a relationship with the rapist: their rapists were a friend made at a party and a boyfriend, respectively. In both cases, the young men in question were called by God to reverence these young women as gifts. In each case, God gave an image of Himself, the woman, to the young man. If the men had treated them with respect, these men would have been gifted with the marvelous joy of counting these women as friends, possibly the young men were even called to lead a long life of loving care and service to these young women.
But instead, in both cases, the young men decided to treat the women as objects. They brutally attacked the divine images God had given unto them. Like the iconoclasts before them, these young men shattered the images of God so that they might worship their own human power instead.
Now, in both cases, God replied to the outrage perpetrated by the rapists by turning to the victimized woman and breathing forth in her the gift of life. He alone has the power to grant life, to breathe forth life in the womb. If He did not desire to grant this gift, the rape would have been sterile, as so many rapes are.
But instead, He gave unto each woman another image of Himself, a source of life and of healing implanted within her being. Just as He had called the young men to respect and revere the young women He had entrusted to their care, so He called the young women to respect and revere the young children He had entrusted to their care.
In the Image of the Rapist
In both cases, each woman, shattered by the violence of the sin visited upon her, turned and visited the same violence she had experienced upon one much weaker than herself. She focused the same level of violence upon not just an acquaintance or friend, but her own child. In each case, the child, being not so strong as her mother, died from this level of violence.
So, in each case, the rapist had made the woman into an image of himself. He had brutally attacked an innocent image of God; as a consequence of his evil, she had likewise brutally attacked an innocent image of God.
When these correspondences were pointed out to the first woman, she repented. She saw the truth, embraced it, and turned from this path.
When these correspondences were pointed out to the second woman, she did not repent. Instead, she said, "You have no right to pass judgement, it is not your place to do so… As I stated previously it is between God and myself…. You are being hypocritical in the fact that you want to quote God, but yet you wish to pass judgement… I believe I did the right thing and if you don't like it, you don't have to because you don't know me and you don't know what it is like to be mutilated on the inside like I was."
You see, the culture of use calls us to pass judgement on the rapist (the other), but not on the one who acts in the image of the rapist (me). Likewise, we can put God in the dock, accuse Him of all the evil we want, but I who am made in His image and likeness – I am innocent. As certain men said at trial in Germany years ago, "I was only doing what was expected. I am innocent of the blood of these people." The rapist made me do it. The devil made me do it. The Fuehrer made me do it.
Abortion is iconoclasm. Rapists are iconoclasts. That’s why the question resonates. That’s why we can’t figure out how to answer it. Abortion and iconoclasm are both very closely linked to rape. Famously Protestant America is built on famously Protestant iconoclasm.
Today, we shatter God’s image, destroy every reference to Him in the public sphere, destroy every image of Him we can find in the culture. Put another way, we rape the public sphere, we watch women get raped, then we insist they rape themselves because rape is an inalienable right found in the shadowy penumbra of the Constitution itself. More than a right: abortion/rape is a duty required to maintain the iconoclastic culture.
The choice is before us: we can be Deathocrats, whether Rockefeller Republicans, Clinton disciples or libertarian lurkers. Or we can oppose the iconoclastic heresy and fight for life. But we must choose a side. One thing is sure: as long as we tolerate abortion, we are all inexorably become a nation of rapists.
Thursday, August 12, 2004
And Now for Something Completely Different
For the last few days, you undoubtedly noticed my blog was being redirected to a sparclinux.org site. It took me awhile to find out what was going on. Apparently a host provider for comments went belly-up, so I had to rip out some code to make things work again. My apologies for the inconvenience. We now return you to our irregularly scheduled blog.
Monday, August 09, 2004
Therese
I just got back from the Wichita Family Conference and have a bit of news to report. As many of you many already know, Leonardo de Filippis is just about to release a new movie on the life of St. Therese of Liseaux.
Now, I must admit, I have long had grave doubts concerning this movie. While deFilippis has created a series of marvelous one-man shows, a movie is a different animal and it wasn't clear that he would be able to make the transition. I have seen several relatively obscure Catholics attempt deservedly obscure movie-length works in recent years. Thus, I was more than a little concerned that the Therese movie would be an obviously low-budget, low-production quality piece of work.
At Wichita, deFilippis showed several out-takes from the movie and gave a basic overview of the production. The movie's star, Margaret Manzy, gave her one-act performance and was on hand for Q&A.
I can say this about Therese: if the movie is as good as the out-takes, it will be favorably compared with Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Indeed, one could argue that we will see in Therese the Passion of the Virgin. I was simply stunned by how good the clips were. The visuals have the rich sensuality of a European production while the characters have a Catholic depth you can happily drown in.
This is easily one of the finest movies of 2004. I didn't think I would say this to anyone, but Therese releases in five weeks - start tapping your movie theater owners to get it in. You won't regret it.
Now, I must admit, I have long had grave doubts concerning this movie. While deFilippis has created a series of marvelous one-man shows, a movie is a different animal and it wasn't clear that he would be able to make the transition. I have seen several relatively obscure Catholics attempt deservedly obscure movie-length works in recent years. Thus, I was more than a little concerned that the Therese movie would be an obviously low-budget, low-production quality piece of work.
At Wichita, deFilippis showed several out-takes from the movie and gave a basic overview of the production. The movie's star, Margaret Manzy, gave her one-act performance and was on hand for Q&A.
I can say this about Therese: if the movie is as good as the out-takes, it will be favorably compared with Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Indeed, one could argue that we will see in Therese the Passion of the Virgin. I was simply stunned by how good the clips were. The visuals have the rich sensuality of a European production while the characters have a Catholic depth you can happily drown in.
This is easily one of the finest movies of 2004. I didn't think I would say this to anyone, but Therese releases in five weeks - start tapping your movie theater owners to get it in. You won't regret it.
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Chicago Racists
I used to think that the the large liberal corporate media conglomerates hated political diversity. I must now eat my words. The Chicago Tribune has a most amazing racist on its editorial staff and for that, the ACLU will undoubtedly hand out high honors. Mr. Eric Zorn baldly states that he knows very little about Alan Keyes, but then goes on to charge that Keyes was only nominated as a Republican party candidate for the Senate based on his skin color.
So, Mr. Zorn calls Dr. Keyes a "token" black simply because he has not managed to impinge on Mr. Zorn's consciousness? Mr. Zorn's racism is made all the more prominent by the facts: Dr. Keyes has a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, was a United States representative to the UN, a successful talk show host, and campaigned twice for the office of Maryland Senator and twice for president. If a man with that kind of education, that kind of public prominence and that kind of experience is a "token" black man then what passes for a REAL black man?
Dr. Keyes would be contesting with a man who holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University and a law degree (magna cum laude) from Harvard. Barack Obama's main claim to fame is as a lawyer and Illinois state senator. Yet, despite the very similar qualifications, Mr. Zorn would certainly not call Barack Obama a token black Democrat candidate.
Why not? Well, that's not clear. Obama is certainly as much or as little a token black as Keyes, but because his politics conform to Mr. Zorn's politics, Mr. Zorn is unwilling to point out the possibility that Obama is just another liberal Oreo. Yet, when we consider that African-Americans overwhelmingly oppose things like abortion and gay marriage and overwhelmingly support things like school vouchers, we find that Keyes' politics are in line with these sentiments while Obama's positions are not. In fact, Obama's positions are much more in accord with white-run power establishments like Mr. Zorn's employer, the Chicago Tribune.
Who's the token black? Isn't it odd that a white man who admits his ignorance of the black man under discussion takes it upon himself to answer that question?
So, Mr. Zorn calls Dr. Keyes a "token" black simply because he has not managed to impinge on Mr. Zorn's consciousness? Mr. Zorn's racism is made all the more prominent by the facts: Dr. Keyes has a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, was a United States representative to the UN, a successful talk show host, and campaigned twice for the office of Maryland Senator and twice for president. If a man with that kind of education, that kind of public prominence and that kind of experience is a "token" black man then what passes for a REAL black man?
Dr. Keyes would be contesting with a man who holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Columbia University and a law degree (magna cum laude) from Harvard. Barack Obama's main claim to fame is as a lawyer and Illinois state senator. Yet, despite the very similar qualifications, Mr. Zorn would certainly not call Barack Obama a token black Democrat candidate.
Why not? Well, that's not clear. Obama is certainly as much or as little a token black as Keyes, but because his politics conform to Mr. Zorn's politics, Mr. Zorn is unwilling to point out the possibility that Obama is just another liberal Oreo. Yet, when we consider that African-Americans overwhelmingly oppose things like abortion and gay marriage and overwhelmingly support things like school vouchers, we find that Keyes' politics are in line with these sentiments while Obama's positions are not. In fact, Obama's positions are much more in accord with white-run power establishments like Mr. Zorn's employer, the Chicago Tribune.
Who's the token black? Isn't it odd that a white man who admits his ignorance of the black man under discussion takes it upon himself to answer that question?
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Why Catholics Don't Often Witness
The May 24th issue of America contains an article by Fr. John C. Haughey, professor of theology at Loyola University in Chicago, who laments the Catholic unwillingness to talk about their personal relationship with Jesus. Whether it be a theology student or a theology professor, Catholics don't talk much about themselves and Christ. Instead, Catholics, even Catholic professors, talk about books: “these seasoned Catholic scholars could hardly be described as lacking a personal relationship with Christ. What is it about Catholicism that makes personal sharing about one’s relationship with Jesus less likely?”
John Paul II has already answered this question. How many men and women begin a conversation by talking about their love for their spouse? Most married people, especially men, simply don't engage in that kind of conversation. We don't start a conversation with "Good heavens, I love my wife! And I just wanted to come before you to say that she's the best little woman in the world."
Evangelicals emphasize the Lordship of Christ or the fact that Jesus is their friend. But you never hear them talk about Jesus as their lover. For Catholics, that is all there IS to talk about.
We can talk about how we got married to our Spouse, Jesus Christ, in baptism. We can talk about God grows how our marriage relationship from baptismal newlywed status to full maturity in Confirmation. We can talk about how He establishes His Son within our spiritual family through Holy Orders. We can talk about how we we cheated on our Spouse but repented and renewed our marriage vows in Reconciliation. We can talk about the Flesh of the Bridegroom entering the Flesh of the Bride at the Nuptial Feast in Eucharist and the Mass. We can talk about all the sweet nothings we whisper into our Lover's ear through sacramentals and the sacramental life. We can talk about how the Bridegroom takes us home to the Father's House after our honeymoon here on earth.
But we don't. We don't talk about it much because spouses don't tend to talk about these things in public. Good spouses don't thrust their private married life on strangers. Married life is about intimacy. It is something that only our family sees, that only spouses really share and understand. I cannot speak for wives, but I can say this: two husbands may talk about this very quietly in the backyard over a beer when the rest of the family is otherwise occupied, but even then, they speak in hushed tones and indirect comments, and even those are kept to a bare minimum. This is the nature of married life. It is the entrance into the sanctuary. It is the holiness of the tabernacle. Men recognize this holiness by doing all that a man can do: he falls silent before it in order to witness to it the better, in order to see it more clearly.
There is good Scriptural precedent for this. Mary, the first person to proclaim the full Gospel, did so in absolute silence, as her spouse, Joseph, silently stood guard over her and the Child. She and Joseph remained silent, leaving to the angels the task of telling the shepherds of the event. If Fr. Haughey had bothered to read John Paul II's Theology of the Body, or even bothered with one of the popular summaries (of which my Sex and the Sacred City is but one example), if he had spent some time absorbing this teaching and making it his own, he would know this.
Evangelicals are the chipper young lads and lasses out on their first or second or twenty-first date, ready to talk about their relationship with anyone who has a ready ear. Like anyone who is not fully committed, they are not entirely sure of themselves, so they constantly bring forward their relationship for others to examine and advise them. "Is this the one?" they ask. "I really love her. I think she is the one. Is she? Am I doing the right thing? I think I am. I can't imagine being happier. What do you think? I think she's GREAT! Oh, if you only had the chance to meet her, if you only had the chance to know her like I do, you would think she is great too! She is you know. Don't you think so? Come with me, I'll introduce you. You'll really like her." How many times have we who are older had this conversation with an eager young adult?
But Catholic life is different.
Catholic life is about being married to Jesus.
Not dating.
Not friends.
Married.
And Fr. Haughey, that's a whole different level of conversation.
John Paul II has already answered this question. How many men and women begin a conversation by talking about their love for their spouse? Most married people, especially men, simply don't engage in that kind of conversation. We don't start a conversation with "Good heavens, I love my wife! And I just wanted to come before you to say that she's the best little woman in the world."
Evangelicals emphasize the Lordship of Christ or the fact that Jesus is their friend. But you never hear them talk about Jesus as their lover. For Catholics, that is all there IS to talk about.
We can talk about how we got married to our Spouse, Jesus Christ, in baptism. We can talk about God grows how our marriage relationship from baptismal newlywed status to full maturity in Confirmation. We can talk about how He establishes His Son within our spiritual family through Holy Orders. We can talk about how we we cheated on our Spouse but repented and renewed our marriage vows in Reconciliation. We can talk about the Flesh of the Bridegroom entering the Flesh of the Bride at the Nuptial Feast in Eucharist and the Mass. We can talk about all the sweet nothings we whisper into our Lover's ear through sacramentals and the sacramental life. We can talk about how the Bridegroom takes us home to the Father's House after our honeymoon here on earth.
But we don't. We don't talk about it much because spouses don't tend to talk about these things in public. Good spouses don't thrust their private married life on strangers. Married life is about intimacy. It is something that only our family sees, that only spouses really share and understand. I cannot speak for wives, but I can say this: two husbands may talk about this very quietly in the backyard over a beer when the rest of the family is otherwise occupied, but even then, they speak in hushed tones and indirect comments, and even those are kept to a bare minimum. This is the nature of married life. It is the entrance into the sanctuary. It is the holiness of the tabernacle. Men recognize this holiness by doing all that a man can do: he falls silent before it in order to witness to it the better, in order to see it more clearly.
There is good Scriptural precedent for this. Mary, the first person to proclaim the full Gospel, did so in absolute silence, as her spouse, Joseph, silently stood guard over her and the Child. She and Joseph remained silent, leaving to the angels the task of telling the shepherds of the event. If Fr. Haughey had bothered to read John Paul II's Theology of the Body, or even bothered with one of the popular summaries (of which my Sex and the Sacred City is but one example), if he had spent some time absorbing this teaching and making it his own, he would know this.
Evangelicals are the chipper young lads and lasses out on their first or second or twenty-first date, ready to talk about their relationship with anyone who has a ready ear. Like anyone who is not fully committed, they are not entirely sure of themselves, so they constantly bring forward their relationship for others to examine and advise them. "Is this the one?" they ask. "I really love her. I think she is the one. Is she? Am I doing the right thing? I think I am. I can't imagine being happier. What do you think? I think she's GREAT! Oh, if you only had the chance to meet her, if you only had the chance to know her like I do, you would think she is great too! She is you know. Don't you think so? Come with me, I'll introduce you. You'll really like her." How many times have we who are older had this conversation with an eager young adult?
But Catholic life is different.
Catholic life is about being married to Jesus.
Not dating.
Not friends.
Married.
And Fr. Haughey, that's a whole different level of conversation.
Saturday, July 31, 2004
The Faded Sun
Twenty years ago, C. J. Cherryh wrote a series of science fiction books, the Faded Sun trilogy. In it, she introduced beings called the regul – cannibalistic frog-like creatures who brought forth the best in their race by ritually chasing down and eating their own children. Whatever children were quick enough and clever enough to survive to adulthood were thereby vindicated as the best.
When one of the human characters asked how the regul could be so bloodthirsty, the regul’s reply upset my teenage worldview. The regul pointed out that their methods of winnowing the population was really no different from that of human beings. The regul simply killed the slow and stupid very early on. Humans tended to wait until youth reached the teens and early twenties, when war served the same purpose the regul winnowing ritual served. The regul couldn’t see why the humans were so upset.
Killing Her Softly
Why mention this? Well, the release of David Reardon’s latest study in the Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy now allows for a similar comparison to be drawn between eastern and western culture. We all know that India and China are preferentially killing their little girls. The latest book on the phenomenon, Bare Branches, points out that over 90 million women are missing from the worlds population; 88% of them would have been Indian or Chinese. The missing women are creating enormous gender imbalances in those cultures, imbalances that will only get worse with time.
Now, we could point out a lot of things about this imbalance and the results it will bring. We could talk about the state of the American Wild West in the mid and late 1800’s, where the amount of frontier town violence turned out to be directly proportional to the paucity of women in these gender-imbalanced areas. We could discuss the fact that the larger the male-female gender imbalance is in any particular area, the more likely existing religions are to fracture and the more likely odd religious cults are to take root and grow. The sociology of gender imbalance is quite interesting. But let’s ignore all that for the moment. Let’s just consider Reardon’s study.
He points out a simple fact. Every study of adult female morbidity and mortality ever done demonstrates that women who have an abortion are more likely to be dead a year later than women who give birth. Every single study. Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia – it simply doesn’t matter who does the study. When death from all causes is considered, the single best predictor of whether or not a woman will be alive a year from today is her abortion status. If she has one between now and then, buy a casket. Whether from drug abuse, suicide, or random violence, she will very likely be pushing up daisies in twelve months.
You Say Tomato, I Say To-mah-toe
Take these facts together, and the conclusion is clear. China and India kill their unwanted women in the womb. We kill our unwanted women about thirty years later. Viewed in this light, there really isn’t much difference between Chinese Communists and Americans. It’s really just a question of where you like to make the cut.
Now, it isn’t all quite so cut-and-dried, of course. China, for instance, not only kills little girls through abortion, infanticide and orphanage neglect, the Chinese also forcibly abort women, with results that haven’t been formally studied in Beijing, but are not difficult to predict, given Reardon’s compilation of results. The Chinese attack women at all levels of society. We aren’t quite so efficient, but we do the best we can with what we have.
This, perhaps, explains a letter in a recent edition of the Illinois Leader. A woman named Judith Ann expressed an enormous amount of vituperation concerning the pregnancy she carried to term. Clearly, she wanted to abort – she tried to do it four times. She kept walking away because she knew it was wrong. In this respect, she is like the man of honorable ignorance whom Aquinas praised. She didn’t have an intellectual reason for turning away from murder. She simply knew in her bones that she had to turn away from it. According to Thomas’ line of reasoning, her knowledge of the natural law was thereby shown to be superior to many pro-life advocates I have known. She didn’t need to painfully reason it out. She just knew. That’s why she was able to walk away from it four times.
Still, it doesn’t explain her anger. However, when you read her letter and take all these facts together, everything makes sense. She isn’t angry about the rape. She isn’t angry about the pregnancy. She is angry about being unwanted. Her husband didn’t want her. Her family didn’t want her. Her church didn’t want her. Nobody wanted her. That’s why she is angry. That’s why she is willing to keep abortion legal, even though she knows it is evil.
Going to the Source
And that is the source of the strength in NOW and NARAL members. They speak constantly of the need to avoid bringing another unwanted child into the world. But that isn’t their real issue. The unwanted baby is just the smokescreen, the tear-jerker, the carnival barker that brings you into the tent. It’s the misdirection that hides their real issue, even from themselves. Their real issue is the unwanted woman. They are terrified of being unwanted.
No, strike that. It isn’t terror. Not really. It is disgust. It is total rejection of the idea that any woman could be unwanted. Women cannot be unwanted. Can’t happen. It’s wrong. It’s evil. That’s what they know. You know what? They are totally, absolutely right. In that sense, NARAL and NOW are fighting the good fight. That’s why we are still fighting them thirty years after the sexual revolution created an explosion in female exploitation.
Their’s is an interesting transfer of responsibility if only because it is so close to true. You see, the woman was wanted when she was having sex with her man. When she got pregnant, the man rejected her. "It can’t be me he’s rejecting," she thinks to herself, "Not really. It can’t be me. It must be the baby that is causing me to be rejected. If I get rid of it, I will be wanted again."
If the abortion doesn’t work, if the child is gone but the woman is still unwanted, it must be due to something else. Perhaps the abortion has wrongfully been stigmatized. So, we’ve got to remove the stigma from abortion. We’ll put on t-shirts praising it. Perhaps the fetal remains are the source of the problem. We’ve got to remove the stigma from fetal remains. We’ll turn them into medical cures.
You see, people are just hung up on stigmas associated with things that have nothing to do with women. Once the stigmas are removed from those other things, people will be able to see past them to the women. The women who are wrongfully forced to stand alone, unwanted. That’s wrong, you know. Women are supposed to be wanted, they are supposed to be loved.
They are supposed to be.
When one of the human characters asked how the regul could be so bloodthirsty, the regul’s reply upset my teenage worldview. The regul pointed out that their methods of winnowing the population was really no different from that of human beings. The regul simply killed the slow and stupid very early on. Humans tended to wait until youth reached the teens and early twenties, when war served the same purpose the regul winnowing ritual served. The regul couldn’t see why the humans were so upset.
Killing Her Softly
Why mention this? Well, the release of David Reardon’s latest study in the Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy now allows for a similar comparison to be drawn between eastern and western culture. We all know that India and China are preferentially killing their little girls. The latest book on the phenomenon, Bare Branches, points out that over 90 million women are missing from the worlds population; 88% of them would have been Indian or Chinese. The missing women are creating enormous gender imbalances in those cultures, imbalances that will only get worse with time.
Now, we could point out a lot of things about this imbalance and the results it will bring. We could talk about the state of the American Wild West in the mid and late 1800’s, where the amount of frontier town violence turned out to be directly proportional to the paucity of women in these gender-imbalanced areas. We could discuss the fact that the larger the male-female gender imbalance is in any particular area, the more likely existing religions are to fracture and the more likely odd religious cults are to take root and grow. The sociology of gender imbalance is quite interesting. But let’s ignore all that for the moment. Let’s just consider Reardon’s study.
He points out a simple fact. Every study of adult female morbidity and mortality ever done demonstrates that women who have an abortion are more likely to be dead a year later than women who give birth. Every single study. Continental Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia – it simply doesn’t matter who does the study. When death from all causes is considered, the single best predictor of whether or not a woman will be alive a year from today is her abortion status. If she has one between now and then, buy a casket. Whether from drug abuse, suicide, or random violence, she will very likely be pushing up daisies in twelve months.
You Say Tomato, I Say To-mah-toe
Take these facts together, and the conclusion is clear. China and India kill their unwanted women in the womb. We kill our unwanted women about thirty years later. Viewed in this light, there really isn’t much difference between Chinese Communists and Americans. It’s really just a question of where you like to make the cut.
Now, it isn’t all quite so cut-and-dried, of course. China, for instance, not only kills little girls through abortion, infanticide and orphanage neglect, the Chinese also forcibly abort women, with results that haven’t been formally studied in Beijing, but are not difficult to predict, given Reardon’s compilation of results. The Chinese attack women at all levels of society. We aren’t quite so efficient, but we do the best we can with what we have.
This, perhaps, explains a letter in a recent edition of the Illinois Leader. A woman named Judith Ann expressed an enormous amount of vituperation concerning the pregnancy she carried to term. Clearly, she wanted to abort – she tried to do it four times. She kept walking away because she knew it was wrong. In this respect, she is like the man of honorable ignorance whom Aquinas praised. She didn’t have an intellectual reason for turning away from murder. She simply knew in her bones that she had to turn away from it. According to Thomas’ line of reasoning, her knowledge of the natural law was thereby shown to be superior to many pro-life advocates I have known. She didn’t need to painfully reason it out. She just knew. That’s why she was able to walk away from it four times.
Still, it doesn’t explain her anger. However, when you read her letter and take all these facts together, everything makes sense. She isn’t angry about the rape. She isn’t angry about the pregnancy. She is angry about being unwanted. Her husband didn’t want her. Her family didn’t want her. Her church didn’t want her. Nobody wanted her. That’s why she is angry. That’s why she is willing to keep abortion legal, even though she knows it is evil.
Going to the Source
And that is the source of the strength in NOW and NARAL members. They speak constantly of the need to avoid bringing another unwanted child into the world. But that isn’t their real issue. The unwanted baby is just the smokescreen, the tear-jerker, the carnival barker that brings you into the tent. It’s the misdirection that hides their real issue, even from themselves. Their real issue is the unwanted woman. They are terrified of being unwanted.
No, strike that. It isn’t terror. Not really. It is disgust. It is total rejection of the idea that any woman could be unwanted. Women cannot be unwanted. Can’t happen. It’s wrong. It’s evil. That’s what they know. You know what? They are totally, absolutely right. In that sense, NARAL and NOW are fighting the good fight. That’s why we are still fighting them thirty years after the sexual revolution created an explosion in female exploitation.
Their’s is an interesting transfer of responsibility if only because it is so close to true. You see, the woman was wanted when she was having sex with her man. When she got pregnant, the man rejected her. "It can’t be me he’s rejecting," she thinks to herself, "Not really. It can’t be me. It must be the baby that is causing me to be rejected. If I get rid of it, I will be wanted again."
If the abortion doesn’t work, if the child is gone but the woman is still unwanted, it must be due to something else. Perhaps the abortion has wrongfully been stigmatized. So, we’ve got to remove the stigma from abortion. We’ll put on t-shirts praising it. Perhaps the fetal remains are the source of the problem. We’ve got to remove the stigma from fetal remains. We’ll turn them into medical cures.
You see, people are just hung up on stigmas associated with things that have nothing to do with women. Once the stigmas are removed from those other things, people will be able to see past them to the women. The women who are wrongfully forced to stand alone, unwanted. That’s wrong, you know. Women are supposed to be wanted, they are supposed to be loved.
They are supposed to be.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
A Puzzle
We pro-lifers have frequently been told that it is a sign of terrible simple-mindedness to be a single issue voter. It lacks sophistication, nuance. It is un-democratic.
So, what do we say to the people who shout "Anybody but Bush!"?
Seems like single-issue voting to me.
But perhaps I'm just being simple-minded again.
So, what do we say to the people who shout "Anybody but Bush!"?
Seems like single-issue voting to me.
But perhaps I'm just being simple-minded again.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Hold the Waffles
Senator Kerry recently, and inadvertently, revived an old debate. He claimed a few weeks ago to believe that "life begins at conception." Now he adds that personhood does not begin at conception. He spoke instead of the 'fertilisation process' when a human being is 'first formed and created.'
The distinction he makes is an important one, of course, but it revolves around how we define "person." In the law (and both Senators Kerry and Edwards are lawyers), anything and anyone defined as a person thereby attains certain rights.
Corporations, for instance, have been considered persons in a limited sense since 1886, long after America’s founding fathers were safely dead. As is noted in The Case of Evelyn Hart (a model brief published in the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal, 2000, by those who wish to recognize great apes as persons) "[C]orporations can be criminally liable but cannot be incarcerated; they must pay taxes, but cannot vote… Human beings, for the most part, are persons; but not so long ago in this country, some were while others were not." The reference is to slavery, of course, but change the sentence to present tense and the argument applies equally well to the unborn.
The argument, however, brings forward a very important point: the concept of personhood is not limited to human beings. There’s a good reason for that, of course. The concept of personhood is divine, not human. Those who wish to argue for the separation of church and state, take note. If you are serious about the idea, then we must abolish the idea of "person" from our midst.
You see, the word "person" comes originally from the stage plays put on by the ancient Greeks and Romans, in which the word referred to the masks the actors habitually wore on stage. Tertullian adopted the word to explain the Trinity, and Boethius created a technical definition of the word in order to explain Tertullian; he described "person" as an individual substance of a rational nature. Thomas Aquinas is somewhat more poetic, but no less accurate in elaborating, "Person signifies what is most perfect in all nature."
Why would he say this? Because "person" describes the inner life of the Trinity. It describes the relationships within the Trinity. Each Divine Person is defined solely and only by His relations to the other two Persons. Father begets Son, Son is begotten by Father. Father and Son breathe forth Spirit, Spirit is breathed forth by Father and Son. And what has this to do with us?
Boethius’ definition tells us what a person is, but it is not immediately obviouis why a person is. Modern man focuses on the "what" to the detriment of the "why." We are persons because we are called by God into a relationship with God. That is, though each human being is an individual substance, we have a rational nature only and precisely so that we can respond to God’s call. If God did not call us to Himself, we would each be, in a certain sense, human animals. Rationality is that which allows us to choose what kind of person we will be: to choose our end, to choose the means to attain that end, and the ability to rest in that end. This is the classical understanding of the person.
Unfortunately, this puts those who would deny God’s existence in rather a pickle. This technical Christian understanding of person is very useful, for it is the basis for every right the state extends. The post-Enlightenment atheist, however, wishes to embrace the technical understanding of "person" and "individual human rights" while denying any responsibility towards the God who endowed us with those rights. That is, he insists that each human being can be a person without regard to divine relationship.
Sadly, the previous sentence is a contradiction in terms. The very concept of "rights" requires one to acknowledge the very relations that create personhood, at least to a minimal degree. After all, rights only exist in relation to another who has rights. My right to bodily existence is not something an Ebola virus or a hungry lion can violate. A lion can kill me, devour my living body or my smoking corpse, but the lion cannot deprive me of my right to live because the deprivation of rights, the negation of rights implies the one who takes from me has the intent to take from me, personally.
Put another way, the existence of rights implies a recognition of me as a person, not just the simple recognition of a chunk of meat with a certain skill at locomotion. There must be a person who recognizes as well as one who is recognized, that is, there must be relationship of some kind in order for rights to exist. Thus, if God does not exist, all I need do in order to legitimize the death of another human creature is refuse to recognize this relationship. If I insist on acting towards another person, or another group of people, as a lion acts towards a gazelle, then I cannot be accused of violating anyone’s rights. If enough people refuse to recognize these rights, these persons don’t exist at all. Rights become subjective, fluid, relative. There is no third party referee.
The only way individual autonomy can be guaranteed is through the existence of a divine being Who guarantees it. If we deny the divine being, then we deny our own existence.
And this lies at the heart of John Kerry’s quandary. If he would insist that personhood is something that exists apart from a call to intimate relationship with the Persons of the Trinity, then he must say personhood exists in some other way, for it would not do to discard the concept entirely. He must say personhood depends on a specific number of brain cells being present, or a specific kind of muscular movement (heartbeat or respiration, for instance), or a specific set of reactions towards self or another human person (self-awareness or other-awareness). Once the criteria depends on physical data, everyone is free to weigh in and put forward their own criteria. You may be opposed to infanticide, but why should I oppose it? Perhaps you dislike assisted suicide or the killing of baby seals, but I may wield a club against both with impunity. As the Supreme Court said in Planned Parenthood versus Casey, reality becomes whatever we define it to be.
That’s why John Kerry can honestly say he has never waffled on any position. He simply re-defines reality as he feels the need. It's a wonderful skill, as long as you are the one with the club.
The distinction he makes is an important one, of course, but it revolves around how we define "person." In the law (and both Senators Kerry and Edwards are lawyers), anything and anyone defined as a person thereby attains certain rights.
Corporations, for instance, have been considered persons in a limited sense since 1886, long after America’s founding fathers were safely dead. As is noted in The Case of Evelyn Hart (a model brief published in the Seton Hall Constitutional Law Journal, 2000, by those who wish to recognize great apes as persons) "[C]orporations can be criminally liable but cannot be incarcerated; they must pay taxes, but cannot vote… Human beings, for the most part, are persons; but not so long ago in this country, some were while others were not." The reference is to slavery, of course, but change the sentence to present tense and the argument applies equally well to the unborn.
The argument, however, brings forward a very important point: the concept of personhood is not limited to human beings. There’s a good reason for that, of course. The concept of personhood is divine, not human. Those who wish to argue for the separation of church and state, take note. If you are serious about the idea, then we must abolish the idea of "person" from our midst.
You see, the word "person" comes originally from the stage plays put on by the ancient Greeks and Romans, in which the word referred to the masks the actors habitually wore on stage. Tertullian adopted the word to explain the Trinity, and Boethius created a technical definition of the word in order to explain Tertullian; he described "person" as an individual substance of a rational nature. Thomas Aquinas is somewhat more poetic, but no less accurate in elaborating, "Person signifies what is most perfect in all nature."
Why would he say this? Because "person" describes the inner life of the Trinity. It describes the relationships within the Trinity. Each Divine Person is defined solely and only by His relations to the other two Persons. Father begets Son, Son is begotten by Father. Father and Son breathe forth Spirit, Spirit is breathed forth by Father and Son. And what has this to do with us?
Boethius’ definition tells us what a person is, but it is not immediately obviouis why a person is. Modern man focuses on the "what" to the detriment of the "why." We are persons because we are called by God into a relationship with God. That is, though each human being is an individual substance, we have a rational nature only and precisely so that we can respond to God’s call. If God did not call us to Himself, we would each be, in a certain sense, human animals. Rationality is that which allows us to choose what kind of person we will be: to choose our end, to choose the means to attain that end, and the ability to rest in that end. This is the classical understanding of the person.
Unfortunately, this puts those who would deny God’s existence in rather a pickle. This technical Christian understanding of person is very useful, for it is the basis for every right the state extends. The post-Enlightenment atheist, however, wishes to embrace the technical understanding of "person" and "individual human rights" while denying any responsibility towards the God who endowed us with those rights. That is, he insists that each human being can be a person without regard to divine relationship.
Sadly, the previous sentence is a contradiction in terms. The very concept of "rights" requires one to acknowledge the very relations that create personhood, at least to a minimal degree. After all, rights only exist in relation to another who has rights. My right to bodily existence is not something an Ebola virus or a hungry lion can violate. A lion can kill me, devour my living body or my smoking corpse, but the lion cannot deprive me of my right to live because the deprivation of rights, the negation of rights implies the one who takes from me has the intent to take from me, personally.
Put another way, the existence of rights implies a recognition of me as a person, not just the simple recognition of a chunk of meat with a certain skill at locomotion. There must be a person who recognizes as well as one who is recognized, that is, there must be relationship of some kind in order for rights to exist. Thus, if God does not exist, all I need do in order to legitimize the death of another human creature is refuse to recognize this relationship. If I insist on acting towards another person, or another group of people, as a lion acts towards a gazelle, then I cannot be accused of violating anyone’s rights. If enough people refuse to recognize these rights, these persons don’t exist at all. Rights become subjective, fluid, relative. There is no third party referee.
The only way individual autonomy can be guaranteed is through the existence of a divine being Who guarantees it. If we deny the divine being, then we deny our own existence.
And this lies at the heart of John Kerry’s quandary. If he would insist that personhood is something that exists apart from a call to intimate relationship with the Persons of the Trinity, then he must say personhood exists in some other way, for it would not do to discard the concept entirely. He must say personhood depends on a specific number of brain cells being present, or a specific kind of muscular movement (heartbeat or respiration, for instance), or a specific set of reactions towards self or another human person (self-awareness or other-awareness). Once the criteria depends on physical data, everyone is free to weigh in and put forward their own criteria. You may be opposed to infanticide, but why should I oppose it? Perhaps you dislike assisted suicide or the killing of baby seals, but I may wield a club against both with impunity. As the Supreme Court said in Planned Parenthood versus Casey, reality becomes whatever we define it to be.
That’s why John Kerry can honestly say he has never waffled on any position. He simply re-defines reality as he feels the need. It's a wonderful skill, as long as you are the one with the club.
Friday, July 23, 2004
Human Shields
I used to write for a Catholic internet site that had a problem. Its self-perception did not match its reality. If you have ever wondered how today’s Catholic Church has gotten into the position of taking its marching orders from the Supreme Court and the Democratic party instead of from the Gospels, the story I am about to tell might be informative.
The site in question was organized and run by good people interested in Doing Something Good for the Faith. An organization for disseminating the Gospel on the Internet was founded, an organization based on the idea that we are entering history’s third millennium since God walked the Earth, and we need to adapt the proclamation of the Gospel to use the newest possible media, be on the cutting edge.
The problem
The problem was simple: everyone in the developed world felt they had to be on the Internet. Millions of sites out there, you know. How do we rise above the noise? Well, as any good marketing consultant can tell you, the best product in the world won’t sell if no one knows about it. So we have to get people onto this: we are promoting the Gospel. Hmmm…. Think, think, think. What shall we do?
A brilliant idea was proposed. Most parishes don’t have websites (or didn’t at the time the organization was founded). Pastors tend to be backward people, especially in the big city. Why don’t we offer free website hosting and/or content to them? It’s a win-win situation – they get a good Catholic site, we get free advertising. As an aside, there’s an irony here: the more rural the parish or diocese, the more likely it is to have an internet presence, e-mail, website and the like. Rural distances make it very cost-effective to communicate this way. It is the inner city parishes, parishes that are cheek-by-jowl, where the bishop doesn’t have to drive more than ten miles to reach 60% of his pastors, it is these parishes that have the worst computing infrastructure.
From the lips of the brilliant to the fingers on the keyboard is but a step. As it was proposed, so was it done. The new proclaimers of the Gospel offered free parish websites to anyone who wanted to sign up. The idea was brilliantly successful. Hundreds of parishes signed on and now get their content from this Catholic organization.
All seemed to go swimmingly until… until a terrible thing happened. You see, the Catholic organization wanted to talk about events from a Catholic perspective. In this culture, that meant some of the events under discussion would be about – dare we say it (yes, we dare) – sex!
Sex spoils everything
It’s remarkable, but true. The word "masturbation" appeared on the front page of the provider’s site. It was duly propagated to the front page of hundreds of parish web sites across the nation. Within hours, nasty letters arrived from pastors and parishioners asking how such a word could have been permitted to appear on the front page of the feed to a Catholic parish! There were children present!
Now, not being privy to all the details, I can only reconstruct what happened from stray fragments of conversations I have had with various people over the course of the last year concerning this (dare I say it? Yes, I dare) seminal event. But even I, who am but a worthless scrivener, can detect the rank odor of decay. Pray tell, kind reader, how many children do you think make it a habit to surf to their own parish website? If the number rises into double digits in any parish, color me purple and wash me in jello. The complaint is, shall we say, somewhat odd.
Further, we could bring out the example of the Cure d’Ars, a priest so renowned for holiness that the devil reportedly feared that three such priests might appear in the world at the same time, lest his empire of sin be destroyed. The Cure, a man not known to season his words with mince for more pleasant consumption, once took offense at the language of the drovers who passed through town. He gave a sermon in which he remonstrated all his parishioners for their bad language, and then, from the pulpit, read out a list of words he did not want to hear anymore, so that there might be no misunderstanding. True, it is not recorded if children were present, but somehow I doubt the presence of children would have prevented him from instructing the adults.
The result
In any case, this set up a certain sense of the gun-shy in the leaders of our vaunted Catholic organization. They began to cringe at the sight of Catholic teaching that was too… well… too raw. Sure, they would promote an extremely raw movie by an extremely well-known Catholic director about the execution of a Jew two millenia ago, because that improved their visibility and the Catholic director in question had "paid his dues." But the proclamation of the Gospel had to be toned down. We don’t want to further injure the bruised reed or quench the smoldering wick.
So, watch the execution movie, but don’t reproduce the words of a woman who is forcibly aborted. Speak against homosexuality, but don’t use the Catechism’s words about it being "intrinsically disordered." Not on the front page. Children might see it, you know. Make the content like G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis (but not like Lewis in "The Four Loves", where he called gays "pansies"). We want to be Mother Theresa (she didn't own a computer) or St. Francis (but not when he rejected a town for its hardened sinfulness and preached the full Gospel to the fishes instead).
In short, be gentle and kind, not harsh and disturbing. Otherwise parishes might start dumping our feed, and then we can’t proclaim the Gospel to everyone! Remember, the Gospel is about Jesus’ love for us – don’t make it into a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. I mean, uh… well… you know. The principles are clear. Really.
That became a popular phrase, "I've already made this clear."
So, if you ever wondered how it happens, that’s how it happens. That’s how the Gospel gets watered down to nothing.
It all starts with the adults, specifically with the parents. When the truth is put out there, the parents complain, "We must protect the children!" Protect them from what? From the sins you are committing? From the consequences of the sins you allow to flourish around you? But these questions are never asked.
So, Father can’t talk about masturbation from the pulpit because there are children in the congregation. He can’t write about contraception in the bulletin because children might read it. He can’t talk about the sin of divorce at the football rally (the only other place his adult parishioners regularly show up) because there are children present AND it is not appropriate. This is a football rally, Father. He can’t talk at all.
The parents use their children as human shields to protect themselves from being told they are sinners. Whosoever brings forward the light of truth will suddenly find a small, large-eyed child between him and the person to whom he is preaching. And the person behind the child will keep repeating, "How can you say these things in front of an innocent like this? What big brown eyes he has! Can you look in his eyes and talk about such filth?"
So, I found myself defending my content – written for adults - from a man who insisted he ran a family website and who therefore insisted my content was not appropriate for his website. I pointed out that his website had no family content. Everything on it was for adults. There was no teen content, no children’s content. It was marketed to adults. What on earth was he talking about?
But, you see, he thought he ran a family site because the adults who helped catapult his site to the top of the Catholic internet heap told him he ran a family site. After all, that’s why he couldn’t run content that fully matched the Gospel – he was running a family site. The people who threatened to pull their support used that as their club. "How dare you harm our children, our family with your talk about our sins?"
Now, one could ponder the logic of this: don’t preach the full Gospel to the family, because the family is the foundation of both society and the Church. Hmmm… something not right about that.
But like most of the American bishops, he had been taken in.
Since our conversation (and my departure), the comedy (in the Dantean sense) has grown towards farce. The site is even now working to change its image to conform to its detractors. It will be adding children and teen content in order to actually be a family site.
Note the progression. They wanted to reach everyone, so they went for assistance to the places that were in most cases not preaching the full Gospel: the parishes. The parishes artificially inflated the website's link popularity but crippled its ability to preach the Gospel because now the people who ran the website were subject to the same forces that crippled the priests. Then they turned themselves into an on-line (read "ultimately ineffective") parish by acquiescing to the vision of the parishioners instead of the vision they had begun with. Like Dan Brown, they are very popular, but like Dan Brown, it isn't quite the Gospel anymore.
Human shields work. The Nazis knew it. The Soviets knew it. The terrorists know it. All sinners know it. Christ refused to allow it. Will we?
The site in question was organized and run by good people interested in Doing Something Good for the Faith. An organization for disseminating the Gospel on the Internet was founded, an organization based on the idea that we are entering history’s third millennium since God walked the Earth, and we need to adapt the proclamation of the Gospel to use the newest possible media, be on the cutting edge.
The problem
The problem was simple: everyone in the developed world felt they had to be on the Internet. Millions of sites out there, you know. How do we rise above the noise? Well, as any good marketing consultant can tell you, the best product in the world won’t sell if no one knows about it. So we have to get people onto this: we are promoting the Gospel. Hmmm…. Think, think, think. What shall we do?
A brilliant idea was proposed. Most parishes don’t have websites (or didn’t at the time the organization was founded). Pastors tend to be backward people, especially in the big city. Why don’t we offer free website hosting and/or content to them? It’s a win-win situation – they get a good Catholic site, we get free advertising. As an aside, there’s an irony here: the more rural the parish or diocese, the more likely it is to have an internet presence, e-mail, website and the like. Rural distances make it very cost-effective to communicate this way. It is the inner city parishes, parishes that are cheek-by-jowl, where the bishop doesn’t have to drive more than ten miles to reach 60% of his pastors, it is these parishes that have the worst computing infrastructure.
From the lips of the brilliant to the fingers on the keyboard is but a step. As it was proposed, so was it done. The new proclaimers of the Gospel offered free parish websites to anyone who wanted to sign up. The idea was brilliantly successful. Hundreds of parishes signed on and now get their content from this Catholic organization.
All seemed to go swimmingly until… until a terrible thing happened. You see, the Catholic organization wanted to talk about events from a Catholic perspective. In this culture, that meant some of the events under discussion would be about – dare we say it (yes, we dare) – sex!
Sex spoils everything
It’s remarkable, but true. The word "masturbation" appeared on the front page of the provider’s site. It was duly propagated to the front page of hundreds of parish web sites across the nation. Within hours, nasty letters arrived from pastors and parishioners asking how such a word could have been permitted to appear on the front page of the feed to a Catholic parish! There were children present!
Now, not being privy to all the details, I can only reconstruct what happened from stray fragments of conversations I have had with various people over the course of the last year concerning this (dare I say it? Yes, I dare) seminal event. But even I, who am but a worthless scrivener, can detect the rank odor of decay. Pray tell, kind reader, how many children do you think make it a habit to surf to their own parish website? If the number rises into double digits in any parish, color me purple and wash me in jello. The complaint is, shall we say, somewhat odd.
Further, we could bring out the example of the Cure d’Ars, a priest so renowned for holiness that the devil reportedly feared that three such priests might appear in the world at the same time, lest his empire of sin be destroyed. The Cure, a man not known to season his words with mince for more pleasant consumption, once took offense at the language of the drovers who passed through town. He gave a sermon in which he remonstrated all his parishioners for their bad language, and then, from the pulpit, read out a list of words he did not want to hear anymore, so that there might be no misunderstanding. True, it is not recorded if children were present, but somehow I doubt the presence of children would have prevented him from instructing the adults.
The result
In any case, this set up a certain sense of the gun-shy in the leaders of our vaunted Catholic organization. They began to cringe at the sight of Catholic teaching that was too… well… too raw. Sure, they would promote an extremely raw movie by an extremely well-known Catholic director about the execution of a Jew two millenia ago, because that improved their visibility and the Catholic director in question had "paid his dues." But the proclamation of the Gospel had to be toned down. We don’t want to further injure the bruised reed or quench the smoldering wick.
So, watch the execution movie, but don’t reproduce the words of a woman who is forcibly aborted. Speak against homosexuality, but don’t use the Catechism’s words about it being "intrinsically disordered." Not on the front page. Children might see it, you know. Make the content like G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis (but not like Lewis in "The Four Loves", where he called gays "pansies"). We want to be Mother Theresa (she didn't own a computer) or St. Francis (but not when he rejected a town for its hardened sinfulness and preached the full Gospel to the fishes instead).
In short, be gentle and kind, not harsh and disturbing. Otherwise parishes might start dumping our feed, and then we can’t proclaim the Gospel to everyone! Remember, the Gospel is about Jesus’ love for us – don’t make it into a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles. I mean, uh… well… you know. The principles are clear. Really.
That became a popular phrase, "I've already made this clear."
So, if you ever wondered how it happens, that’s how it happens. That’s how the Gospel gets watered down to nothing.
It all starts with the adults, specifically with the parents. When the truth is put out there, the parents complain, "We must protect the children!" Protect them from what? From the sins you are committing? From the consequences of the sins you allow to flourish around you? But these questions are never asked.
So, Father can’t talk about masturbation from the pulpit because there are children in the congregation. He can’t write about contraception in the bulletin because children might read it. He can’t talk about the sin of divorce at the football rally (the only other place his adult parishioners regularly show up) because there are children present AND it is not appropriate. This is a football rally, Father. He can’t talk at all.
The parents use their children as human shields to protect themselves from being told they are sinners. Whosoever brings forward the light of truth will suddenly find a small, large-eyed child between him and the person to whom he is preaching. And the person behind the child will keep repeating, "How can you say these things in front of an innocent like this? What big brown eyes he has! Can you look in his eyes and talk about such filth?"
So, I found myself defending my content – written for adults - from a man who insisted he ran a family website and who therefore insisted my content was not appropriate for his website. I pointed out that his website had no family content. Everything on it was for adults. There was no teen content, no children’s content. It was marketed to adults. What on earth was he talking about?
But, you see, he thought he ran a family site because the adults who helped catapult his site to the top of the Catholic internet heap told him he ran a family site. After all, that’s why he couldn’t run content that fully matched the Gospel – he was running a family site. The people who threatened to pull their support used that as their club. "How dare you harm our children, our family with your talk about our sins?"
Now, one could ponder the logic of this: don’t preach the full Gospel to the family, because the family is the foundation of both society and the Church. Hmmm… something not right about that.
But like most of the American bishops, he had been taken in.
Since our conversation (and my departure), the comedy (in the Dantean sense) has grown towards farce. The site is even now working to change its image to conform to its detractors. It will be adding children and teen content in order to actually be a family site.
Note the progression. They wanted to reach everyone, so they went for assistance to the places that were in most cases not preaching the full Gospel: the parishes. The parishes artificially inflated the website's link popularity but crippled its ability to preach the Gospel because now the people who ran the website were subject to the same forces that crippled the priests. Then they turned themselves into an on-line (read "ultimately ineffective") parish by acquiescing to the vision of the parishioners instead of the vision they had begun with. Like Dan Brown, they are very popular, but like Dan Brown, it isn't quite the Gospel anymore.
Human shields work. The Nazis knew it. The Soviets knew it. The terrorists know it. All sinners know it. Christ refused to allow it. Will we?
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Changes to the blog
Over the next few weeks, I will be migrating all my blog articles (70+ at last count) to a new article manager on the Bridegroom Press website. In order to find articles, just look at the information box on the right, immediately above the BESTSELLERS box.
This migration provides several benefits and potential benefits:
This migration provides several benefits and potential benefits:
- Articles can now be categorized by topic,
- Articles now have one to two sentence summaries to help you find your information more quickly,
- Editing abilities are much improved (this helps me more than it does you),
- I now have a means to accept articles from other people who might want to contribute (prior to this, there was no good way to attribute specific columns to one person versus another person),
- I may eventually be able to create an internal search engine to help you find specific articles more quickly (that's in the works as soon as I figure out how to modify the php code in the OSCommerce search box - anyone out there want to help on that one?).
All in all, this should provide a better experience for both of us.
I will be cross-posting to both sites for the near future, but hope to move entirely to the new site by the end of August at the latest.
As an aside, rummaging through some of these nine-month old posts was quite enlightening. It's remarkable how well they have held up during the course of the year. Specifically, posts like The Infallibly Dirty Dozen, Mutual Admiration Society, What's Natural About Marriage?, Are YOU My Mother, and Democracy at Work though written for situations specific to last year's debates, still make relevant points now. If you have time to re-read some of these, I'd like to hear your opinions on them. Especially as I haven't tried out the new comment system at the site yet, so you can be my guinea pigs. :)
Click here to find out.
Monday, July 19, 2004
The Picayune Passion?
Well, the impact of Gibson’s Passion movie is already being minimized. According to the wire services, “while a solid majority liked the film, seeing the movie brought about few changes in individual’s faith or beliefs” (CNS). According to the survey, as a result of seeing the movie:
Yet this poll, taken over ten weeks after the movie had ended, produced a larger viewer response than any summer revival. And the movie was only a couple of hours long. In our discussion of this, a friend of mine, Dennis Embo, pointed out:
“To the CNS wire service people it was a ‘mere’ 18%. But when compared to, as you say, these big evangelistic crusades, they would love to see double-digit figures of people whose report a life-changing experience after attending such an event. And the difference between the two is that Gibson's evangelism was not a 'participatory' event. Noboby made an altar call at the end of the movie. No 800-number was flashed on the screen so folks could get in touch with some local evangelical group for follow-up. Nobody sang and prayed and carried on during the film. No Benny Hinn lunacy. Just the Gospel portrayed in its true colors. When the Gospel is acclaimed that way one would almost expect some very positive and long-lasting results.”
And that’s exactly what we see. If Michael Moore's "Farenheit 9/11" caused 10% of its viewers to call the phone numbers he flashed on the screen during the movie, don't you think this would be reported as a news event? If this were a safe-sex campaign, CNS would trumpet an 18% change in condom-using behaviour from the rooftops. But since the viewers are putting on Christ instead of a sheath of latex, it becomes a “mere” 18% change.
Is it any wonder that most people find prostitutes more reliable than journalists? We know Jesus ate and drank with the former, but there's nothing to indicate He associated with the latter.
- 18 percent of moviegoers changed their religious behaviour,
- 16 percent changed their religious beliefs,
- 10 percent had done both,
- Less than one-tenth of one percent made a profession of faith or accepted Jesus as their saviour in reaction to the film.
Yet this poll, taken over ten weeks after the movie had ended, produced a larger viewer response than any summer revival. And the movie was only a couple of hours long. In our discussion of this, a friend of mine, Dennis Embo, pointed out:
“To the CNS wire service people it was a ‘mere’ 18%. But when compared to, as you say, these big evangelistic crusades, they would love to see double-digit figures of people whose report a life-changing experience after attending such an event. And the difference between the two is that Gibson's evangelism was not a 'participatory' event. Noboby made an altar call at the end of the movie. No 800-number was flashed on the screen so folks could get in touch with some local evangelical group for follow-up. Nobody sang and prayed and carried on during the film. No Benny Hinn lunacy. Just the Gospel portrayed in its true colors. When the Gospel is acclaimed that way one would almost expect some very positive and long-lasting results.”
And that’s exactly what we see. If Michael Moore's "Farenheit 9/11" caused 10% of its viewers to call the phone numbers he flashed on the screen during the movie, don't you think this would be reported as a news event? If this were a safe-sex campaign, CNS would trumpet an 18% change in condom-using behaviour from the rooftops. But since the viewers are putting on Christ instead of a sheath of latex, it becomes a “mere” 18% change.
Is it any wonder that most people find prostitutes more reliable than journalists? We know Jesus ate and drank with the former, but there's nothing to indicate He associated with the latter.
Friday, July 16, 2004
DOMA and Eucharist
Shared viewpoints
"Marriage should be reserved to relationships between a man and a woman. Only these pairings can produce children. But I do not believe an amendment to the Constitution of the United States is the appropriate answer at this time." – Sen. Kent Conrad, D, N.D.
"I have not gotten to the stage where I'm comfortable in denying the Eucharist," - Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C.
"Changing the Constitution of the United States of America is a very serious business and should only be used as a last resort." – Sen. Max Baucus, D, Mont.
"I have a deep reverence for our Constitution, and believe it should be amended only when absolutely necessary." – Sen. John Edwards, D, N.C.
"In the nature of the church, the imposition of sanctions is always the final response, not the first response, nor the second nor maybe even the 10th," Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, Belleville, USCCB president
"Our Constitution has traditionally been used to expand rights, not to restrict rights, and I do not support amending it." – Senator Carl Levin, D, Mich.
"I believe that 'marriage' should be reserved to a woman and a man, based on the long tradition and religious context of the institution. But I see no need for a constitutional amendment." – Sen. Bob Graham, D, Fla.
“I’m slightly mystified why this is all coming up now. We’ve had pro-choice Catholic politicians going to Communion since Roe v. Wade,” - Cardinal Mahony, Los Angeles
"Marriage between a man and a woman is an honored social and sacred institution that dates back thousands of years in civilization. It is for this reason that I am opposed to same sex marriages. However, I do not support amending the U.S. Constitution to ban same sex marriage at this time." – Sen. Chuck Hagel, R, Neb.
"Though I oppose gay marriage, I believe a constitutional amendment is neither appropriate nor necessary." – Harry Reid, D, Nev.
“The prophet Isaiah has that wonderful line about peace-making – turning swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks… I fear that we are reversing the situation, and taking God’s great gift to our Church and using it as a weapon of divisiveness and destruction... I strongly oppose using Eucharist as a weapon.” - Bishop Skylstad, Spokane
Opposing viewpoints
“Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weak man say, ‘I am a warrior!’ ” – Joel 3:10
“[When] the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist [the minister giving Communion] must refuse to distribute it… This decision properly speaking is not a sanction or a penalty. Nor is the minister of Holy Communion passing judgment on the person's subjective guilt, but rather (he) is reacting to the person's public unworthiness to receive Holy Communion due to an objective situation of sin." – Cardinal Ratzinger, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
"When politicians agree with the church's position on a given issue, they say that the church is prophetic and should be listened to, but if the church's position doesn't coincide with theirs, they scream separation of church and state." -Archbishop O'Malley, Boston
Interesting facts
135 of 154 bishops polled felt Eucharist should not be denied to anyone, or if denied, only as a last resort. Only five out of 178 Latin-rite Roman Catholic dioceses in the US have indicated that they will deny prochoice Catholic politicians the Eucharist (Camden, NJ; Colorado Springs, CO; LaCrosse, WI; Lincoln, NE; and St. Louis, MO). These dioceses are following the directives of four bishops: Bishops Bruskewitz, Burke, Galante, and Sheridan. Just 17 bishops have encouraged Catholic policy makers to abstain from communion because of their prochoice position.
- Catholics For a Free Choice poll of all American Latin-rite bishops.
Bishops are consecrated to defend the Eucharist.
Congressmen are sworn to defend the Constitution.
The Constitution is to US politics what the Eucharist is to Catholics.
Thirty-eight Congressmen complain to the USCCB about the possibility of being denied Eucharist. The USCCB complains to the Congress about its failure to add DOMA to the Constitution.
Some say that we can't withhold Eucharist if only because the bishops have not properly instructed the faithful on life issues. Indeed. If that is true, then the bishops really can't expect to win on DOMA, can they, since they haven't properly instructed the faithful on life issues, specifically contraception and its links to homosexuality.
If either side had the backbone to do what they are supposed to do - safeguard the Constitution, safeguard the Eucharist, we wouldn't have these problems. If American bishops had a tradition of sticking to the constant teaching of the Church and always insisting that the Catholic Faith is what informs Constitutional principles, not vice versa, we would not have this problem.
As it is, because American bishops have throughout the history of this country, almost NEVER taught the fullness of the Faith, the high holy of secular America and the High Holy of the Catholic Faith are now both up for grabs. And both discussions revolve around a single issue: the proper place of the Bridegroom in the Wedding Feast.
"Marriage should be reserved to relationships between a man and a woman. Only these pairings can produce children. But I do not believe an amendment to the Constitution of the United States is the appropriate answer at this time." – Sen. Kent Conrad, D, N.D.
"I have not gotten to the stage where I'm comfortable in denying the Eucharist," - Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C.
"Changing the Constitution of the United States of America is a very serious business and should only be used as a last resort." – Sen. Max Baucus, D, Mont.
"I have a deep reverence for our Constitution, and believe it should be amended only when absolutely necessary." – Sen. John Edwards, D, N.C.
"In the nature of the church, the imposition of sanctions is always the final response, not the first response, nor the second nor maybe even the 10th," Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, Belleville, USCCB president
"Our Constitution has traditionally been used to expand rights, not to restrict rights, and I do not support amending it." – Senator Carl Levin, D, Mich.
"I believe that 'marriage' should be reserved to a woman and a man, based on the long tradition and religious context of the institution. But I see no need for a constitutional amendment." – Sen. Bob Graham, D, Fla.
“I’m slightly mystified why this is all coming up now. We’ve had pro-choice Catholic politicians going to Communion since Roe v. Wade,” - Cardinal Mahony, Los Angeles
"Marriage between a man and a woman is an honored social and sacred institution that dates back thousands of years in civilization. It is for this reason that I am opposed to same sex marriages. However, I do not support amending the U.S. Constitution to ban same sex marriage at this time." – Sen. Chuck Hagel, R, Neb.
"Though I oppose gay marriage, I believe a constitutional amendment is neither appropriate nor necessary." – Harry Reid, D, Nev.
“The prophet Isaiah has that wonderful line about peace-making – turning swords into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks… I fear that we are reversing the situation, and taking God’s great gift to our Church and using it as a weapon of divisiveness and destruction... I strongly oppose using Eucharist as a weapon.” - Bishop Skylstad, Spokane
Opposing viewpoints
“Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears; let the weak man say, ‘I am a warrior!’ ” – Joel 3:10
“[When] the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist [the minister giving Communion] must refuse to distribute it… This decision properly speaking is not a sanction or a penalty. Nor is the minister of Holy Communion passing judgment on the person's subjective guilt, but rather (he) is reacting to the person's public unworthiness to receive Holy Communion due to an objective situation of sin." – Cardinal Ratzinger, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
"When politicians agree with the church's position on a given issue, they say that the church is prophetic and should be listened to, but if the church's position doesn't coincide with theirs, they scream separation of church and state." -Archbishop O'Malley, Boston
Interesting facts
135 of 154 bishops polled felt Eucharist should not be denied to anyone, or if denied, only as a last resort. Only five out of 178 Latin-rite Roman Catholic dioceses in the US have indicated that they will deny prochoice Catholic politicians the Eucharist (Camden, NJ; Colorado Springs, CO; LaCrosse, WI; Lincoln, NE; and St. Louis, MO). These dioceses are following the directives of four bishops: Bishops Bruskewitz, Burke, Galante, and Sheridan. Just 17 bishops have encouraged Catholic policy makers to abstain from communion because of their prochoice position.
- Catholics For a Free Choice poll of all American Latin-rite bishops.
Bishops are consecrated to defend the Eucharist.
Congressmen are sworn to defend the Constitution.
The Constitution is to US politics what the Eucharist is to Catholics.
Thirty-eight Congressmen complain to the USCCB about the possibility of being denied Eucharist. The USCCB complains to the Congress about its failure to add DOMA to the Constitution.
Some say that we can't withhold Eucharist if only because the bishops have not properly instructed the faithful on life issues. Indeed. If that is true, then the bishops really can't expect to win on DOMA, can they, since they haven't properly instructed the faithful on life issues, specifically contraception and its links to homosexuality.
If either side had the backbone to do what they are supposed to do - safeguard the Constitution, safeguard the Eucharist, we wouldn't have these problems. If American bishops had a tradition of sticking to the constant teaching of the Church and always insisting that the Catholic Faith is what informs Constitutional principles, not vice versa, we would not have this problem.
As it is, because American bishops have throughout the history of this country, almost NEVER taught the fullness of the Faith, the high holy of secular America and the High Holy of the Catholic Faith are now both up for grabs. And both discussions revolve around a single issue: the proper place of the Bridegroom in the Wedding Feast.
Thursday, July 15, 2004
Lenin, Hitler and Bush
Adolf Hitler has become a major campaigner in this election. The Republicans are running ads that visually equate their opponents with Hitler, while the Democrats are expressly making comparisons between Bush and the little mustachioed man from Austria. This is not particularly noteworthy in certain respects. After all, the two parties began calling each other these kinds of names during the Cold War: Democrats, as everyone knows, are socialists and Republicans are brown-shirts. American politics is built on this kind of name-calling. Look at any of the presidential campaigns run during the last century and you will find virtually all of them involved name-calling and mud-slinging.
But the charges in this election set up a certain level of resonance. It is said that history repeats itself. It doesn’t, of course. It’s just that God keeps giving us the same chances, and we have only discovered a limited number of ways to mess things up. That having been said, let’s examine a few of the similarities between this historical situation and others.
Lenin
Few people realize that Russia’s first free election was held at Lenin’s insistence. World War I had created too many problems for Russia, both militarily and politically: the Czar abdicated his throne on March 1, 1917. In November, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power and held elections for the Constituent Assembly. They thought they would win (which is why they held the elections). Instead, they received only 24% of the vote, as opposed to the Socialist Revolutionaries 58%. Saddened by the loss, Lenin was, however, quick to mend the results. He dissolved the lawfully elected assembly, seized power and outlawed all the other parties. The Greek Orthodox Church, which was headed by the Czar, stayed out of the affair in all essentials. There would not be another free election in Russia until 1991.
World War I had caused the crisis: the Bolsheviks – a minority party - grabbed the chance. The Bolsheviks were atheists.
Hitler
In contrast, at the beginning of the 1930’s, Germany had essentially three major parties: the national socialists (Nazis), the international socialists (Communists) and the Zentrum (Catholics). The Nazis responded to the Zentrum’s strongly anti-Nazi campaign by furiously denying religion had any role in politics. Nazis advocated a wall of separation between church and state. National socialism was not anti-Catholic, rather, it was opposed to political Catholics. It had no quarrel with sensible Catholics who kept religion and politics separate.
No clear winner emerged from the November 1932 elections for chancellor. Instead, an appeal had to be made to President Hindenburg to confirm Hitler in the position, given that his party had won the most votes. After some vacillation (Hindenburg didn’t like or trust Hitler), Hindenburg was convinced and Hitler was confirmed. A scant month after Hitler was confirmed in his position, the Reichstag was burned down by an arsonist. Though the national socialists did not start the fire, it gave them the excuse to declare martial law, rid the country of political enemies and secure their hold on power.
The fire caused the crisis: the Nazis – a minority party - grabbed the chance. The Nazis espoused the ancient Norse gods of the country folk. They were pagans.
Bush
In the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, two political parties comprise three political movements: the atheistic anarchists (Democrats), the atheistic businessmen (Rockefeller Republicans) and the Christians (the rest of the Republicans). The Democrats argue strongly that church and state must be separate. The Rockefeller Republicans actively attempt to co-opt and defuse the power of the Christian Republicans.
No clear winner emerged from the 2000 elections for president. Instead, an appeal had to be made to the US Supreme Court to confirm the adamantly Christian George Bush in the position, given that he won the most electoral votes. After some vacillation (the media didn’t like or trust Bush), the Supreme Court was convinced and confirmed him. Nine months after Bush is sworn into office, the World Trade Center is blown up. Though the Republicans had nothing to do with it, the event permits the passage of the Patriot Act. Bush does not declare martial law, rid the country of political enemies, or use the event to secure his hold on power.
Comparison and Contrast
The Bolsheviks’ main claim to fame was their attack on the bourgeoisie – the destruction of Russia’s very small middle class. They were economic parasites who fed off the poor peasants, you see.
The Nazis’ main claim to fame was their attack on the Jews – a very small religious denomination in Germany. They were international parasites who fed off the German people, you see.
The Democrats’ and Rockefeller Republicans’ main claim to fame is their attack on unborn children – very small persons in the womb. They are parasites who feed on their mothers, sapping away economic earning potential, you see.
The Bolsheviks differed from the Socialist Revolutionaries primarily on matters of how best to implement socialism: whether through education of the workers or education of the peasants.
The primary difference between the national socialists (Nazis) and the international socialists (communists), were in their respective emphases on the importance of the nation. Because Germany had just become a nation in 1871, national socialists played strongly on the harp-strings of patriotism. They were unwilling to surrender the nationhood that Germany had fought centuries to attain. Communists, on the other hand, cared not a fig for nationalism.
Today, the difference between Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans is largely a matter of nationalism and business. Several Democrats, for instance, have perpetuated the international socialist stereotype attached to their name by requesting UN observers to watch over US elections. Meanwhile, Rockefeller Republicans are content as long as national and business interests are maintained.
It is a remark oft-made and worth repeating that the difference between Republicans and Democrats, like the difference between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks or Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries or Hitler and Stalin, is relatively insignificant.
Recent history has shown us what happens when an atheist or a pagan takes charge of a country. Today, we have a Christian in charge. Barely.
Recent history has also shown what happens when Christians avoid politics or allow their opponents to define their Christian sensibilities out of politics.
The wall between Church and state is killing millions today, as it has killed millions before. We can build all the walls we want, but the problem isn't Church or state, it is us. People get killed because sinners like us kill them. We can either justify the killing on the grounds that Church and state are one or on the grounds that Church and state are separate. As history demonstrates, it is a lot easier to justify the killing when Church and state are separate.
This situation is exactly analogous to the problem of sex abuse from priests versus sex abuse from secular public school teachers that I pointed to just a few days ago. Sex abuse is going to happen. We are sinners. Why would we think we can stomp out a particular sin through the laws of men? But religious men commit this sin a lot less often than secular men do.
Religion elevates.
Separation from religion destroys.
Mr. President, tear down this wall.
But the charges in this election set up a certain level of resonance. It is said that history repeats itself. It doesn’t, of course. It’s just that God keeps giving us the same chances, and we have only discovered a limited number of ways to mess things up. That having been said, let’s examine a few of the similarities between this historical situation and others.
Lenin
Few people realize that Russia’s first free election was held at Lenin’s insistence. World War I had created too many problems for Russia, both militarily and politically: the Czar abdicated his throne on March 1, 1917. In November, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power and held elections for the Constituent Assembly. They thought they would win (which is why they held the elections). Instead, they received only 24% of the vote, as opposed to the Socialist Revolutionaries 58%. Saddened by the loss, Lenin was, however, quick to mend the results. He dissolved the lawfully elected assembly, seized power and outlawed all the other parties. The Greek Orthodox Church, which was headed by the Czar, stayed out of the affair in all essentials. There would not be another free election in Russia until 1991.
World War I had caused the crisis: the Bolsheviks – a minority party - grabbed the chance. The Bolsheviks were atheists.
Hitler
In contrast, at the beginning of the 1930’s, Germany had essentially three major parties: the national socialists (Nazis), the international socialists (Communists) and the Zentrum (Catholics). The Nazis responded to the Zentrum’s strongly anti-Nazi campaign by furiously denying religion had any role in politics. Nazis advocated a wall of separation between church and state. National socialism was not anti-Catholic, rather, it was opposed to political Catholics. It had no quarrel with sensible Catholics who kept religion and politics separate.
No clear winner emerged from the November 1932 elections for chancellor. Instead, an appeal had to be made to President Hindenburg to confirm Hitler in the position, given that his party had won the most votes. After some vacillation (Hindenburg didn’t like or trust Hitler), Hindenburg was convinced and Hitler was confirmed. A scant month after Hitler was confirmed in his position, the Reichstag was burned down by an arsonist. Though the national socialists did not start the fire, it gave them the excuse to declare martial law, rid the country of political enemies and secure their hold on power.
The fire caused the crisis: the Nazis – a minority party - grabbed the chance. The Nazis espoused the ancient Norse gods of the country folk. They were pagans.
Bush
In the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, two political parties comprise three political movements: the atheistic anarchists (Democrats), the atheistic businessmen (Rockefeller Republicans) and the Christians (the rest of the Republicans). The Democrats argue strongly that church and state must be separate. The Rockefeller Republicans actively attempt to co-opt and defuse the power of the Christian Republicans.
No clear winner emerged from the 2000 elections for president. Instead, an appeal had to be made to the US Supreme Court to confirm the adamantly Christian George Bush in the position, given that he won the most electoral votes. After some vacillation (the media didn’t like or trust Bush), the Supreme Court was convinced and confirmed him. Nine months after Bush is sworn into office, the World Trade Center is blown up. Though the Republicans had nothing to do with it, the event permits the passage of the Patriot Act. Bush does not declare martial law, rid the country of political enemies, or use the event to secure his hold on power.
Comparison and Contrast
The Bolsheviks’ main claim to fame was their attack on the bourgeoisie – the destruction of Russia’s very small middle class. They were economic parasites who fed off the poor peasants, you see.
The Nazis’ main claim to fame was their attack on the Jews – a very small religious denomination in Germany. They were international parasites who fed off the German people, you see.
The Democrats’ and Rockefeller Republicans’ main claim to fame is their attack on unborn children – very small persons in the womb. They are parasites who feed on their mothers, sapping away economic earning potential, you see.
The Bolsheviks differed from the Socialist Revolutionaries primarily on matters of how best to implement socialism: whether through education of the workers or education of the peasants.
The primary difference between the national socialists (Nazis) and the international socialists (communists), were in their respective emphases on the importance of the nation. Because Germany had just become a nation in 1871, national socialists played strongly on the harp-strings of patriotism. They were unwilling to surrender the nationhood that Germany had fought centuries to attain. Communists, on the other hand, cared not a fig for nationalism.
Today, the difference between Democrats and Rockefeller Republicans is largely a matter of nationalism and business. Several Democrats, for instance, have perpetuated the international socialist stereotype attached to their name by requesting UN observers to watch over US elections. Meanwhile, Rockefeller Republicans are content as long as national and business interests are maintained.
It is a remark oft-made and worth repeating that the difference between Republicans and Democrats, like the difference between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks or Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries or Hitler and Stalin, is relatively insignificant.
Recent history has shown us what happens when an atheist or a pagan takes charge of a country. Today, we have a Christian in charge. Barely.
Recent history has also shown what happens when Christians avoid politics or allow their opponents to define their Christian sensibilities out of politics.
The wall between Church and state is killing millions today, as it has killed millions before. We can build all the walls we want, but the problem isn't Church or state, it is us. People get killed because sinners like us kill them. We can either justify the killing on the grounds that Church and state are one or on the grounds that Church and state are separate. As history demonstrates, it is a lot easier to justify the killing when Church and state are separate.
This situation is exactly analogous to the problem of sex abuse from priests versus sex abuse from secular public school teachers that I pointed to just a few days ago. Sex abuse is going to happen. We are sinners. Why would we think we can stomp out a particular sin through the laws of men? But religious men commit this sin a lot less often than secular men do.
Religion elevates.
Separation from religion destroys.
Mr. President, tear down this wall.
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
DOMA is dead
I predicted the death of the Defense of Marriage amendment a few weeks back.
Part one has come true: Congress has killed it.
Clearly there wasn't enough grass-roots support to light any fires under Congressional toes, even though this was an election year!
That leaves the state initiatives, which is undoubtedly the back-up plan.
Let's see if I bat 1.000
Part one has come true: Congress has killed it.
Clearly there wasn't enough grass-roots support to light any fires under Congressional toes, even though this was an election year!
That leaves the state initiatives, which is undoubtedly the back-up plan.
Let's see if I bat 1.000
Monday, July 12, 2004
Why the Pagans are Correct
Talk about using a sledgehammer to kill a fly. Thirteen different books respond to the Da Vinci Code, three of them authored by Catholics. Certainly that is sufficient to refute Dan Brown, right? Unfortunately, while all of us have easily refuted Dan Brown’s erroneous statements, all of us – including, I am sad to say, myself – missed the point. Good heavens! This is all rather embarrassing.
I didn’t realize how badly off the mark we all were until I read Angels and Demons some weeks after my own refutation of The Da Vinci Code released. As you may know, Code is not Mr. Brown’s first book. He has written three earlier novels, Digital Fortress, Deception Point and Angels and Demons, plus a book of poetry, Matter. These all sold well enough, but none of them had sales approaching that of Code. All of them began to sell after Code took off, of course, riding the Code-tails of success, as it were. That is why I began reading them.
“What is sauce for the goose is certainly sauce for the gander,” thought I to myself thought I, “Given how well my counter-Code book is selling, perhaps there is something that needs refuting in Dan’s earlier work.” So, I began reading those earlier works with an eye towards writing refutations of those as well. Instead, I was brought up short.
Like everyone else, I had assumed that the anti-Christian, particularly the anti-Catholic, tone of Code is its main selling point. That isn’t true. It can’t be. After all, Angels and Demons is at least as anti-Catholic as Code (more so in some ways), but its sales were nowhere near the same, even though it came out in June 2001, just months before the sex abuse scandal began to break. And, lest you begin to protest, the books are nearly identical.
The two novels share a main character (Robert Langdon) and a conspiracy theory plot, have the same fast-paced style and pacing, draw similarly one-dimensional characterizations, even mimic dialogue. Indeed, one could lift entire chunks of dialogue from one book and drop them into the other without affecting the plot line of either story. In nearly every respect, the two books are interchangeable. But Code sold like hotcakes while Angels and Demons was barely a blip on the radar screen by comparison. Indeed, even at its best, Angels and Demons has never approached Code’s sales. Why? The difference in their stories lies only in this: Code spends a fair bit of time talking about sex, Angels and Demons does not.
Now, this statement must be qualified. Angels and Demons has quite a bit of sex in it, as does most of Dan Brown’s work. But it is not the sex itself, rather it is Dan Brown’s treatment of the sex that is dramatically different. Code is not successful because of its decadence. Quite the reverse. Code is successful because it is theologically accurate and is, therefore, counter-cultural. Let me explain.
In Angels and Demons we see various beautiful, half-dressed women under threat of physical violation at various points in the novel. The most beautiful of the bevy is saved only at the last minute by the dashing hero, Robert Langdon. Having rescued her, Langdon then physically violates her (with her consent, of course) at the end of the book and completes the male fantasy. It is a typical bodice-ripper plot-line and it sold as well as most such books do: moderately so, but nothing to write home about.
Now, turn to The Da Vinci Code. The number of beautiful women in the book is reduced to one. Langdon, of course, beds her in the novel’s final chapters, but he does so only after having protested for the whole of the book – and despite several instances of strong male opposition - that sex is sacred, sex is holy and women should be treated like goddesses. Now, why should that make the difference in sales? Because 70% to 80% of book-buyers in the United States are women and women are tired of the male version of sex: sex as fast food and women as inflatable dolls.
In short, The Da Vinci Code phenomenon actually proves what the Holy Father has been saying for the last thirty years. Dan Brown is, in his own way, preaching the Theology of the Body and he’s getting better response than any Catholic has yet received.
Surprised? Study the differences. Angels and Demons spends most of its time asserting that Catholics find faith and reason diametrically opposed. There are no flashback sequences, the whole plot takes place entirely in Rome. Its watchword is “Galileo’s persecution.” It’s anti-Catholic group is the Illuminati. It’s recurring reference is to the ambigram, a specific way of encoding a written word so that it appears to be right-side up no matter which way you look at it.
The Da Vinci Code, in contrast, spends most of its time extolling pagan goddess worship and the sacredness of sex. It’s watchword is Heiros Gamos: “the once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos – the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole.” Its anti-Catholic group is pagan goddess worshippers. Its recurring reference is to “the chalice and the blade.” But, there’s more. It has flashback sequences that center on the relationship between a little girl and her grandfather (her parents having been killed in a car crash). The main mystery of the novel is not the murder that opens the novel, rather, it concerns the true identity of the little girl and why she ran away from her beloved grandfather. The answer? She is descended from Jesus and Mary Magdelene. She ran away because she saw her grandfather having sacred ritual sex in front of an admiring crowd of worshippers.
Dan Brown “debunks” Christ’s divinity only as a means to an end. The pivotal monologue sequence that lies out the novel’s thesis begins with the idea that Jesus is not divine and Brown really spends very little time on this assertion. It is just one stone in the foundation that builds towards an entirely different argument: Mary Magdelene’s sexual union with Christ is an encounter with the divine. God had sex.
That is the heart of the novel. Every one of us silly Christians who focused on debunking the novel focused our energy on debunking the fact that Dan Brown denies Jesus’ divinity. As a result, all of us, whether Catholic Christian or simply Christian, concentrates on his error-filled history.
But none of the historical “facts” he brings forward are the issue. Sex is the issue. Sex is holy. Dan Brown proves that sex is holy by asserting that Jesus had sex. Brown wants to demonstrate the divinity of sex. He knows most readers will walk away from the novel believing that Christ is God, no matter what foolish things he says in the novel. He wants to use our attachment to Christ’s divinity in order to connect Christ’s divinity to sex. If God had sex, then it must be divine.
This is why all of us debunkers have missed the mark. By hammering home Christ’s divinity, we merely hammer home Dan Brown’s argument. Our refutations of the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus will always be an argument from silence, since history doesn’t speak of it at all. Thus, our arguments will always allow people to believe that He really did have sex with “that woman.”
Dan Brown is a product of American culture, and America is Protestant. Protestantism is, in turn, the product of two ideas: (1) faith is opposed to and superior to reason and (2) the body is totally corrupt. The first concept lay at the heart of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Rousseau and the rest fought the idea that faith is superior to reason with such vigor that they embraced exactly the opposite conclusion. While they agreed on the opposition of faith and reason, they insisted that reason is superior to faith. Thus, members of today’s society, whether non-Catholic Christian, agnostic or atheist all oppose Catholic teaching by agreeing that faith is opposed to reason. Angels and Demons plays on that sentiment.
The culture is agreed on the terms of the fight, even if both sides in the fight, Protestant and atheist, are completely wrong. Because Catholic theology is on the fringe of American culture, Catholics can shout until we are blue in the face that both faith and reason are necessary. No one will listen, because no one else believes it. Angels and Demons plays off this fact by putting Protestant theology about the opposition between faith and reason into the mouths of Catholic characters. Let the Catholics protest. Both sides agree they are disingenuous.
Dan Brown uses the perceived insincerity of Catholic Faith to drive Code. Since Christians believe the flesh is corrupt, they believe sex is dirty. Sex, after all, produces more bodies, more evil flesh. This is the Gnostic element that all of us Code debunkers latched onto. Now, Gnosticism is indeed the heresy at the root of this, but we lost the fight because we didn’t scout the terrain sufficiently.
You see, American society is Gnostic, but it is Gnostic in a fundamentally new way. The earliest Gnostics and their spiritual descendants, the Protestants, saw the body as a prison, an impediment to the light of divinity. Today’s Gnostics view the body as a prison only if it is not fully under the control of the mind, specifically under the control of the will.
For the new Gnostics, the body can be a means to attain divine life but only if we can attain total control over it. Now, God is the source of life and the neo-Gnostics understand this, so total control over procreation lies at the heart of neo-Gnosticism. Having sex when, where and how we want, with exactly the consequences we want: that is logically central. God controls life, therefore if we control life, control it right down to the finest detail, we must be God. The body is the instrument by which we demonstrate total control to ourselves and those around us.
This understanding explains everything we see in society: the new eugenics, in vitro fertilization, genetic manipulation, abortion, euthanasia. In the 1800’s, industry drove our understanding of what it meant to be God. If we controlled industrial output, we could transform the earth into a garden paradise. Today, the new advances in biology have transformed the goal: now we mean to control our bodies the way we formerly meant to control the environment.
Dan Brown’s novel constantly contrasts “outdated” Christian understanding of male-female relations and the problems it generates with neo-Gnostic understanding of male-female relations and how to attain divinity. That is the whole focus his attack on Opus Dei. He means to show that orthodox Christianity, especially orthodox Catholicism, distorts male-female relations and thereby distorts man’s understanding of himself.
Or take my most significant blunder: the comment by Fache, the French murder investigator on the sex abuse scandal. Very early in the novel, he makes a single reference to the scandal. Out of the thirteen Code refutations, mine was the only one to address the logical inconsistencies the remark created. However, while I dealt adequately with the bare facts surrounding the comment, I completely missed the point. I saw it simply as an essentially opportunistic attack on Catholicism that was irrelevant to the plot.
It is an attack on Catholicism, but it is not at all opportunistic. That single remark is critically relevant to the storyline. It is not just an attack on Catholicism, it is the opening salvo of his entire argument: Christians are wrong about sex. Sadly, he is perfectly correct. Most Christians are wrong about sex.
Atheists see the Protestant argument – sex is dirty, the body is corrupt – and they dismiss it as erroneous. They are right to do so. The flesh is good, there is nothing sinful about the properly ordered appetites of the body, including the desire for sexual union between persons of the opposite sex. In that respect, atheistic reason has reached an understanding of God’s design that is much more accurate than Protestant theology.
Unfortunately for atheists, their solution is not compelling. You see, men and women both get distorted understandings of the world, but when we do, we do so in different ways. The way a man distorts the world is this: he embraces just the facts of a situation and fails to understand the human element, the element of the sacred and the mysterious. This is why atheism tends to be a male phenomenon.
When we encounter a society that equates sex with fast food, that treats women as objects, we have stumbled upon an essentially atheistic (male) error. Women might embrace this way of thinking, of course, but men are much more likely to. Women, by and large, understand that atheism’s response to sex cannot be true. Because women embrace the relational, they know instinctively that sex is holy, that women are to be treated as goddesses for they are made in the image and likeness of God.
Dan Brown may have execrable theology in most respects, but he recognizes this much. This is why Code is a record-breaking best-seller. In proclaiming the sacredness of sexual union he answers a cultural need which Protestant theology created and Hugh Hefner’s atheism cannot answer. From Protestant preachers pounding the pulpit to gay priests cruising for teens, our culture has seen every manifestation of deformed Christian sexual theology there is to see. Likewise, Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt provide the (male) atheistic response to Christian heresies like “sex is dirty,” but this response also fails to answer.
So, Dan Brown serves up the non-Christian female answer: pagan goddess worship. The irony is that he inadvertently latches onto the male version of pagan goddess worship. That is, he emphasizes “the chalice and the blade,” Wiccan symbols developed by the civil servant and adulterer Gerald Gardner in the late 1930’s. Gardner (and Brown) said the chalice represented the woman’s womb, and the blade the man’s member. In Wiccan ritual, the blade is plunged into the cup (or, alternatively, ritual sex is had on the altar). How many women really like to think of their partner’s organ as a razor-sharp blade? Is it “goddess-friendly” to plunge symbolic knives between a woman’s legs and into her womb?
Reason says no, but reason is not at work here. The central message overrides the symbols. He insists sex is holy, sacred and women are goddesses. Thus, even though he ends both Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress with fornication and the possibility of marriage, he can end Code with the promise of fornication and no marriage at all. Langdon has but to kneel before the bones of the quasi-goddess, Mary Magdelene, and the fornication becomes holy.
To a population of women who have been chemically and surgically sterilized, who are bombarded with “women’s magazines” explaining how to be better sex toys for the pleasure of any passing man, for women who are relentlessly used and abused by the culture, Dan Brown is fresh air. It does not matter what happened in Nicaea, in the Inquisition, in the sex scandal. Brown got this much right: sex is holy. The rest must be fairly close to right as well. In denying the niggling little facts of history and refusing to address the big picture, the Catholics are just being disingenuous again.
There are many ironies in his novel, but the greatest is this: when it comes to announcing to the world that sex is holy, Dan Brown stands together with Pope John Paul II and the whole college of bishops throughout the history of Christendom. Mr. Brown gets everything else wrong, but this much he gets right.
And, in the final analysis, it is enough. Despite the enormous flaws of his novel Dan Brown is, in his own way, proclaiming the Theology of the Body, if only because he tells everyone that sex is, indeed, holy, that there is such a thing as Hieros Gamos – sacred, sacramental marriage. He helps our culture accept this by placing this message in the context of non-Christian “feminine” religion. He knows that if he placed it in a Christian context, or heaven-forbid, a Catholic context, no one would ever believe it.
We might not like the facts, but there they are. Dan Brown is getting a core aspect of papal theology into everyone’s lap, and he’s doing it primarily by denying that it is Christian. He has prepared the way to talk about the Theology of the Body. Now it’s our turn to follow up.
I didn’t realize how badly off the mark we all were until I read Angels and Demons some weeks after my own refutation of The Da Vinci Code released. As you may know, Code is not Mr. Brown’s first book. He has written three earlier novels, Digital Fortress, Deception Point and Angels and Demons, plus a book of poetry, Matter. These all sold well enough, but none of them had sales approaching that of Code. All of them began to sell after Code took off, of course, riding the Code-tails of success, as it were. That is why I began reading them.
“What is sauce for the goose is certainly sauce for the gander,” thought I to myself thought I, “Given how well my counter-Code book is selling, perhaps there is something that needs refuting in Dan’s earlier work.” So, I began reading those earlier works with an eye towards writing refutations of those as well. Instead, I was brought up short.
Like everyone else, I had assumed that the anti-Christian, particularly the anti-Catholic, tone of Code is its main selling point. That isn’t true. It can’t be. After all, Angels and Demons is at least as anti-Catholic as Code (more so in some ways), but its sales were nowhere near the same, even though it came out in June 2001, just months before the sex abuse scandal began to break. And, lest you begin to protest, the books are nearly identical.
The two novels share a main character (Robert Langdon) and a conspiracy theory plot, have the same fast-paced style and pacing, draw similarly one-dimensional characterizations, even mimic dialogue. Indeed, one could lift entire chunks of dialogue from one book and drop them into the other without affecting the plot line of either story. In nearly every respect, the two books are interchangeable. But Code sold like hotcakes while Angels and Demons was barely a blip on the radar screen by comparison. Indeed, even at its best, Angels and Demons has never approached Code’s sales. Why? The difference in their stories lies only in this: Code spends a fair bit of time talking about sex, Angels and Demons does not.
Now, this statement must be qualified. Angels and Demons has quite a bit of sex in it, as does most of Dan Brown’s work. But it is not the sex itself, rather it is Dan Brown’s treatment of the sex that is dramatically different. Code is not successful because of its decadence. Quite the reverse. Code is successful because it is theologically accurate and is, therefore, counter-cultural. Let me explain.
In Angels and Demons we see various beautiful, half-dressed women under threat of physical violation at various points in the novel. The most beautiful of the bevy is saved only at the last minute by the dashing hero, Robert Langdon. Having rescued her, Langdon then physically violates her (with her consent, of course) at the end of the book and completes the male fantasy. It is a typical bodice-ripper plot-line and it sold as well as most such books do: moderately so, but nothing to write home about.
Now, turn to The Da Vinci Code. The number of beautiful women in the book is reduced to one. Langdon, of course, beds her in the novel’s final chapters, but he does so only after having protested for the whole of the book – and despite several instances of strong male opposition - that sex is sacred, sex is holy and women should be treated like goddesses. Now, why should that make the difference in sales? Because 70% to 80% of book-buyers in the United States are women and women are tired of the male version of sex: sex as fast food and women as inflatable dolls.
In short, The Da Vinci Code phenomenon actually proves what the Holy Father has been saying for the last thirty years. Dan Brown is, in his own way, preaching the Theology of the Body and he’s getting better response than any Catholic has yet received.
Surprised? Study the differences. Angels and Demons spends most of its time asserting that Catholics find faith and reason diametrically opposed. There are no flashback sequences, the whole plot takes place entirely in Rome. Its watchword is “Galileo’s persecution.” It’s anti-Catholic group is the Illuminati. It’s recurring reference is to the ambigram, a specific way of encoding a written word so that it appears to be right-side up no matter which way you look at it.
The Da Vinci Code, in contrast, spends most of its time extolling pagan goddess worship and the sacredness of sex. It’s watchword is Heiros Gamos: “the once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos – the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole.” Its anti-Catholic group is pagan goddess worshippers. Its recurring reference is to “the chalice and the blade.” But, there’s more. It has flashback sequences that center on the relationship between a little girl and her grandfather (her parents having been killed in a car crash). The main mystery of the novel is not the murder that opens the novel, rather, it concerns the true identity of the little girl and why she ran away from her beloved grandfather. The answer? She is descended from Jesus and Mary Magdelene. She ran away because she saw her grandfather having sacred ritual sex in front of an admiring crowd of worshippers.
Dan Brown “debunks” Christ’s divinity only as a means to an end. The pivotal monologue sequence that lies out the novel’s thesis begins with the idea that Jesus is not divine and Brown really spends very little time on this assertion. It is just one stone in the foundation that builds towards an entirely different argument: Mary Magdelene’s sexual union with Christ is an encounter with the divine. God had sex.
That is the heart of the novel. Every one of us silly Christians who focused on debunking the novel focused our energy on debunking the fact that Dan Brown denies Jesus’ divinity. As a result, all of us, whether Catholic Christian or simply Christian, concentrates on his error-filled history.
But none of the historical “facts” he brings forward are the issue. Sex is the issue. Sex is holy. Dan Brown proves that sex is holy by asserting that Jesus had sex. Brown wants to demonstrate the divinity of sex. He knows most readers will walk away from the novel believing that Christ is God, no matter what foolish things he says in the novel. He wants to use our attachment to Christ’s divinity in order to connect Christ’s divinity to sex. If God had sex, then it must be divine.
This is why all of us debunkers have missed the mark. By hammering home Christ’s divinity, we merely hammer home Dan Brown’s argument. Our refutations of the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus will always be an argument from silence, since history doesn’t speak of it at all. Thus, our arguments will always allow people to believe that He really did have sex with “that woman.”
Dan Brown is a product of American culture, and America is Protestant. Protestantism is, in turn, the product of two ideas: (1) faith is opposed to and superior to reason and (2) the body is totally corrupt. The first concept lay at the heart of the Enlightenment. Voltaire, Rousseau and the rest fought the idea that faith is superior to reason with such vigor that they embraced exactly the opposite conclusion. While they agreed on the opposition of faith and reason, they insisted that reason is superior to faith. Thus, members of today’s society, whether non-Catholic Christian, agnostic or atheist all oppose Catholic teaching by agreeing that faith is opposed to reason. Angels and Demons plays on that sentiment.
The culture is agreed on the terms of the fight, even if both sides in the fight, Protestant and atheist, are completely wrong. Because Catholic theology is on the fringe of American culture, Catholics can shout until we are blue in the face that both faith and reason are necessary. No one will listen, because no one else believes it. Angels and Demons plays off this fact by putting Protestant theology about the opposition between faith and reason into the mouths of Catholic characters. Let the Catholics protest. Both sides agree they are disingenuous.
Dan Brown uses the perceived insincerity of Catholic Faith to drive Code. Since Christians believe the flesh is corrupt, they believe sex is dirty. Sex, after all, produces more bodies, more evil flesh. This is the Gnostic element that all of us Code debunkers latched onto. Now, Gnosticism is indeed the heresy at the root of this, but we lost the fight because we didn’t scout the terrain sufficiently.
You see, American society is Gnostic, but it is Gnostic in a fundamentally new way. The earliest Gnostics and their spiritual descendants, the Protestants, saw the body as a prison, an impediment to the light of divinity. Today’s Gnostics view the body as a prison only if it is not fully under the control of the mind, specifically under the control of the will.
For the new Gnostics, the body can be a means to attain divine life but only if we can attain total control over it. Now, God is the source of life and the neo-Gnostics understand this, so total control over procreation lies at the heart of neo-Gnosticism. Having sex when, where and how we want, with exactly the consequences we want: that is logically central. God controls life, therefore if we control life, control it right down to the finest detail, we must be God. The body is the instrument by which we demonstrate total control to ourselves and those around us.
This understanding explains everything we see in society: the new eugenics, in vitro fertilization, genetic manipulation, abortion, euthanasia. In the 1800’s, industry drove our understanding of what it meant to be God. If we controlled industrial output, we could transform the earth into a garden paradise. Today, the new advances in biology have transformed the goal: now we mean to control our bodies the way we formerly meant to control the environment.
Dan Brown’s novel constantly contrasts “outdated” Christian understanding of male-female relations and the problems it generates with neo-Gnostic understanding of male-female relations and how to attain divinity. That is the whole focus his attack on Opus Dei. He means to show that orthodox Christianity, especially orthodox Catholicism, distorts male-female relations and thereby distorts man’s understanding of himself.
Or take my most significant blunder: the comment by Fache, the French murder investigator on the sex abuse scandal. Very early in the novel, he makes a single reference to the scandal. Out of the thirteen Code refutations, mine was the only one to address the logical inconsistencies the remark created. However, while I dealt adequately with the bare facts surrounding the comment, I completely missed the point. I saw it simply as an essentially opportunistic attack on Catholicism that was irrelevant to the plot.
It is an attack on Catholicism, but it is not at all opportunistic. That single remark is critically relevant to the storyline. It is not just an attack on Catholicism, it is the opening salvo of his entire argument: Christians are wrong about sex. Sadly, he is perfectly correct. Most Christians are wrong about sex.
Atheists see the Protestant argument – sex is dirty, the body is corrupt – and they dismiss it as erroneous. They are right to do so. The flesh is good, there is nothing sinful about the properly ordered appetites of the body, including the desire for sexual union between persons of the opposite sex. In that respect, atheistic reason has reached an understanding of God’s design that is much more accurate than Protestant theology.
Unfortunately for atheists, their solution is not compelling. You see, men and women both get distorted understandings of the world, but when we do, we do so in different ways. The way a man distorts the world is this: he embraces just the facts of a situation and fails to understand the human element, the element of the sacred and the mysterious. This is why atheism tends to be a male phenomenon.
When we encounter a society that equates sex with fast food, that treats women as objects, we have stumbled upon an essentially atheistic (male) error. Women might embrace this way of thinking, of course, but men are much more likely to. Women, by and large, understand that atheism’s response to sex cannot be true. Because women embrace the relational, they know instinctively that sex is holy, that women are to be treated as goddesses for they are made in the image and likeness of God.
Dan Brown may have execrable theology in most respects, but he recognizes this much. This is why Code is a record-breaking best-seller. In proclaiming the sacredness of sexual union he answers a cultural need which Protestant theology created and Hugh Hefner’s atheism cannot answer. From Protestant preachers pounding the pulpit to gay priests cruising for teens, our culture has seen every manifestation of deformed Christian sexual theology there is to see. Likewise, Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt provide the (male) atheistic response to Christian heresies like “sex is dirty,” but this response also fails to answer.
So, Dan Brown serves up the non-Christian female answer: pagan goddess worship. The irony is that he inadvertently latches onto the male version of pagan goddess worship. That is, he emphasizes “the chalice and the blade,” Wiccan symbols developed by the civil servant and adulterer Gerald Gardner in the late 1930’s. Gardner (and Brown) said the chalice represented the woman’s womb, and the blade the man’s member. In Wiccan ritual, the blade is plunged into the cup (or, alternatively, ritual sex is had on the altar). How many women really like to think of their partner’s organ as a razor-sharp blade? Is it “goddess-friendly” to plunge symbolic knives between a woman’s legs and into her womb?
Reason says no, but reason is not at work here. The central message overrides the symbols. He insists sex is holy, sacred and women are goddesses. Thus, even though he ends both Angels and Demons and Digital Fortress with fornication and the possibility of marriage, he can end Code with the promise of fornication and no marriage at all. Langdon has but to kneel before the bones of the quasi-goddess, Mary Magdelene, and the fornication becomes holy.
To a population of women who have been chemically and surgically sterilized, who are bombarded with “women’s magazines” explaining how to be better sex toys for the pleasure of any passing man, for women who are relentlessly used and abused by the culture, Dan Brown is fresh air. It does not matter what happened in Nicaea, in the Inquisition, in the sex scandal. Brown got this much right: sex is holy. The rest must be fairly close to right as well. In denying the niggling little facts of history and refusing to address the big picture, the Catholics are just being disingenuous again.
There are many ironies in his novel, but the greatest is this: when it comes to announcing to the world that sex is holy, Dan Brown stands together with Pope John Paul II and the whole college of bishops throughout the history of Christendom. Mr. Brown gets everything else wrong, but this much he gets right.
And, in the final analysis, it is enough. Despite the enormous flaws of his novel Dan Brown is, in his own way, proclaiming the Theology of the Body, if only because he tells everyone that sex is, indeed, holy, that there is such a thing as Hieros Gamos – sacred, sacramental marriage. He helps our culture accept this by placing this message in the context of non-Christian “feminine” religion. He knows that if he placed it in a Christian context, or heaven-forbid, a Catholic context, no one would ever believe it.
We might not like the facts, but there they are. Dan Brown is getting a core aspect of papal theology into everyone’s lap, and he’s doing it primarily by denying that it is Christian. He has prepared the way to talk about the Theology of the Body. Now it’s our turn to follow up.
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