Howell is Back In

In an absolutely shocking development, the UIUC is offering Dr. Ken Howell his job back.

However, the university insists that the Diocese of Peoria is not to pay for the position - Howell's salary will come out of the UIUC faculty coffers from this point forward.

I am amazed.
I did not expect him to be teaching there again, nor did he.

Kudos to the Facebook support group and to all those involved in the negotiations, including Bishop Daniel Jenky and the Alliance Defense Fund, the Protestant legal group that was working with Dr. Howell to reverse UIUC's decision.

I am happy to see that this has come to a positive conclusion.

Now, some might still be upset with me about my earlier comments concerning Bishop Jenky's involvement, given the happy resolution of the case.

I stand by my opinion that the Newman Center's firing of Dr. Howell was far too hasty, and I stand by the opinion that it is highly unlikely Dr. Howell was fired from the Newman Center without the Bishop's knowledge and approval.

You may argue that this was merely a tactic to increase pressure on UIUC, that Bishop's heart was not really in it, and both those statements may well be true.

But, tactic or no, it didn't reflect well on the Bishop or on Newman Center.
The various strategies of the various parties involved have, however, come together so that Dr. Howell again has a position, fleeting as adjunct instruction is.

And that is certainly a good thing.

Captain Hook Goes Fishing

Was Andrew Breitbart set up to look like a racist? The evidence is building that this is EXACTLY what happened. Consider the timeline laid out by Noel Sheppard (Newsbusters) and others: 

1.  Breitbart receives word of the video several months ago, but sits on it because he can't verify the source. 
2.  Nancy Pelosi deliberately walks black Congressmen through a crowd of Tea Partiers trying to get them to say "Nigger." 
3.  As dozens of videos show, no one says the word, but several people, including Congressmen, accuse the Tea Partiers of having used that word anyway. When the video evidence comes forward, along with eye witnesses swearing that the word was never used, the Congressman back off their accusations, but the MSM continues to lay the claim as if it had been substantiated. 
4.  Breitbart, looking for some way to show the hypocrisy, remembers the video and contacts the source for the video. After receiving and viewing it, he decides there is enough there to do a compare-contrast. He throws up the video with no commentary. He does NOT call for anyone's resignation - in typical Breitbart fashion, he lets the video speak for itself. 
5.  The NAACP, which has the full video in its possession, is the first to condemn Sherrod. 
6.  The White House sends a henchman down to make sure she resigns.
7.  Sherrod resigns BEFORE ANYONE calls for her resignation (didn't SHE know what was on the video either?). 
8.  Fox and its commentators begin calling for a resignation, not knowing it has already happened.
9.  Only after Fox and commentators are on public record calling for the resignation, does the NAACP suddenly release the full video and instantly start piling on Fox and Breitbart for having destroyed a "good woman."
10.  Notice - it was literally only a few hours after everyone the liberals wanted dead had made a commitment that the NAACP released the video. They waited until the bait was taken, then they SET THE HOOK. 
11.   Sherrod, this post-racial "good woman" now claims that Breitbart's intent is to bring back slavery: in short, the classic liberal craptrap now has a hook. 

So, a few questions. Now, how is it that the White House that took weeks to get a "beer summit" together and months to actually NEVER get the nation's 20,000 oil skimmers to the Gulf, how is it that this same absolutely inept White House was able to act within HOURS to get Sherrod's resignation on its desk? 

 These people barely know what day it is, they let the Black Panthers walk for violation of voters rights DESPITE video evidence AND a conviction, but Sherrod they want hung? Square that circle for me, someone. 

Why hang Sherrod so swiftly when so many other blacks have been given a free pass? When Justice has been explicitly told never to prosecute a black person? When ACORN was given months of rope to try to unhang themselves after a whole SERIES of previous Breitbart videos? THIS is the White House that nailed Sherrod to the wall within an hour or so of a single five minute video hitting Breitbart's site? It boggles the imagination. 

The only time the White House has moved THIS fast was when it sent Russian spies back home to keep them from testifying to how many Democratic fundraisers and Congressmen they had suborned. Obama only moves fast on an issue when it suits him - not otherwise. And why is it that the NAACP couldn't find the video until AFTER Sherrod resigned? Why did they condemn a black person so quickly, so adamantly?

This is the same NAACP that has NEVER condemned Louis Farrakhan, but they want Sherrod on a rail with tar and feathers? C'MON! Why has no one in the MSM noticed the unusual competencies and failures here? OK, that's the easiest question to answer - they're all incompetent themselves. But, now that Journolist conspiracy has been exposed, along with nearly every prominent reporter in the media, someone needed to nail the conservative media equally hard, to take the Journolist media conspiracy out of the headlines. And they have. 

Sherrod is at least an unwitting victim, and at worst she's in on the scheme. But in any case, this was definitely a scheme and it has definitely worked. Journolist and the oil leak are off the table. Reagan was the Teflon President. Obama is Captain Hook.

The Single Life

I've had many people ask me if single life is considered a vocation.

This is all I've ever been able to find on it.
As you can see, according to the Magisterial documents, single life is NOT a vocation.
In fact, the Magisterial documents don't really talk about single life at all.
It's not even listed as a state in life.

Apparently, adult human life is always meant to be lived in some kind of community under some kind of vow.

Indeed, according to the documents, living without this community life is considered a poverty.

Catechism of the Catholic Church

1658 We must also remember the great number of single persons who, because of the particular circumstances in which they have to live - often not of their choosing - are especially close to Jesus' heart and therefore deserve the special affection and active solicitude of the Church, especially of pastors. Many remain without a human family often due to conditions of poverty. Some live their situation in the spirit of the Beatitudes, serving God and neighbor in exemplary fashion. The doors of homes, the "domestic churches," and of the great family which is the Church must be open to all of them. "No one is without a family in this world: the Church is a home and family for everyone, especially those who 'labor and are heavy laden.'"

2349 "People should cultivate [chastity] in the way that is suited to their state of life. Some profess virginity or consecrated celibacy which enables them to give themselves to God alone with an undivided heart in a remarkable manner. Others live in the way prescribed for all by the moral law, whether they are married or single." Married people are called to live conjugal chastity; others practice chastity in continence:

There are three forms of the virtue of chastity: the first is that of spouses, the second that of widows, and the third that of virgins. We do not praise any one of them to the exclusion of the others. . . . This is what makes for the richness of the discipline of the Church.

POST-SYNODAL APOSTOLIC EXHORTATION,
CHRISTIFIDELES LAICI
"ON THE VOCATION AND THE MISSION OF THE LAY FAITHFUL IN THE CHURCH AND IN THE WORLD"

The Various Vocations in the Lay State
56. ... Along the same line the Second Vatican Council states: "This lay spirituality should take its particular character from the circumstances of one's state in life (married and familylife, celibacy, widowhood), from one's state of health and from one's professional and social activity. All should not cease to develop earnestly the qualities and talents bestowed on them in accord with these conditions of life and should make use of the gifts which they have received from the Holy Spirit"(208)

I know this isn't fun to hear for a lot of people, and I'd be happy to hear that there are some references I've missed which flesh this out better, but this is all I've been able to find.

Cult of the Expert

You can always tell when someone encounters a popular rendition of the Theology of the Body for the first time. It's like watching someone smitten by a movie star, or joining a new and powerful cult movement: they burble about things which are, upon further contemplation, manifestly absurd.

As Scripture says, it tastes sweet in the mouth, but it is sour in the stomach.

The newest burble is occasioned by William May's recent article in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly.

Dr. Jeff Mirus, of CatholicCulture.org, after having read May's analysis, concludes,

In its femininity and masculinity, the human body is an image of the Trinity, which is Itself an eternal relationship of love. Moreover, Christ’s body, taken on and freely given for others, is a further sign of man’s Divine call to love.

Now, God bless Dr. Mirus and William May, but need we recall that May is definitely not orthodox in his understanding of how the hierarchy of good works?

Specifically, Dr. May denies that there IS any hierarchy of goods.

That's a problem.

Instead, he asserts all things are equally good. This, of course, is just the converse of the Protestant position that all sins are equally bad - there is no mortal vs. venial sin.

Clearly, May is not a Thomist.

Which is not surprising, given that St. Thomas SPECIFICALLY and EXPLICITLY condemns as manifestly absurd the idea that the body images the Trinity as anything more than a trace:

Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 93, Article 6

It would seem that the image of God is not only in man's mind.

Objection 2.

Further, it is written (Gen1:27) God created man to His own image, to the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. But the distinction of male and female is in the body. Therefore the image of God is also in the body, and not only in the mind.

I answer that, While in all creatures there is some kind of likeness to God, in the rational creature alone we find a likeness of image as we have explained above; but in other creatures we find a likeness by way of a trace.

Reply to Objection 2.

As Augustine says (De Trinitas, 12:5) some have thought that the image of God was not in man individually, but severally. They held that "the man represents the Person of the Father; those born of man denote the person of the Son; and that the woman is a third person in likeness to the Holy Ghost, since she so proceeded from man as not to be his son or daughter." All of this is manifestly absurd: [Aquinas doesn't mince words here] first, because it would follow that the Holy Ghost is the principle of the Son, as the woman is the principle of the man's offspring; secondly, because one man would be only the image of one Person; thirdly, because in that case Scripture should not have mentioned the image of God in man until after the birth of the offspring. Therefore we must understand that when Scripture had said to the image of God He created him, it added, male and female He created them, not to imply that the image of God came through the distinction of sex, [emphasis added] but that the image of God is common to both sexes, since it is in the mind, wherein there is no distinction of sexes. [How many Theology of the Body promoters have said that the image of God is in the sex?] And so the Apostle (Col 3:10), after saying According to the image of Him that created him, added, Where there is neither male nor female.

Reply to Objection 3.

Although the image of God in man is not to be found in his bodily shape, yet because "the body of man alone among terrestrial animals is not inclined prone to the ground, but is adapted to look upward to heaven, for this reason we may rightly say that it is made to God's image and likeness, rather than the bodies of other animals," as Augustine remarks. But this is not to be understood as though the image of God were in man's body, but in the sense that the very shape of the human body represents the image of God in the soul by way of a trace. [Notice that: insofar as anything in the body images God, it does so by way of a trace]

So, like Christopher West - who, coincidentally, attended the institution at which Dr. William May teaches - we now have the home of Diogenes infected with the anti-Thomist, anti-JP II meme that JP II is somehow out of step with the Angelic Doctor.

And, of course, we do have a choice.

We could stick with the ancient teachings of the Church from time immemorial and the writings of the man whose Summa Theologica was enshrined on the altar at the Council of Trent along with the Sacred Scriptures.

Or we could go with the personal interpretations of a pair of media hucksters (George Weigel and Chris West) and an American theologian (William May) concerning a set of prudentially inept Wednesday audiences which have been referenced by Magisterial documents less than a half-dozen times in the intervening 30 years.

Well, it's obvious what we should choose!

According to these cultists, we're supposed to toss the Summa and doggedly follow their highly idiosyncratic, highly personal (though not very personalist) interpretation of Pope John Paul II's virtually unreadable Wednesday audiences.

And the beauty of those Wednesday audiences is precisely that they are so obscure. For reasons which no one really knows, the newly elevated John Paul II apparently thought it a good idea to throw a bunch of scholarly jargon into his first series of Wednesday audiences. Precisely because JP II was not a particularly lucid writer, especially in his earliest papal works, anyone can read anything they want into those audiences and who will contradict it?

Rather than admit that this was a huge mistake in judgement which has subsequently been hijacked by a group of heterodox Catholics (of which group, Dr. May and Chris West form a nucleus), we are all supposed to think that this was a smart move on John Paul II's part. And, yes, I know Dr. May supported Humane Vitae when few others did. But that doesn't keep him from being theologically loopy, as a quick glance at his position on the hierarchy of goods readily demonstrates.

The cult of the expert has replaced the cult of the saints. Instead of following millennia worth of examples of the lives of the saints, we follow people like Maciel, May, Monaghan and West. They aren't holy, they are in many respects barely Catholic, but because they are excellent at marketing themselves and their cause, they gain adherents. Instead of teaching the Catholic Faith, they hijack it for their own ends: a remunerative religious order here, a profitable real estate deal there, a lucrative book deal in the corner.

Could someone explain to me again how TOB is not a cult, on the order of Maciel's Legion, or the cultic Mother of God community from which Chris West sprang and from which Tom Monaghan took so much advice?


Addendum:
Before nitpickers begin commenting, I should add that I fully realize Thomas was not correct in every particular of what he taught. In that same Summa, for instance, he is famously claimed to have denied the Immaculate Conception.

Of course, anyone who actually takes the time to read what he wrote, discovers this claim is false. He did not deny the Immaculate Conception, he only denied that Mary could have been sanctified before the infusion of her rational soul - a perfectly reasonable theological position. We don't baptize dogs because dogs don't have rational souls. We don't sacramentally anoint chairs or tables because they don't have souls at all.

If Thomas had known the infusion of the rational soul took place at conception - which is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception implies - he would have instantly agreed that the Immaculate Conception was a reasonable teaching:

Article 2: Whether the Blessed Virgin was sanctified before animation?

I answer that, The sanctification of the Blessed Virgin cannot be understood as having taken place before animation, for two reasons. First, because the sanctification of which we are speaking, is nothing but the cleansing from original sin: for sanctification is a "perfect cleansing," as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. xii). Now sin cannot be taken away except by grace, the subject of which is the rational creature alone. Therefore before the infusion of the rational soul, the Blessed Virgin was not sanctified.[emphasis added]

Secondly, because, since the rational creature alone can be the subject of sin; before the infusion of the rational soul, the offspring conceived is not liable to sin.[emphasis added] And thus, in whatever manner the Blessed Virgin would have been sanctified before animation, she could never have incurred the stain of original sin: and thus she would not have needed redemption and salvation which is by Christ, of whom it is written (Matthew 1:21): "He shall save His people from their sins." But this is unfitting, through implying that Christ is not the "Saviour of all men," as He is called (1 Timothy 4:10). It remains, therefore, that the Blessed Virgin was sanctified after animation.

Update:
Found this gem in article 4 of one of John Paul II's homilies. Notice, the theory espoused here by Saint JP II is precisely what Aquinas called "manifestly absurd". 

Christian families exist to form a communion of persons in love. As such, the Church and the family are, each in its own way, living representations in human history of the eternal loving communion of the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity.

So, who do you believe? 

A saintly Pope or the greatest Doctor the Church has ever produced?

Philadelphia Freedom

I used to be a rolling stone
You know if the cause was right
I'd leave to find the answer on the road
I used to be a heart beating for someone
But the times have changed
The less I say the more my work gets done.

Elton John's Philadelphia Freedom is the theme song at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Few people know how the arrangement between Dr. Ken Howell, the Catholic Diocese of Peoria and the UIUC actually worked. The Chicago Tribune accurately explains the situation:

Kenneth Howell taught "Introduction to Catholicism" and "Modern Catholic Thought" in university classrooms, but served on the payroll of the St. John's Catholic Newman Center funded by the diocese of Peoria.

The church has maintained control over how Catholic theory was taught, selecting the instructors and paying their salaries. Although the university has amended the agreement over the years to exercise more control, the arrangement has left the Catholic component of the school's otherwise secular religious studies curriculum susceptible to church influence.

Horrors!
We wouldn't want the Catholic Church influencing how a course on Catholic Faith is taught!
That's nearly as bad as allowing a mathematical accrediting society to influence how math is taught, or the APA influencing how psychology is taught!

Those kinds of outside influences are obviously bad, as university professors explained:

Faculty and administrators now will review that policy to determine if it violates the separation of church and state or threatens academic integrity. They hope to conclude their investigation before the fall semester begins.

"I have very strong inclinations that this is where things went wrong in the first place," said Nicholas Burbules, a member of the Faculty Senate's General University Policy Committee, which will review the relationship, along with others. "This line is going to get blurred and was blurred repeatedly over a long period of time."

No doubt. Why, just the other day, some economics professor - accredited through an outside "professional" organization of some kind - was teaching his students that Barack Obama's policies were actually detrimental to the nation! And he was teaching it as FACT, not just one more opinion or position.

This is the problem with outside funding and outside influences. That's why NONE of the research labs at UIUC takes a DIME of funding from ANYONE except the administrators of UIUC.

Such outside funding would create undue influence.
The rules someone must stick to in order to be a member of a "professional" organization might create a breach of academic integrity.

No, it's best to just levy money from the taxpayer, and make sure that same taxpayer doesn't worry his pretty little head about how we academics spend the money that is properly ours, the money that would have been ours from the beginning, if that grubby little taxpayer hadn't laid his grubby little hands on it first.

The nerve. He'll be investigated next, of course, along with the economics prof, but for right now...

Scholars are troubled both by the university's agreement with the church and by what they consider a lack of due process in Howell's dismissal.

Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, said the circumstances of Howell's employment don't void his right to due process.

"Outside control is very dangerous," said Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois. "If the control is not clearly with the university, ordinarily that's something we just wouldn't tolerate."

Exactly. As Marx said, a man cannot serve two masters. At least, I'm pretty sure it was Marx. Whoever it was, he was certainly a faculty member at UIUC that said it, I know that. We don't allow anyone to think thoughts that aren't controlled by the university - that's something we just don't tolerate. The very fact that I attended UIUC and had that thought about two masters shows the thought originated at UIUC. QED.

And you grubby little meddlers all need to shut up, by the way.

I hear you muttering! "But the very term professor comes from the Catholic Church! It means one who professes the Catholic Faith, it was given to teachers at the original universities, the university systems invented by the Catholic Church in Europe, and the title indicated the person had promised to teach only that which was in accord with Catholic Faith."

That's all a pack of papist LIES!
We are university professors who DON'T believe, so belief isn't necessary anymore, hear?
Oh, and it never WAS necessary!
The idea that it was is a LIE.
The Catholic Church influences history instructors and then they teach these LIES.
All the more reason to recognize that:

"The university needs to have complete control over who teaches," Price said. "This agreement should not exist."

Yes. That's why the university completely ignores all outside organizations when it comes to deciding who teaches at a university. No accreditation will sway us, and we don't permit endowed chairs AT ALL. Too much outside control. No self-respecting university would allow that kind of influence on their curriculum.

Indeed, Ayesha Khan, legal director for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said the arrangement is rife for pitfalls.

"You can imagine a person hired by the diocese (but) being put in a public institution having, at a minimum, a conflict of interest," Khan said. "That's an untenable situation and it's not surprising it led to this."

Obviously a reference to both endowed chairs in general and this particular endowed chair.

Burbules said the university committee recognizes the urgency of the situation and will respond quickly.

"I don't need to itemize the ways in which this can go wrong," he said. "We will be reporting fairly quickly on lessons we can learn from this situation — whether we should continue (such teaching arrangements) at all or whether they need to be managed or regulated more closely in the future."

Lay people don't understand how the priesthood of academia works.
Academic freedom is like Philadelphia Freedom.

When I'm a university professor, "The less I say the more my work gets done."

"Shut Up!' They Explained

Professor Kenneth Howell has been fired from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Department of Religion because he dared to teach - in a course dedicated to the exploration and explanation of Catholic theology - that according to Catholic belief, homosexuality is wrong.

Welcome to academic freedom in the 21st century!

It mattered not that Dr. Howell has won several awards for excellence in teaching from that same august institution. He has spoken ill of the dead (morally dead, anyway), and so must be punished!

Now, this by itself would not be particularly big news.
Universities are renowned for their hatred of things Catholic.
What a lot of people don't realize is that, for over 60 years, the UIUC campus has hosted the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Conference. The largest conference of its kind in the world, once every three years evangelical Christians from across the nation gather at UIUC for short summer courses that discussed how best to evangelize the nation and the world to Christianity. The last conference was in 2009. The UIUC happily rented classroom, auditoria and dormitory space to these evangelical Christians with nary so much as a whimper. They did, after all, at least embrace contraception with open arms.

Money has reasons which ethics knows not.
Apparently, however, ethics eventually triumphed because it looks like UIUC has kicked out the IVC, who ultimately had to relocate a short way down the road to St. Louis. If you can dump the income from 16,000 evangelical Christians, then dumping one Catholic professor should be easy. It has the added bonus of potentially scaring all the other Christian faculty into silence.


According to my sources, Dr. Howell, upon being notified of his dismissal, went back to the Newman Center and told the sad tale. In recognition of the terrible narrow-mindedness shown by UIUC, the Newman Center patted the good doctor on the back, commiserated with him for a few moments, then fired him as well.

Why?
Well, because he had been hired to teach UIUC courses, and now that the horse had thrown the rider, there was no need for the rider, you see.

Dr. Howell reportedly pointed out that the classes could still be offered through the Newman Center, if they were accredited through a Catholic college and the credits were then transferred back to UIUC - a reasonable solution, if you were really interested in accurately teaching Catholic theology on campus.

"No, oh NO!" replied the Newman Center, "That would NEVER do!"

The plan was then pitched to the Bishop's office - the good Bishop Jenky and his lay woman chancellor.

"No, oh NO!" replied the bishop's office, "That would NEVER do!"

And so it is, dear readers, that Dr. Kenneth Howell has to rely on the good offices of a Protestant legal defense fund because his own department at the UIUC refused to endorse academic freedom, the Newman Center saw nothing Newman-like in Dr. Howell's presentation, and the bishop's office saw no reason to employ or even to support a Catholic professor who accurately teaches Catholic theology.

Oh, did I mention?

Bishop Jenky is from Notre Dame (founded by the CSC), is himself a CSC (Congregation of the Holy Cross), and is himself a fellow of that fine institution. It may also be of mild interest that he is one of the men who stayed conspicuously silent when Barack came calling for his Ph.D. in law last year.

What a COINCIDENCE!

The Social Gospel: Spread the Wealth

Over at CatholicCulture.org, the general opinion is that that new 18% Boston archdiocesan chancery tax on parishes will cause more parishes to close.

While I don't doubt a few more parishes WILL close as a result of the tax, that isn't where the closures are really going to take place.

Parochial schools suck up to 90% of parish revenue if given the opportunity.
Most dioceses have rules in place that will limit the damage to 50% of parish revenue - the rest has to be made up by tuition and donations.

But regardless of the precise percentage, the largest single ravenous maw in the parish belly is the parish school.

Now, if a parish suddenly sees its chancery tax (the amount of money it pays to the chancery each year to keep the chancery functioning and pay all the salaries for those... employees...) raised, the funds to pay that money has to come from somewhere.

And the biggest hole in the revenue stream is always going to be the parish school.

My apologies to Diogenes, but Boston isn't going to close parishes, or at least, it won't begin by closing parishes.
The last thing any bishop closes is a parish.
No, it will begin by closing down the parochial schools.

Now, this will increase homeschooling, as Catholic parents desperately try to keep their kids out of failing public schools, but most parents aren't interested in homeschooling, and there aren't enough private schools in Boston to absorb the influx.

So, the vast majority of the newly displaced population will end up in the public school system, which will have to increase property taxes in order to make up the shortfall from the increased costs of the new students.

You can see where this is headed.

Ultimately, Boston WASPs will pay for the Catholic sexual abuse scandal.

And thus, the tenets of the social gospel will be fulfilled: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

If anyone wanted to see "social justice" in action, meditate on Boston.

A Growing Economy

Private companies experienced robust growth in the United States over the last ten years, adding over two million jobs to their payrolls. Businesses across the nation pooled their resources and chipped in to provide jobs with excellent pay, marvelous benefits and spectacularly good working hours. None of that minimum wage stuff when it came to THESE two million positions!

Or, in other words:

"Over the 10-year period between March 2000 and March 2010, the private sector lost over three million jobs, while the public sector gained nearly two million jobs"

Dissonance
Business leaders are like everyone else. They tend to act in their own best interests. Keep this in mind when you hear people talk about the incredible economic engine that is the American economy, because the American economy is an incredible economic engine. But, for at least the last century, that economy has been built, at least in part, on the indispensable incompetence of arrogant fools.

We all complain that government employment is nothing but a leech on the economy, useless positions which do nothing for businesses but whose salaries and benefits are paid for by businesses, thus dragging the general economy into the dirt.

It is true. Yet, if this were unequivocally bad, wouldn't it be in the best interests of business to make sure their own employees were well-informed about the virtues of small government? Wouldn't businesses spend millions of dollars to sway the opinions of all employed people towards self-reliance, good personal finance, and similar virtues? Wouldn't business always have done this? And if all employers always did this, how would contrary concepts arise?

Do we wish to argue that the same people who successfully sell millions of people on the virtues of a particular style of jeans or jeeps, who have successfully changed the lifestyles of millions of Americans for over a century, that these same business leaders are incompetent in selling the virtue of virtue? This seems unlikely.

Perhaps there is a reason business does not really like any of the virtues it extols.

The Corporate Dole
Consider what would happen if business were actually to follow the advice they so clamorously insist they would like to follow.

Imagine a business with a successful program of teaching their employees the virtues of self-reliance and good personal financial sense. What would such employees look like?

To begin with, they would not long remain employed. Employees who actually understand their rights and obligations, who actually take on and live adult responsibility, will soon leave the corporate paycheck. They will see flaws in the business plan of the people they work for. They will go off and start their own businesses, become competitors, remove themselves from the corporate dole.

A virtuous people is an entrepreneurial people.
Corporations don't like entrepreneurs.

Business doesn't just tolerate big government, it encourages big government, because big government is a necessary cost in limiting competition.

But big government doesn't just limit competition.

Government also serves as a flak-jacket, a way to outsource problems you don't want to deal with. Bureaucracy is famously a flak jacket for CEO's, a way to deny responsibility and blame it on faceless peons who can take the blame. The best flak jacket is a rental - if you can point to someone else's bureaucracy as the source of the problem, all the better.

So, yes, business chooses to hire a growing portion of its work force as government employees, that is to say, as leeches, because it beats having those same employees as competitors. As a bonus, when things go wrong, business can outsource the blame to the government. If the rabble, that is to say, if the employees, can be gotten angry enough at the government, the corporation will not be the sole focus of blame.

Better yet, precisely because government employee pay ultimately comes from the corporate paymaster, the government employee will create regulations, indeed, will create a veritable culture, that will stifle corporate competition, and, in a really beautiful turn of events, the nascent entrepreneurs can be made to pay for their own stifling through taxes. Wherever new avenues for competition rear their ugly heads, the government can be counted to cut off the heads and set fires to the neck stumps.

To this end, when hiring for a government position, it is critical to make sure you hire men and women who are arrogant, narcissistic, highly-educated idiots with a supreme sense of self. If they do not begin so, they must at least become so during the course of their training for the job and their time in the job. Only these kinds of people can be expected to endure the constant well-deserved insults for doing what they are best at doing: being incompetent.

Government is a corporation with a critically important set of tasks. It's job is to stifle competition and be the scapegoat for all that goes wrong. And precisely because it is incompetent, precisely because it is staffed by incompetents, precisely because it is both powerful and incompetent, it truly is to blame for stifling competition, for general incompetence. It is supremely suited to its task, which is why it is so successful.

Government growth really took off in this country at the same time that corporate growth took off. Both began their meteoric growth for the same reason: they need one another. When a company spins off a subsidiary, that subsidiary continues to work with the original company. It does real work, but it really is independent of the original company. Government is a spin-off of the corporate world.

So, the next time you hear corporate leaders lament the increase of government jobs at the expense of the private sector, keep all this in mind.

Incompetence and scapegoating have been America's fastest growing industry for the last several decades, and, especially under this president, it shows no signs of abating.

Forked Things

Just received this FASCINATING news item from a friend:

Why is ultra-libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel (see also here) sitting on the First Things finance committee (along with George Weigel, Robert P. George, Frederic Clark, and William Burleigh)? Named one of the 10 Most Powerful Gays by Out magazine, Thiel is a transhumanist who supports technology to "save" human beings by turning them into robots. (See MercatorNet's op-ed on this.) His Thiel Foundation also supports utopian "seasteading" and human embryonic stem cell research. He has written that democracy and freedom are incompatible. Could Thiel's involvement have anything to do with FT's recent shift away from articles that support marriage? One more note about Thiel: He's created a group called Imitatio to promote the "mimetic theory" of Rene Girard. FT once published an article (by Servais Pinckaers, I think) critical of Girard, but it's gone whole hog on him during the past year--check its archives. Here are some notes on Thiel and Girard from The Guardian:

What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in Thiel's philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.

I've said before that George Weigel is a sycophant. I am of the personal opinion that he is a spineless snake. Now we find him sitting in a cozy relationship with one of the major underminers of Catholic Faith in the United States. 

UPDATE: 

Several people have asked why I dislike George Weigel so much. I heard him speak once in Peoria, Il, where he mentioned that pro-abort politicians got voted into office because Catholics voted them in. Thus, it was really the fault of Catholic laity that such politicians were so prominent. We were to blame. Mea culpa, mea culpa, etc. Everyone in the audience was ashamed of themselves. Except I wasn't buying that crap. During the Q & A, I publicly asked him how he could maintain that position, given that:

1. the bishops had put pro-aborts on their own national review board following the sex abuse scandal (the board was only a year or so old at that point, and this was fresh then),
2. the bishops had REFUSED to act in solidarity to refuse communion to pro-abort politicians (you couldn't receive on your knees in some diocese, but you could certainly receive if you supported killing babies - we have to show liturgical solidarity, after all),
3. many bishops used public language that could easily be interpreted by Catholic laity to mean that we should have no qualms with voting for pro-abort politicians as long as they were "good on other issues."

I pointed out that a Catholic was only as good as his leader, and asked him to explain what a Catholic in the pew was supposed to think, given the honors, accolades and language of the American Catholic bishops. How were Catholic laity culpable for voting badly given how badly the bishops led? Wasn't it the job of the bishop to teach, preach, lead by example, help us understand these issues? When he says "it's the fault of the laity" isn't he really saying, "It's the fault of the bishops."? 

But our spineless Weigel snake just kept repeating, "I cannot explain the actions of the bishops" until his friend, the priest who had brought him in for the talk (perhaps stung by the direction of that last question, given that George's thesis was precisely that it wasn't the fault of the bishops), suddenly stood up and said, "The time for questions is now closed." 

Now, George knew damned well why the bishops acted the way they did. The vast majority of them are freaking heretics. But George didn't want to urinate in his rice bowl by saying it aloud. So, he took the boot-licker's way out and punted. He's a sycophant. The man has no spine, no guts. You've got to remember that George was nothing but another ignorant journalist when he got tapped to write JP II's biography. He got in not because of his depth of theological knowledge, but because he happened to have the right friends and he hit it off with the Pope on a personal level, in much the same way Maciel did. Think about that.

We've treated Weigel like some kind of deeply insightful Catholic saint since JP II and he became buddies, but Weigel has never really advanced beyond his ignorant journalist stage. He just has access to some bishops who give him inside scoops (much as Amy Welborn built her blog reputation on the inside scoops her ex-priest husband's contacts gave her), so he seems like a man who can be trusted. For my money, there isn't any real evidence that George is more than a mouthpiece for bishops who want to get their opinions out but don't want their fingerprints on the essays. If he loses that access, he won't have any more grist for his books. Loss of income is a terrible thing, especially in this economy. Maybe that's why Weigel is on the finance board at FT. As for Rene Girard, I don't know anything about him, but I did find these couple of gems: See this. And this rather interesting review of Girard.

Covering Their Tracks

So, what's up with Chris West's Theology of the Body Institute?
Strange things are going on there.

1. Archbishop Chaput quietly disappears from the list of episcopal advisors - no announcement, no fanfare, just POOF! and he's gone. The man who was responsible for West's first (inappropriate) imprimatur and upon whose reputation Chris West built his own reputation is suddenly and mysteriously out of the picture. Why did he leave?
2. Chris West himself takes the trouble of setting up the first national conference sponsored by his TOB Institute, but then suddenly takes a six-month "sabbatical," timed in such a way that he can't show up at his own first national conference. Can anyone imagine why a publicity-hound like Chris West would set himself up for that kind of hole in his own speaking schedule? It defies belief.
3. And now the tobinstitute.com URL has been dropped, with a new URL substituted - toboncampus.com. Why on earth would anyone throw away Google pagerank on an existing URL? After all, when an URL is dropped, Google not only resets your pagerank to ZERO, it erases all the cached pages to your domain, so you can't access the old content anymore.... Hmmm... And the old URL seems to have expired three weeks before West went on "sabbatical." ... Hmmm.....
   

Like the Stalinists of old, Matt Pinto, Chris West and the gang at the TOB Institute seem to be in the process of re-writing at least some of their history.

Stay tuned.
I'm sure this gets MUCH more interesting in the next few months.

Honoring The Ides of Christ

"What Would Jesus Do?"

"You need to act more like Christ."

"You are being DIVISIVE and RENDING the Body of Christ!"

Yada, yada, yada.
Blech.

It's hard to take people who make these comments very seriously. After all, God's prophets were not known for their sweetness and light. People tend to forget the jeremiad was named after Jeremiah. Isaiah promised quite a diverse number of really nasty punishments to his listeners. John the Baptist's favorite question was, "Who told YOU that you could escape the coming destruction?!?"

Jesus was no less serious about getting in people's faces. Remember these Golden Oldies?

"You blind guides!...
You blind fools!...
You hypocrites!....
You snakes!...
You brood of vipers!...
You whitewashed sepulchres, pleasing to look at on the outside but filled with filth and charnel on the inside!...
You make your disciples TWICE the sons of hell that YOU are yourselves!...
How will you escape hell?" (Matthew 23)

He called one woman a dog ("It is not right to give the children's food to dogs": Matthew 15:26), and made His own special whip of cords in order to whip the money changers out of the Temple, turn over their tables and make a general mess inside (John 2).

Jesus cursed a fig tree so furiously it died on the spot. (Matthew 21:18-22)

He insisted that He had not come to bring peace. Quite the opposite:

"Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. (Matthew 10:34).

When an apostle lifted up two swords and said, "Here, we have swords," Jesus didn't reply with, "Idiot - I don't condone violence." He also didn't say, "You fools. I don't mean actual swords." In short, He didn't start explaining His remarks as yet another parable. Instead He saw the apostles' two swords and merely said, "That's enough" (Luke 22:35-38).

When Peter uses his sword to strike off Malchus' ear, Jesus does not forbid the use of the sword entirely, He merely says it is not to be used now, during His Passion (Luke 22, John 18). Similarly, when soldiers came up to him asking for various things, He never told them to stop being soldiers - although He certainly did tell tax collectors that they were saved when they stopped being tax collectors (Luke 19:1-10). Instead, He simply warned the soldiers not to abuse their position.

Although God is Love and Jesus is God, so Jesus is Love, Jesus wasn't very nice.
He was, in fact, about the most confrontational, divisive figure you can imagine.

Indeed, the only time He didn't verbally upbraid the men who opposed Him was when those same religious and secular authorities began to beat, scourge, humiliate, crucify and kill Him. And notice that He didn't shut up as soon as the idea to do this entered their heads - the religious authorities were looking to kill Him from the moment He raised Lazarus from the dead.

No, He continued to energetically correct them until the time HE chose to go silent.

Alright, so His prophets were divisive and HE was divisive, but His apostles were terribly gentle men, weren't they?

Were they?

Read about Paul in Acts, or better yet, read what he wrote to the Galatians sometime.

In Acts, Paul gets thrown out of synagogue after synagogue because he keeps fighting with the Jews who reject Christ. In Galatians, he not only proudly recounts his fight with Peter over how to interact with the Gentile converts, he also mentions that he hopes the Judaizers will castrate themselves. (Galatians 5:12, 6:12-13, 6:15)

Paul is so divisive he gets beaten, with rods, thrown in jail and nearly stoned to death. That's the man who becomes all things to all men so that he might by all means have a chance to save some.

Peter was no better. He threatened Simon Magus with damnation (Acts 8:9-24) and struck Ananias and Sapphira stone cold dead (Acts 4). His work in Rome so thrilled Caesar that the Emperor had him crucified upside down.

Essentially every martyred Christian follows this example. That's why the saints got martyred, after all. You don't get martyred unless you really tick somebody off. At some point, the words and actions of every single one of the apostles managed to generate a murderous rage in their hearers.

What makes us think we are supposed to be different?
Are we smarter?
Holier?

So, when someone tells me to "act more like Christ" and "stop being so divisive!" what does that really mean?

Well, the short answer is simple - it's the coward's way of saying, "SHUT UP! I don't want to listen to you anymore!"

People who spew this "You are being DIVISIVE... NOT Christ-like!" phrase are not particularly Christian. They can't let their YES mean YES or their NO mean NO because they don't like being like Christ. They don't like getting in people's faces.

Instead, they call names - "YOU aren't like CHRIST!" - while pretending that they aren't calling names. They judge while retaining the false veneer of being non-judgemental and loving. They are white-washed tombs, pleasing to look at on the outside, but filled with venom and hatred on the inside.

They are like nothing so much as the pro-abort who says, "No one has the right to push their morality on others." Of course, if any pro-abort really believed such nonsense, she would remain silent, lest voicing this opinion render her a hypocrite as she forces on others her opinion about how morality should be handled.

As with the "Be more like Christ!" example, the phrase "Don't force your morality" really means, "SHUT THE HELL UP! I don't want to hear what you have to say." But by phrasing the sentiment as a moral judgement, the speaker gets to take the moral high ground and pretend to be holier than the one condemned by the phrase.

Of course, it should be noted that Jesus did command us to turn the other cheek, to give more than is asked of us, to care for one another. He did give us the greatest example of this when He opened not His mouth as He was led to destruction as a lamb led to the slaughter.

We must always remember that, after three years of incredibly divisive language and action, Jesus ended in silence.

Like the month of March, He came in like a lion, but left like a lamb. The ides of March fall on the 15th, the turning point of the month. It is the day Caesar was murdered, the day that Shakespeare has Marc Antony remark on the silent mouths of the knife wounds on Caesar's body that give testimony to his death.

So, for those of us who want to model our lives on Christ's, what is the take-away here?
We who follow Christ must honor the ides of Christ, honor and imitate every part of His life.

Jesus followed the law in all things, right down to the paying of the Temple tax.
As long as He had breath in His body, He fought injustice, hypocrisy and lies.
For three long years, He fought the good fight - divisive, in-your-face, brutal, but always the very essence of divine love.

Only at the end, as He allows human law to drag Him to His death, does He allow Himself to enter into His great silence. Although the breaking of the first six seals were accompanied by all kinds of calamity, the breaking of the seventh seal brought a long, great silence (Revelation 8:1).

Jesus was divisive in His words and in His actions.
But He was the most divisive of all in His silence.

It was in His incredibly provocative, contentious silence that Simon was forced to become God's co-worker and help carry the Cross.

It was in this divisive silence that eleven of His apostles broke and ran like water, leaving only one man, John, and a small group of women behind to watch silently with Him.

It was in this great silence that the tombs split open, the dead walked amongst the living, and the Temple curtain was torn in two.

It was in this great silence that the pagan soldier finally turned and spoke the unspeakable Truth: "Surely this man is the Son of God!"

So, yes, as Christians who want to model Christ, we have a right and a duty to fall silent before authority, to turn the other cheek, to give more than is asked of us.

But we have an equal right, and even a canonical duty, to make a great noise, a noise as reverential and gentle as the crack of a whip, before we enter that silence.

And whether we speak or we be silent, if we truly have the Spirit of God within us, then we will necessarily be a sword unto the world, no matter what we do. Even if we fall silent, especially when we fall silent and do the silent works of mercy and charity, we must do these things in a way that divides, separates, cleaves the sheep and the goats.

So, how now shall we live?
The answer is clear.

Go in like a lion, be led like a lamb, but always wield the two-edged sword that divides the people and brings judgement upon the nations. This honor is for all the faithful.

McChrystal Clear

According to the Rolling Stone magazine story, two things are McChrystal clear about the general who is attempting to win the fight in Afghanistan:

1. McChrystal voted for Obama, the community organizer, not for McCain, the Vietnam war hero,
   
2. McChrystal cannot get his own troops to buy into his counter-insurgency strategies. "This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks," McChrystal tries to joke. "But it doesn't get the same reception from infantry companies."
   

Think about these two facts for a minute.

Certainly McCain was no one's idea of a good candidate, but Obama was clearly a complete disaster waiting to happen. How could a military man NOT see the problems associated with Obama? The fact that he voted for BHO is a stunning indictment of his poor judgement.

Combine this with the fact that he's pushing a strategy his own infantry can't be convinced to follow. That's a recipe for disaster. No matter how good the theory may look, if the grunts who are supposed to execute that theory don't buy into it, it isn't going to work, if only because those same grunts won't implement your glorious theory.

As any industry exec can tell you, if you can't even convince your own paid employees that you have a decent product, you won't convince the customers those employees are supposed to be selling to. McChrystal's COIN strategy is already dead - he just doesn't know it yet.

But let's look a little deeper.

Rolling Stone paints a picture of a man who has enormous problems with authority, enormous empathy for the "little guys" out on the front line, but wants those same "little guys" to stay the hell away from the border where all the bad guys are, a man who adamantly endorses the use of the latest technology to advance his agenda, a man who voted for the wimp, and has a winning plan that ivory tower types like, but the grunt hates.

Hmmmm..... who does this sound like?

Let's put it this way: if that thumbnail description had been used to outline an Obama cover story in Rolling Stone, would a word of it have to be changed?

Well, no...no.... it wouldn't.

McChrystal is a user of people who outmaneuvered his President into giving him exactly what he wanted, but then found he couldn't deliver what he promised.

Again, who does this sound like? Does getting George Bush to hand over the initial TARP funds sound somewhat familiar?

Sure, McChrystal is excellent at organizing the Special Forces community as it assassinates Al Quaeda bad guys. But essentially, he's just an authority-hating, teflon general whose good at organizing specific kinds of communities, much as Obama organized the 'hood.

He's single-handedly managed to collect all power into his hands in Afghanistan: "McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side. " It's almost like he's set up a commission of czars that run rings around the rest of the government.

McChrystal is said to have enormous disdain for civilians.
Obama is known to have enormous disdain for anyone who doesn't think like him.

It is no wonder McChrystal was saddened when the community organizer he voted for ignored him. Like called to like across the deep, but one of the "likes" didn't really like him.

Is there anything to be concerned about here?
I don't see why.
What we have here is a liberal idiot firing another liberal idiot.

A New Kind of Rape

A new weapon has been brought into the sexual arena, a condom with teeth. Developed by a doctor who wanted to cut down on rape, the woman who uses such a device would be expected to insert this "female condom" when venturing into dangerous areas. The would-be assailant would find himself incapacitated by the device as it painfully latches onto his penis. According to reports, it could only be removed by a doctor.

All well and good, if used for the intended purpose.

But, as with so many items, who really believes it will be restricted to just that use?

What of the woman who is angry with her husband and/or lover, who wants him to suffer because he has inflicted upon her some slight, real or imagined, and she sees this as a marvelous way to strike back at him? As the doctor who developed the device says, the man so afflicted "cannot urinate or walk" after it has attached itself to him. What a delightful way to incapacitate a man!

Indeed, this painful new device could easily be used upon a man who is sleeping, drunk, high, or simply gulled into believing he has been invited to a night of pleasure, only to discover other things have been intended for him.

With this new device, women are now capable of the violent, painful rape of men.
It is impossible to see this "advance" as an unalloyed good.

It Could Be Worse

As we all know by now, Barack Obama's endorsement of political candidates is the kiss of death for their political careers. Every time he endorses someone, they lose.

As David Broder pointed out yesterday, Specter’s failure “showed the Obama White house once again to be a toothless tiger -- with its endorsements now having failed in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. No good news for the president there.”

Now, for some time, conservative political pundits have lamented the fact that Barack Obama constantly runs down the United States.

This is true.

But has anyone considered how much WORSE it would be if he endorsed America?

UPDATE:
Public Policy Polling took my advice and actually conducted a poll on this kind of question.

* 42 percent of the women surveyed said Obama's endorsement would make them less likely to vote for someone, with 36 percent of women viewing the president's support positively.

* 55 percent of men took a negative view of Obama's backing, while only 30 percent of men said the president's endorsement increased a candidate's chance of getting their votes.

* 54 percent of those identifying themselves as "independent" or "other," rather than Republican or Democrat, now view an Obama endorsement as a factor swaying them against voting for a candidate for office.

* Only 23 percent of such independent voters said his endorsement would make them more likely to support someone; the remaining 23 percent of independents said it didn't matter or they didn't know.

* A huge proportion of those independent voters -- 57 percent -- disapprove of the way the president is handling the ongoing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, while only 27 percent approve.

* 44 percent of Hispanics said they would be less likely to vote for someone President Obama endorses, while only 33 percent were more likely. Among whites, the comparison was 55 percent to 27 percent. Blacks, however, were another story, with only 13 percent viewing an Obama endorsement dimly and 70 percent saying it would make them more likely to vote for someone. And 83 percent of blacks said they approved of Obama's handling of the Gulf oil disaster.

So, all the stereotypes are coming home to roost.

Marking Chris West

To my shock and delight, it seems Mark Shea has finally decided to skewer Christopher West. Given Mark's close association with Matt Pinto via Catholic Exchange (Mark is the senior editor, Matt is the unofficial publisher for Catholic Exchange), this is a remarkable turn of events. It is, perhaps, for reasons along this line that we see Shea's attack on West appear not on Catholic Exchange, but at Inside Catholic.

The distancing is all the more amazing when we see the bits of "business" Mark has inserted into the essay itself, subtle parodies of West's own errors.

For instance, in the opening paragraphs, Mark deliberately misrepresents the facts on the "Adamites", in an apparent parody of West's constant distortion of the theological facts surrounding John Paul II's Theology of the Body.

Mark places the Adamites and similar theological nudist movements in post-Reformation, post-Enlightenment, technologically advanced 20th century climate-controlled countries, despite the fact that a simple Google search or a quick perusal of the Catholic Encyclopedia clearly reveals that the Adamite nudists were a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th century heresy.

Why would Shea make such an obvious and easily debunked historical error? Well, we should remember that one of West's central errors, the idea that the Paschal candle is a phallic symbol of some kind, is also an insupportably anachronistic error, the exact reverse of the Adamite error Shea "makes."

Whereas Shea takes an ancient sect and pretends it is thoroughly and only modern, West took a modern heresy - the idea that the Paschal candle is somehow a phallic symbol - and pretended it was thoroughly ancient.

In fact, despite the unsupported statements of people like Christopher West, Janet Smith and Michael Waldstein, no one has produced ANY evidence that the Paschal candle was ever given West's phallic meaning in the first 1800 years of the Church.

Instead, quite the opposite is the case. Due to Dawn Eden's masterful research on the subject, we know that the "Easter candle as phallic symbol" concept was actually developed by one of Nietsche's professors and was popularized by anti-Catholic students of Carl Jung. Eden reminds us that Father Dominic Serra has already described how the fathers of the Second Vatican Council specifically rejected the phallic symbol interpretation West foolishly uses.

But Mark Shea doesn't stop there. He then goes on to an extended discussion of the verb "nake." The parody here is that Mark takes chunks of his own discussion straight from C.S. Lewis' well-known chapter on Eros in The Four Loves without any attribution whatsoever.

This, of course, is a subtle reference to West's habit of taking material like the "Easter candle-phallic symbol" analogy from other modern, copyrighted sources without making any attributions whatsoever, deliberately passing off other people's work as his own. As a senior editor at Catholic Exchange, Mark is fully aware of the need to attribute work, so it's clear that he's making a point about West's unwillingness to do so.

Whereas Mark's unattributed source is the redoubtable C.S. Lewis, West's unattributed sources, at least in reference to the phallic Easter candle, are a series of anti-Catholic Protestants and atheists. Mark thereby quietly reminds the reader of Chesterton's hilarious debunk of the atheist's idea that a church steeple is a phallic symbol.

And Mark uses all of this in a concentrated attack against the memes promoted by West and his acolytes:

This is, of course, what gives the lie to the notion that the account in Genesis is somehow the cause of a Religion of Shame about the Body, and all the rest of the recent rubbish blaming Judaism and Christianity for failing to celebrate unnatural polymorphous perversity and unfettered sexual license....

...As a general rule, the command to clothe the naked is concerned, primarily, not with the need for human warmth as the need for human dignity. Both the Puritan and the Libertine tend to forget this. The Puritan forgets by putting some arbitrary rule above the person's healthy sense of modesty in relation to his culture. The Libertine forgets it by denying that a culture (usually his own) has any language by which virtue or vice is spoken through clothes.

This, of course, is one of the central complaints made about Chris West. When he insists, as he frequently has, that a pure and moral Catholic should be able to look at a naked woman, even someone else's wife, without sin, he has taken up the Libertine's language. Mark Shea neatly skewers West not only through the subtle parody of Westian "scholarship" but also through this overt attack on West's obsession with "Puritanism." Similarly, Shea uses the theme of modesty to skewer West's understanding of the related virtue of continence:

Great fun can be had with all these cultural differences, and Puritans and Libertines have a wonderful time dogmatizing about and ignoring completely the complex interplay of aesthetics, common sense, and morality as they jockey to either raise a fashion to a granite truth of Sinai, or else eradicate the very possibility that modesty is a virtue.

Of course, continence, the virtue by which an engaged couple realizes they should not spend extended periods of time alone prior to marriage, is ridiculed by West as not being a virtue at all. Indeed, West has not only lied about the Catholic doctrine concerning the virtue of continence, he has even gone so far as to pretend Aquinas and JP II agree with him, even though both explicitly state that continence is, in fact, virtuous.

But the modesty and humility that is embodied in continence is precisely what Shea holds up as a virtue here. Indeed, Shea not only holds it up as a virtue, he condemns as "Libertine" those who would eradicate the virtues, as West has tried to do. West has long been chastised for refusing to acknowledge "the complex interplay of ... common sense and morality" and now Mark Shea adds himself to the list of those who take issue with West's approach.

By imitating and thereby parodying Westian errors and plagiarism, by interweaving Westian obsessions into his essay and soundly refuting them, Mark Shea has done a masterful and uncharacteristically subtle job of repudiating the theology of the man who has made millions by distorting Catholic theology.

My hat is off to Mark Shea.

UPDATE: Mark indicates that he didn't have Chris West in mind when he wrote the essay. He claims complete and utter ignorance of what West has to say.

This is kind of sad, since that means he really didn't know the Adamites were an early heresy, not a late one (thus seriously undermining part of his thesis), nor does this senior editor at Catholic Exchange seem to see a problem with lifting C.S. Lewis without attribution. So, while he is ignorant of West's teaching, he is sympatico in his use of research techniques.

In any case, although his comments are, like those of the High Priest, unintentional, they are completely on target. Even in his ignorance, Mark Shea demonstrates that West's "naked without shame" theology is absurd, so that portion of the essay stands. My apologies for incorrectly portraying Mark in a more positive light than he deserves.

Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Every FDR wannabee recognizes that high unemployment, high business closure and high home foreclosure is good for the Democrats.

President Barack Obama muses:

"I had one side of the aisle just sit on the sidelines as the crisis unfolded," Obama said. "And if we had taken that position, just thinking about what was good for my politics, millions more Americans would have lost their jobs and their businesses and their homes."

Now, let's ignore the fact that the "one side of the aisle" he complains about was actually not happy with the amount of money he was spending or the amount of taxation that his spendthrift habits will generate.

Let's just look at what Barack Hussein Obama said:

"If we... [were] just thinking about what was good for my politics, millions more Americans would have lost their jobs and their businesses and their homes. "

He publicly admits that Democrats make hay while the storm blows.

His party, according to him, is the party of doom and gloom that advances only when Americans lose.

Which is exactly what conservatives have been saying for the last ten years.

It's always nice when he brings people together, nicht wahr?

To Bomb or Not To Bomb

The great thing about liberals is, they aren't just spineless cowards, they are stupid spineless cowards.

Take for instance, Comedy Central . Why it was just a week ago that the creators of South Park dressed Mohammed up in a bear suit and had him prance around on the animated set as the main characters tried out various comedic lines (well, not really comedic, except to a five-year old... this is South Park, after all).

Much to the writers' chagrin, Comedy Central decided to ban the episode, lest Muslims be offended and blow them up. A subsequent episode had all references to Mohammed bleeped out.

Following this, a West Coast blogger and artist proposed a "Let's All Draw Mohammed Day" and then immediately withdrew the proposal as it went viral, lest she be blown up as well.

Their concerns were not without foundation.

Within days of the events, a massive car bomb was found scant feet from the headquarters of Viacom in New York's Times Square.

Viacom is the HQ for Comedy Central.

So, the brilliant minds at Comedy Central have now proposed to lampoon Jesus Christ.

Smooth move, Ex-Lax.

• Do these jokers realize that Muslims consider Jesus Christ the third holiest prophet in history, second only to Abraham and Mohammed himself?
• Do they understand that they consider him born of a virgin, and sinless his whole life (along with his mother), a true Muslim who lived the Muslim faith perfectly, just as Mohammed did?
• Do they recognize that Jesus Christ is, according to Muslim theology, the one who will judge everyone on the Last Day?
• Does anyone at Comedy Central read the news? Or read, period? Have they discovered how well Egypt tolerated Elton John's recent remarks about Jesus? Elton should thank his lucky stars he was banned. If he had gone to Egypt, he never would have gotten out alive.

So, YO!

Comedy Central freaks!

How do you think the Muslims will react to you making fun of the Muslim prophet Jesus?

That's right, friend.

They gonna blow you up.

Confirmation Problem

I recently received a question about how a homeschooler might deal with a parish confirmation program that really, really stunk.

Are there any options other than a parish based program to Confirm our children? Our parish does not allow parents to homeschool any of the sacramental years including Confirmation (2 year program). 
My son Lucas detests going to class because it is a class of all boys that he describes as a bunch of crazed monkeys. They disrupt the class the entire 2 hours and it's very hard for him to concentrate. I realize that they all are 12 and 13 and this is normal. But Lucas is very mature for his age thinks it's silly for them to act this way. 
He's asking us why he has to go through this? He could learn all this material at home without all the distraction. It's hard to argue with that logic. We've spoken with our priest and with the director of the Religious Ed program. Both have emphasized the need to be apart of the church "community" and just stick it out. Being part of this particular community (his class) would mean acting like a crazed monkey! So you can see our dilemma. Please send any thoughts and/or suggestions.

This was my response:

You have several options. 

All involve pain.   

1) Once someone is baptized, they may approach ANY legitimate minister of the other sacraments in order to receive those other sacraments. All that is necessary to receive a sacrament is 

(a) the recipient knows what it will do to him/her 

(b) the recipient wants that change to happen and 

(c) the recipient knows enough about the liturgy to successfully move through it.   

That's it.   

So, you could go to ANY PARISH IN THE WORLD in order to get your child confirmed. Any bishop, indeed, any priest whose bishop has given him authority to confirm, can do this for your child. Thus, you are quite within your rights to check out other parishes/dioceses for alternatives. Hispanic children, for example, commonly go to a grandmother's house in Mexico to get confirmed over the summer and avoid the gringo stupidity that you are presently encountering.  

2) You can fight the priest. The documents are QUITE clear on this point. The Rite of Confirmation #3 even says: 

“The initiation of children into the sacramental life is ordinarily the responsibility and concern of Christian parents. They are to form and gradually increase a spirit of faith in the children and, at times with the help of catechism classes, prepare them for the fruitful reception of the sacraments of confirmation and the eucharist.” 
Articles 2220-2225 of the CCC re-state the parental duty/right in slightly different language. CCC 2225 says "Parents should initiate their children at an early age into the mysteries of faith." The phrase "mysteries of faith" is a technical theological term that refers to the sacraments (Part II of the CCC is called "The Mystery of Faith" and it discusses sacraments and liturgy).   The parents are the primary educators of their own children and no pastor, no bishop, no DRE, no deacon, NO ONE can interfere in your right and your duty to prepare your own children for the sacraments. I have a couple of chapters on this in my book, Designed to Fail: Catholic Education in America. 

If you bone up on the Magisterial documents and approach the pastor, making it clear that you know what you're talking about and you will take it to the bishop if he doesn't allow you to prepare your child at home, most pastors will back down because they know they have no ground to stand on.   If you run into a stupid pastor who really wants to fight on this issue, then after talking with him, take it to the bishop. 

Bishops know perfectly well that they can't force you through the parish program. He may or may not bluster and try to bully you into it, but if you stand your ground, he will relent, if only because he wouldn't want you to take it to the papal nuncio, which you should make clear you are willing to do.   

The most common objection is that the parish is supposed to participate in the child's preparation for confirmation. Yes, well, you are part of the parish, so you represent the parish to the child. The parish exists to support the family, not vice versa. Families got along without parishes for the first 1000 years of the Church just fine. Parishes don't exist without families. Parishes must support the parents. Anything else is a violation of the principle of subsidiarity.   

3) You can go into the class with your child, as is your right, and loudly correct any error the confirmation instructors try to bring forward, i.e., make a real nuisance of yourself. It works best if you get ALL the homeschooling parents to do this en masse. Facing a large-scale revolt, the pastor will quickly find an alternative way to deal with homeschoolers.  

The only reason he's been able to ram this down your throats so far is you haven't all gotten together and had a come-to-Jesus meeting with him. If he sees 20 or 30 families all ticked off and all ready to head to the bishop and sit on the bishop's doorstep, the pastor will back down and accommodate you.   Familiaris Consortio (#69-72) recommends that parents form associations to work together for their common good. In this day and age, that means you need to band together against your pastor, break green lumber over his head in order to get his attention, then tell him what he needs to do to fix his ignorance, and his insulting attitude towards the parents in his parish.  

He'll hate you for taking option #3, but that's ok. He'll get over it. And he will cave, guaranteed. Pastors hate parish insurrections. A big insurrection reduces the likelihood that the bishop will give the pastor a cushy parish next time he has to pass through the spring "pastor roulette" when bishop transfers pastors.   

Now, that having been said, bishops don't like noise either, because it looks bad on their vitae if the noise reaches Rome. Given the internet, most noise reaches Rome nowadays. So, #3 is really going to tick off the bishop as well (although Rome won't mind) and it will give homeschoolers a generally bad name with him. I just mention it because it DOES work, if nothing else does.   

4) Skip confirmation for the moment. Yes, I know it's a sacrament, and yes I know it sounds wrong, but if he just waits until he's 18 or 19 to get confirmed, then all of this juvenile behaviour from the pastor and the deacon magically falls away. 

Typically, most parishes have a "catch-up" program for adults who missed confirmation in their youth (which is not uncommon). The adult program is much less onerous, typically only a couple of weeks, and the level of discourse does not involve crazed monkeys.   

It should be noted that, for purposes of receiving a sacrament, canon law recognizes the age of 8 as being an adult. So, technically, an adult prep program for your child is perfectly within his rights if he's 8 years old or older. Now, nobody is going to let your twelve-year old into an adult confirmation program, and I wouldn't argue that you should try, but since your child is unlikely to fall away from the Faith UNLESS he participates in the parish confirmation nonsense, it is actually a prudent decision on your part to simply delay the sacrament until such time as either the boy or the pastor grows up.   

Since the former is more likely to happen than the latter, I don't think it unreasonable to wait until he's 19 for confirmation if you can't avoid the near occasion of sin in the parish program any other way.   Again, #4 is not the best choice, but I throw it out as an option that I think can legitimately be considered if you don't want to pursue the other courses of action.