Articles by Russell Shaw
Getting the message in the Church?
Oct 18, 2011 / 00:00 amDraw yourself an organization chart representing the Catholic Church. What you’ll get is a sketch of an ecclesiastical institution that on paper looks like a genuine world class internal communication machine. Those boxes and lines could lead the beholder to suppose that if the Pope says something on Monday morning, then by the following Sunday evening a billion or so Catholics around the world will have a pretty clear notion of what he’s said. The Church’s network of dioceses, parishes, organizations, institutions, and media all but guarantees that happy result. The same is true of other communications by other communicators all up and down the line in the Church. Messages constantly flowing, messages constantly being received. Correct?Sorry, my friend, but if you think it really works like that, all I can say is: dream on. People who’ve spent some time in communication in and around the Catholic Church can tell you the reality is vastly different.I was reminded of this by news of a study showing only 16% of American Catholics recall even hearing about the most recent of the “political responsibility” statements published quadrennially by the American bishops. And three-quarters of those who’d heard of it said it had “no influence at all” how they voted in 2008. Yes, a small number of professional church watchers have argued about these documents ever since the bishops’ conference began publishing them in 1976. They have been, and to some extent still are, a big bone of contention between liberal and conservative activists. Whether that will be true of the version forthcoming for next year’s election — which, the bishops say, will simply be the 2007 text, with an introduction added — remains to be seen.But hold that argument for another day. The point here is that, except for the activists, few Catholics have read or heeded these much-discussed documents. It’s no surprise. As somebody who drafted many bishops’ statements some years ago and did media relations on behalf of many others, I have no hesitation saying it’s been this way a long time. Not just with bishops’ documents either. The same is true of documents from the Pope and Roman Curia. Catholics by and large don’t read them or know what they say.There are several reasons. Church documents tend to be long and difficult for people without much practice reading them. These days they’re readily available on the internet, but people still must make a small effort to access them — and they don’t. Priests rarely preach on them, and while Catholic papers faithfully report on them, many Catholics can’t be bothered to read the Catholic press to find out what’s going on. Thus, what many Catholics know about the Church and the teaching of the Magisterium comes to them largely (if it comes at all) from the reporting of the secular media. And secular media generally do a better job covering high school field hockey than reporting important statements by the bishops and the Pope. As suggested, though, the largest part of the problem lies elsewhere — with the lethargy and indifference of the numerous Catholics who know little about their Church and won’t make the effort it would take to know more. Maybe it doesn’t matter. No one has to read an encyclical or a bishops’ statement to go to heaven. But at a time when the faith is commonly either ignored or misrepresented by secular purveyors of information and opinion, you’d think more Catholics would make that effort. Or am I the one who’s dreaming?
Is America fighting wars without end?
Sep 27, 2011 / 00:00 amIs America condemned to endless war? And if so, what implications does that have for the American psyche—the American soul?A friend of mine who is a practicing poet writing under the pen name Pavel Chichikov shares a poem composed after hearing the roar of F-16s—presumably engaged in protecting the citizenry—over the section of Washington where he lives. A meditation on “security” as Americans have come to know it, it has a simple point: security comes at a price. “There is a gate that must be closed,/Documents that must be seen,/Private life to be disclosed.” And then we are—safe? I was thinking of these things as I skimmed the outpouring of commentary on the 9/11 anniversary. One piece in particular caught my attention, a page-one article by Greg Jaffe in the Sept. 5 Washington Post describing the evolution of U.S. military policy and the military itself in these last 10 years. Jaffe quoted from a Pentagon assessment that called the present “a period of persistent conflict,” adding: “No one should harbor the illusion that the developed world can win this conflict in the near future.” Jaffe himself spoke of “endless war.” It has numerous consequences. One is the creation of a tight-knit, highly professional military isolated in significant ways from the people on whose behalf it fights. Another is growing skepticism about peace. Earlier this year, Jaffe noted, the House of Representatives voted to eliminate funds for the U.S. Institute of Peace (the money was later restored). “’Peace’…has become something of a dirty word in Washington foreign-policy circles,” he wrote. President Obama doesn’t promise it. His approach is to look for ways of fighting—drone strikes and special forces operations—that are more “cost-effective” than putting thousands of troops into places like Iraq and Afghanistan.You could argue that America has been fighting a war or getting ready to fight one for most of the last 70 years—ever since Pearl Harbor, that is: Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and always background accompaniment courtesy of the cold war or the war on terror. The difference now is that no serious person promises an end. What state of mind does a permanent national security regime produce? Here’s Chichikov again: So that at last the guards deformThe shape of life they should defend,And no one knows of what they warnOr if the siege will ever end.Columns like this one generally conclude by offering solutions, but this tunnel has no easy way out. Neo-isolationism would be suicidal. Continuing America’s dual role as world policeman and anti-terror crusader will eventually drain our material and moral resources. If there’s any escape from the bind, surely it lies in some form of innovative internationalism—the creation of a genuine, working community of nations. But that appears to exceed the political will of America’s leadership class, to say nothing of the leaders of other nations. Pope Benedict sometimes speaks of it, as in his 2009 encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” with its advocacy of “a true world political authority.” Listed as its purposes were “to manage the global economy” in the face of the current crisis, “to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace,” and to deal with urgent issues of environmental protection and migration. Most people, including most Catholics, shrugged that off. The Pope is unrealistic, they said.Perhaps. But this may be a case where idealism is the real realism. It looks a lot better than endless war.
Could the riots in Britain happen here?
Sep 14, 2011 / 00:00 amCommentary on the riots in London and other British cities has frequently made the point that what happened there could be a forerunner of something that might happen in America. And why not? After all, it already has—think of Watts, think of the eruptions in Washington and other American cities after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. The scenery is familiar—we’ve been here before. Yes, there are differences. The obsession in London with grabbing consumer goods was a distinctive, though not unique, feature—visible also in the U.S., to be sure, but perhaps not to the same degree. In the end, though, there’s more than enough similarity to warrant anxiety about what might lie ahead for America. A police incident, an angry crowd, and many U.S. cities could be in the hands of rioters and looters. This isn’t a prediction. Maybe it won’t happen. God grant it doesn’t. But whoever says it couldn’t is living in a dream world. That being so, it behooves Americans to take steps now to prevent it from happening if they can. Given the human propensity for ignoring potential problems until they become real ones, chances are good that won’t be done. But one can hope. As a first step, it would be useful to reach agreement not only on what happened in London but why. As matters stand, there are significantly diverse views on that. One version is that cutbacks in social problems, introduced by an austerity-minded government against the background of already existing poverty, provoked London’s poor and dispossessed to violent rebellion, just as it might do in the U.S. Emphasizing high unemployment, bad schools, a growing rich-poor income and lifestyle gap, and deepseated resentment as causal factors of human behavior, the explanation has about it more than a touch of economic determinism. For their part, conservative analysts agree that the mindset of entitlement created by generous government social welfare programs had primed their London recipients to revolt, just as their American counterparts sooner or later may do. Stressing moral values (or their absence) as a cause, this explanation points to family breakdown, fatherless homes, greed, envy, permissiveness, and moral relativism as causes. As a matter of fact, though, it’s not a case of either-or. Both of these explanations are partly right. It is simplistic to the point of absurdity to reduce the causes of the riots and looting to one thing only, whether the thing that supposedly explains everything be a set of economic grievances or a widespread moral collapse. Either explanation alone, without the other, presents a dangerously misleading picture of the social and individual pathologies that we witnessed in the streets of London. It’s just here that churches can play an important role—if they so choose. The gospel uniquely equips them to preach both parts of the message we need to hear—a message that underlines the importance of justice and equity in the economic realm side by side with moral values like family stability and a sense of personal responsibility. This is to say that—to head off trouble if for no better reason—churches are in a strong position to make the point that America needs a renewed, value-based secular culture in place of the decadent, morally bankrupt we’ve got now. Instead of blaming all our problems on poverty (on the one hand) or moral relativism (on the other), religious voices should be raised making the complex but realistic argument that both evils are deadly foes of a healthy civil society.
Two easy steps for one-on-one evangelization
Aug 30, 2011 / 00:00 amA man I know was sitting on a boardwalk bench several weeks ago watching the ocean and thinking about nothing special. Two young men, maybe 18 or 20, came up and sat down beside him. The one nearest him leaned over and said:“Excuse me, sir, do you mind if I ask you a question?” He was very polite and seemed slightly nervous. The older man smiled and shook his head, indicating that he had no objection to being asked. “If you were to die right now and find yourself standing at the gate of heaven, what reason would you give God for letting you in?” The man thought for a moment, then replied: “Because I’ve been baptized, because I believe Jesus Christ is my redeemer, because I believe in the mercy of God.” The young man seemed a little surprised. Maybe he’d expected an argument. Turning to his companion, he said: “He says he believes Jesus Christ is his redeemer.”Then to the older man: “Thank you, sir, for your time.” And the two young men got up and headed for the beach. The man sat there thinking about what had happened. He supposed the young fellows were members of some evangelical Protestant group. You wouldn’t catch many Catholics doing that, he thought. And that’s a shame. I agree — it’s a shame. Some people would say the young man’s technique was naïve and clumsy. No doubt. But clearly he was motivated by love of God, and now and then a pitch like his will open someone’s heart to grace. Which is all God asks of us or needs. So why don’t Catholics do it? Several reasons come to mind. One is that many have bought into the belief that religion is strictly a private affair. There’s a sense in which that’s true of course, but in its contemporary form it usually expresses American individualism in a religious context. Another reason is the fear that if they raise the God question with a stranger, the stranger will laugh in their face. Or call them a fool. Or tell them to go you-know-where. How embarrassing! Finally — and this is a very Catholic reason — many lay people take it for granted that one-on-one evangelizing is a priest’s job, not theirs. That’s clericalism at work. Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI both have spoken repeatedly about something they call the “new evangelization” — rekindling faith in places where it’s at risk of dying out. Hearing that, people may suppose that the new evangelization will have to take the form of a big, complex, organized program, probably with lots of media thrown in. Very likely that’s part of it. But more crucial to the success of the new evangelization than any organized program, with or without media, is what individual Catholic lay people do — or fail to do. There are two simple steps any lay person can and should take right now to be part of the new evangelization, without waiting for the Pope or the Synod of Bishops or their pastor to give them their marching orders. The first is to be exemplary in living out the faith with courage and conviction — not just on Sunday but every day of the week. People of faith attract attention nowadays, sometimes favorable, sometimes not. That’s evangelization. The second is to study the faith to be able to explain it intelligently and defend it when it’s attacked. That also is evangelization. If you aren’t already doing these two things, start now.
Presidential candidates and religion
Aug 23, 2011 / 00:00 amAs America gears up for another presidential election season, do we really have to agonize yet again over whether being a Mormon disqualifies a person for the presidency? Since the answer apparently is yes, at least let’s try to get some use from the discussion by understanding what’s really at stake. With two Mormon ex-governors in contention for the Republican nomination, the polls—those omnipresent, omniscient, and too often uncriticized monitors of public opinion—find fully 25 percent of Americans less likely to vote for a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. But hang on. Upon closer examination, it turns out that figure is deceptive. Within the larger group that makes up the 2 5 percent, liberal Democrats—41 percent of them, we’re told—are less likely to support a Mormon. The reason, suggests The Washington Post, is “the church’s social conservatism and the fact that Mormons tend to be Republicans.” Well, yes. But in that case liberal Democrats’ antipathy is based not on religion as such but on politics. Think what you like of it, at least it isn’t an expression of religious bias—and there’s less dislike of Mormon candidates on theological grounds than the 25 percent figure might at first suggest. All the same, it does seem likely that at least some of those who look askance at a Mormon contender for the White House do that because of his church. Just here we run up against the Constitution’s ban on a religious test for public office. It is extremely important, however, to grasp what the no-religious-test principle does and doesn’t rule out. Specifically, this is a guarantee of the right of anyone of any faith persuasion to run for public office and, if he or she wins, to serve. It has nothing to do with the right—indeed, the duty—of voters to apply relevant criteria derived in part from their own religious formation to the task of evaluating candidates. For example: Where does a candidate stand on abortion, on capital punishment, on same-sex marriage, on cutting entitlement spending? These are questions that voters are entitled to raise precisely against the background of their own deeply held faith-based convictions. Over 50 years ago, John Kennedy muddied these particular waters by promising the Protestant ministers of Houston that as president he wouldn’t be influenced by his Catholicism. Kennedy’s privatizing of religion has borne much bitter fruit in the past half-century. Among other things, it has been extended—in line with secularist thinking—to imply that citizens shouldn’t be influenced by their religiously grounded values in deciding how to vote. But many are so influenced. And, provided the values in question are pertinent to true political concerns, that’s not only inevitable but right. As there are no atheists in foxholes, so in the voting booth, voters—including atheists—should be guided by their conscientious convictions. And those two Mormon would-be candidates—what about them (or, for that matter, what about Michele Bachmann, who severed her ties with a Lutheran sect that thinks the Pope is Antichrist)? If either Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, or Bachmann winds up on the ballot, the appropriate question for a conscientious voter who’s a person of faith won’t be: How do I feel about this individual’s church? It will be: How do I rate the candidate’s ability to promote a good and just society according to my own religiously formed convictions about what such a society should be like? That’s responsible citizenship. Don’t let some secularist mouthpiece in the media tell you differently.
The 'Dolan Doctrine' and Catholic politicians
Aug 3, 2011 / 00:00 amHeat, not light, is the usual fruit of political passion. How refreshing, then, that some significant light on the vexed question of Catholics in politics managed to break through amid an ugly little controversy a while back. With another election year hard upon us, it’s worth reflecting on what transpired then.In May, some 80 professors teaching at assorted Catholic colleges and universities whipped up an argument with a letter protesting the Catholic University of America’s decision to have Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) as commencement speaker. But just when it seemed least likely, somebody actually said something sensible. Credit Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, with that. Although he wasn’t speaking about the Boehner controversy, his words — in a letter to House budget committee chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.)—clearly did apply there. Thanking Ryan for assurances of “continued attention to the guidance of Catholic social justice” in budget negotiations, Archbishop Dolan said this: “The principles of Catholic social teaching contain truths that need to be applied. Thus, one must always exercise prudential judgment in applying these principles while never contradicting the intrinsic values.” And then: “We bishops are very conscious that we are pastors, never politicians….As the Second Vatican Council reminds us, it is the lay faithful who have the specific charism of political leadership and decision.” Archbishop Dolan was neither toeing the GOP line on the budget nor was he condemning it. He was saying that, assuming they’re committed to the principles of Catholic social doctrine, lay people with appropriate expertise — not bishops or the Church as such — are the ones who should be arguing for and against specific policy positions. (Ryan and Boehner are both Catholics.) On that basis, Democrats and Republicans in Congress—and college professors too—are free to battle it out among themselves. But it’s implicit in the Archbishop’s words that they aren’t free to say, as the college professors said of Boehner, that an opponent’s views on matters of prudential judgment are “at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings”—in this case, concern for the poor. If that leaves you wondering: no, saying this doesn’t open the door to the pro-choice position on abortion (or embryonic stem cell research or same-sex marriage or assisted suicide). Here, fundamental moral principles clearly rule out support. The question here, however—a very different one—is how to shape a budget that serves the common good. That’s devilish hard work and necessarily open to a variety of opinions, as the 80 professors should know. Archbishop Dolan’s comments appear to signal a helpful new approach to political questions by the American bishops. If that’s so, then perhaps we will be spared some of the headaches of the past in the political season ahead. Ever since the 1970s, the national bishops’ conference has saluted the approach of election years with statements outlining what it considered to be the political responsibilities of Catholic voters. Fair enough. Unfortunately, those statements rather often erred by pronouncing on prudential questions that Archbishop Dolan concedes are beyond the pastoral competence of bishops. Confusion, not enlightenment, was the result. (This tangled history is reviewed at length in J. Brian Benestad’s illuminating new introduction to social doctrine Church, State, and Society published by the Catholic University of America Press.) If the Dolan Doctrine means the bishops’ conference henceforth means to concentrate on forming consciences by enunciating doctrinal principles while leaving practical applications to the laity, that’s welcome news.
Why God lets bad things happen
Jul 12, 2011 / 00:00 amWhy did God let that happen?For centuries that question has been asked about items in the endless catalogue of human misery. About the Holocaust, Midwestern tornadoes, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. And about intimate personal tragedies: a teenager killed in an auto crash, an old person dying unwanted and alone, a marriage that collapses amid bitter recriminations. Why does God permit such things? Start with the fact that whoever claims to have the definitive answer is either talking through his hat or doesn’t understand the depth and complexity of the problem. In the Old Testament, God’s response to Job is blunt: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?...Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?” Here and now that’s about as much of an answer as we can expect. In the New Testament, moreover, Jesus, speaking of a man born blind and of people killed when a tower fell, dismisses out of hand the idle speculation of bystanders that these unhappy events were God’s way of punishing somebody’s sins. All the same, it sheds a glimmer of light on the mystery to realize that the very same question—why does God let that happen?—applies as much to good things as to bad ones. Why does God permit happy marriages? A promotion at work? Satisfaction in a vocation? These happy things are as real as the unhappy ones, and God’s hand is at much in operation in the good as in the bad. Why does he permit them? About the good things, of course, we suppose we know the answer: God permits them because he wants us to be happy. But that’s too superficial an explanation. God also wants people who suffer to be happy. So why does he allow their suffering? Fully to understand why God permits anything, good or bad, we’d need to know the whole of his providential plan. But that is something we can’t know until we see God face to face in heaven. Then, presumably, it will become clear how everything fits together in the final fulfillment of God’s will. For now, we can only guess. But we do have some hints to lend a hand in our efforts to cope. In a 1984 document called “Salvifici Doloris,” Pope John Paul II, following St. Paul, finds the “Christian meaning” of suffering in participation in the redemptive suffering of Christ. Suffering offers people a way to become co-redeemers with Christ, share in his redemptive activity, expiate their sins, and contribute to the process by which the merits of the redemption are extended to others. So three cheers for suffering? Not at all. This explanation doesn’t attempt to say why God permits suffering. And it doesn’t pretend that suffering is pleasant. All it does—and it’s a lot—is invest the experience with meaning. For people who grasp it, that can have, in John Paul’s words, “the value of a final discovery, which is accompanied by joy.” The redemptive value of Jesus’ life doesn’t lie only in suffering. It’s present in his life as a whole. From that perspective, it makes sense to think of the happy things in our lives as participations in the happy moments in Christ’s redemptive life: family affection in the house at Nazareth, productive labor in Joseph’s workshop, get-togethers with the apostles when things were going well. All of it had redemptive value along with the cross. Just as all that happens in our lives, both suffering and joy, can have redemptive value too.
What the Pill brought us
Jun 29, 2011 / 00:00 amIf you have access to the April 29 issue of The New Republic, take a look at a long review of several new books on abortion. The work of Christine Stansell, a professor of history at the University of Chicago and herself author of a history of feminism, it’s worth reading on several counts. Full of misinformation and misinterpretation, punctuated by invective and anti-Catholicism, it’s an unintended primer for people with traditional views that illustrates what they face in confronting the mindset of secular feminism. Negatives aside, though, Professor Stansell does make one important point. The introduction of the birth control pill in the United States in 1963, she writes, was the start of a “revolution in assumptions about sex and its consequences” based on “the central tenet of modern heterosexual life, [namely] the separation of pregnancy from sex.”Here is the dawning of the era of “worry-free contraception”—with abortion available (and soon to be legal, thanks to the Supreme Court) as “a method of birth control when other measures failed.” What’s surprising about this is that it’s basically what Pope Paul VI said in his 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae” condemning contraception. To be sure, Pope Paul didn’t refer to the “separation of pregnancy from sex” as Professor Stansell does, but instead, more delicately, to “the inseparable connection … between the unitive significance and the procreative significance” of the act. With all due respect to the Pope, I prefer the Stansell version—“the separation of pregnancy from sex”—since it bluntly expresses what’s really involved here. But regardless of the words, the Pope and the Professor are saying the same thing: separate the purposes or meanings of this act by means of contraception, and you take a radical step that has serious consequences. Professor Stansell thinks the consequences are very good. Pope Paul clearly does not. On the contrary, he said, once you do this the way will be “wide open to marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards.” He was right. This plainly has happened the last half-century, despite widespread refusal to acknowledge the fact. The refusal is a product of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in a journal article back in 1993, memorably called “defining deviancy down.” When a society suffers from an over-supply of deviant behavior, Moynihan explained, one way it handles the problem is by redefinition, so that activity previously considered deviant is now seen as normal. That in a nutshell is what’s happened in the case of contraception, whose universal approval in the United States, a phenomenon of just the last 80 years, received its final boost from the marketing of The Pill. Just as Pope Paul said, the emergence of the contraceptive mentality and the contraceptive culture that came with it have paved the way for other behaviors that many people still recognize as forms of deviancy with destructive social consequences. Among these are cohabitation, illegitimacy, abortion, and the decline of traditional marriage. Like others, Professor Stansell thinks The Pill has been liberating. That’s true in a very limited sense. The Pill makes it safe to act on instinct, impulse, urge. But there’s nothing humanly liberating about that. Freedom in a human sense is freedom to make self-determining choices, while chastity—temperance in the realm of sexuality—is the virtue empowering one to choose in favor of self-control instead of being driven by instinct. It’s a measure of how far we’ve traveled the other way that simply saying it sounds strange to so many people in America today.
In praise of 'good-enough' parents
Jun 16, 2011 / 00:00 amBack in prehistoric times when my wife and I were busy doing our parenting, I paid very little attention to the many books that promised to tell me how to do the job really well. My loss, I suppose. Yet I can’t help thinking my omission may have reflected a healthy instinct.After all, if I’d spent a lot of time studying some expert’s version of what an ideal father was like, chances are good that I’d only have ended up depressed at how far short my own efforts fell—and at the realization that, no matter how many books I read, they probably wouldn’t get a whole lot better. Being a parent is hard enough without making yourself feel worse about your inadequacies than you already do. Let mediocre be mediocre, I say. Perhaps it’s this inglorious personal history that moves me now, midway between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, to say few kind words on behalf of the sort of parents many of us either are or once were—parents, that is, who are not Wonder Mom and Super Dad but only good enough. Being a parent is probably the most important job most people will ever have and one for which few receive any formal training. Under the circumstances, being good enough is no small thing, especially since the real-life alternative usually isn’t being Super Dad or Wonder Mom but being a total flop. What does a good enough parent look like? Good enough parents often don’t know just what to say or do in times of family crisis, but at least they stick around when things get tough and see it through to the end as best they can. Good enough parents sometimes blow their stacks when provoked beyond endurance by their little darlings (or their spouses), but they usually don’t smash the furniture and they generally calm down fairly soon. Good enough parents don’t really care that much about a lot of the things that interest their children (a good enough father, for instance, may not play basketball or have any interest in the sport), but they’re reasonably adept at faking enthusiasm for harmless stuff that fascinates their kids. And religion? The notion of being good enough applies here too, but the standard of what that means in practice has to be a good deal higher. “It appears that the relative religious laxity of most U.S. Catholic teenagers significantly reflects the religious laxity of their parents,” one researcher says. Studies of young people who care little or nothing about faith have shown that they generally are the products of homes where parents don’t care much about it either. This confirms the well-known rule of parenting that although your kids may not pick up your good habits, almost always they’ll pick up your bad ones. That doesn’t mean a good enough parent has to be an honest to goodness saint, but at least he or she has to be seen giving it an honest try and continuing the effort day-in and day-out in ways kids can observe. Consider, too, that good enough parenting itself may be a way to sainthood. In these confused times, when many Americans duck marriage and parenthood entirely, it would be foolish to chide those who still take up the challenge for not doing better at it. The message should be that they’re doing plenty—and something almost everybody can manage—by being good enough. And then, just possibly, they really will be Wonder Mom or Super Dad.
Islamic radicalism after bin Laden
May 23, 2011 / 00:00 amSome early media reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden were, to use as charitable a word as possible, unserious. To such a point that one was reminded of a scene in "The Wizard of Oz." The wicked witch has been killed, and the other characters dance about and merrily sing, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead!” There are several things to be said about that kind of coverage and commentary on the killing of bin Laden. One is that it was in hideously bad taste. The death of any human being is a profoundly serious affair. That’s no less true because bin Laden was himself the author of many other people’s deaths, including those of several thousand Americans. On this point, the Vatican’s reaction got it right. While noting bin Laden’s many heinous crimes, the statement nevertheless added that “a Christian never takes pleasure from the fact of a man’s death” but sees it instead as an occasion not “to disseminate hate but rather to foster peace.” On a different plane, it’s imperative also to grasp the fact that bin Laden’s death in no way removes the threat to Western—and Christian—interests that he symbolized. On this point there was much to ponder in an Op-Ed column in The New York Times by former National Security Council counter-terrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke. The declared goal of Al Qaeda and similar groups, Clarke said, is to create a kind of federation of “religiously pure Islamist states”—a restored “Islamic caliphate,” that is. For Islamist ideologues, the present Arab Spring is a step toward that end. And although bin Laden is dead, “their goal has not changed, nor has their willingness to use terror.” “Believing that their religion requires them to act violently against nonbelievers in the West and impure, apostate Muslim elites, the Islamist extremists will not be stopped by the elimination of Al Qaeda’s leader or even by the eradication of Al Qaeda itself,” Clarke warned. This point was reinforced for me soon after bin Laden’s killing in a private session for a small group conducted by an eminent canon lawyer. The subject was canon law and Islamic Shari’a law. The lesson was illuminating. Canon law, the canonist pointed out, is a body of legislation that applies only to the Catholic Church. In no way does it usurp the function of civil law. But Shari’a is expansive and pervasive—indeed, potentially universal in scope. The fundamental reason is that classical Islam doesn’t recognize the distinction, taken for granted in the West, between church and state, the next-worldly realm of religion and the this-worldly realm of the temporal order. Society is considered a unitary whole, to be shaped and controlled by Islam and Shari’a as appointed instruments of Allah. Shari’a law therefore reaches into every nook and cranny of the lives of individuals and the life of the community. Where they are weak, the canonist remarked, traditionalist Muslims are prepared to live with the Western system because they have no other choice. Where they hold power, religious conviction obliges them to impose Shari’a, with results more or less to the disadvantage of non-Muslims. If that is so, prospects for peaceful coexistence between Islamic traditionalists and non-Muslims will remain bleak as long as the traditionalists continue to believe what they believe. Among the several conclusions to which that points is that Western media need to go slow in touting the forces currently battling Arab dictators as “pro-democracy” as they’ve been doing. Sorry, friends, this isn’t Oz.
The new culture war — social democrats vs. democratic capitalists
May 10, 2011 / 00:00 amFor a long time I supposed that social issues — abortion, same-sex marriage, and the rest — were the great dividing line in American politics, with the collapse of natural law thinking at the root of the problem. While I still see the culture war resulting from this as a large part of what ails us, I’ve come belatedly to understand that something else also is at work: conflict between two fundamentally different visions of government’s role in bringing about a good and just society — and perhaps even what that society should look like. Wishing to be fair to them both (a nicety their partisans generally ignore), I’m hesitant even to give them names. But since to speak of them it’s necessary to call them something, I suggest “social democracy” and “democratic capitalism.” At bottom, social democracy sees government as a provider and democratic capitalism sees it as an enabler. As we are now being reminded, many large conflicts in contemporary America find their origin in that difference. It needs exploring. Many years ago, George Santayana, the erstwhile Harvard philosopher who lived in this country for most of four decades, concluded that individualism and good will coexist at the heart of the American character. How can that be? As he explained it, the instinct of an American was “to think well of everybody, and to wish everybody well, but in a spirit of rough comradeship.”“When he has given his neighbor a chance,” Santayana said, “he thinks he has done enough….It will take some hammering to drive a coddling socialism into America.” Not long after, the hammering began via the Great Depression and the New Deal. Much that’s happened since then has served to continue it. Government in America has moved beyond simply providing a safety net, to meeting a vast range of people’s needs and wants, from day care and prescription drugs to arts subsidies and public broadcasting. Call it coddling, as Santayana did, or call it enlightened social policy, that’s where we are now. But now, too, we have a lagging economy in combination with a soaring deficit, with threats of national bankruptcy looming in the background. Hence the debate that will dominate the run-up to next year’s election, essentially driven by the clashing visions here called democratic capitalism and social democracy. Does Catholic social doctrine have anything to contribute to the debate? Certainly it does. But it remains to be seen whether those officially responsible for articulating that body of teaching will rise to the occasion. A recent statement on federal budget policy from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops highlighted concern for the poor as a criterion of budgetary decisions. Quite so. But the official representatives of Catholic social doctrine ought also to be taking the further step of pointing out that for many of America’s poor, poverty has not only economic causes but also cultural — in other words, moral — ones that entitlements alone can’t solve. To pass over the roles that family breakdown, illegitimacy, no-fault divorce, single parenthood, toxic schooling, drugs, and early dropping out have in creating the culture of poverty vastly oversimplifies the problem. And to say that isn’t blaming the poor for poverty but simply recognizing inconvenient facts. Facing up to social issues is no substitute for economic policy, but ignoring the link between the two spheres is also a mistake. Helping people see the link and respond appropriately could be Catholic social doctrine’s biggest contribution to bridging the gap between social democracy and democratic capitalism in today’s America.
Pope John Paul II showed the world how to carry the cross
Apr 25, 2011 / 00:00 amStrange as it may seem at first, I find the key to the sanctity of Pope John Paul II in the closing words of an American novel published in 1988 — a book the Pope most likely never read. In brief, the heart of John Paul’s practice of “heroic charity” resides in the fact that he showed the world how to carry the cross. His May 1 beatification — the formal declaration that he’s “blessed” as a step on the way to recognition as a saint — is expected to be one of the biggest events Rome has seen in years. Those gathered in the heartland of Christianity, as well as the millions joyfully following the event around the world, will undoubtedly be celebrating the obvious greatness of this extraordinary man. John Paul was human, and he made mistakes. He was slow to come to grips with the sex abuse problem, and not all his choices for bishop turned out well. But among the conspicuous elements of his greatness were his key role in the fall of communism, which he helped bring about by his powerful support for the Polish people’s deeply spiritual rebellion against their communist overlords; his remarkable body of encyclicals and other teaching documents positioning Catholics to engage contemporary secular culture; and his dramatic, globe-circling travels that captured the imaginations and moved the hearts of people throughout the world. Important as all this was, however, to me the heart of his sanctity resides somewhere else. I find the idea expressed at the end of J.F. Powers’s second novel and last book, Wheat That Springeth Green. Powers, a serious Catholic, was not a prolific writer — he published just three books of short stories and two novels — but he was a subtle and insightful one as well as a careful craftsman. Wheat That Springeth Green tells the story of an American priest named Joe, a would-be wearer of a hairshirt during his seminary years, who as a pastor in the post-Vatican II Church learns what everyday penitential suffering really means. In an incident that recalls an episode in the life of St. John Vianney, patron saint of parish priests, Joe deserts his post and runs away. But, also like the Cure d’Ars, he soon relents and turns back. Not long after that, friends give Father Joe a birthday party. After it’s over, he’s heading to his car when another priest, Lefty by name, calls after him about a chair he’s offered to give Joe and Joe has declined: “Sure you don’t want that chair?” “Joe shook his head and kept going, calling back, ‘Yes,’ and when Dave called after him, ‘Where is it you’re stationed now — Holy…Faith?’ Joe shook his head and kept going, calling back, ‘Cross.’” What does that have to do with John Paul II? Just this. In his declining years — old, sick, increasingly incapacitated by Parkinsonism — he soldiered on, demonstrating how a son of God accepts the Father’s will, takes up his cross, and goes to meet his death. Other public men have hidden their weakness and disability — among American presidents, think of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy.Popes have sometimes done the same. John Paul handled it differently, carrying on his ministry as pastor of the universal Church as well as his failing strength allowed and allowing the world to witness his weakness in a display of uncommon heroism. No doubt there are many reasons why he deserves to be called “Blessed” and some day “Saint.” This one seems central to me.
Libya proves: Just war theory doesn’t go far enough
Apr 12, 2011 / 00:00 amThe military intervention in Libya by the United States and NATO offers new evidence that the just war theory stands in need of rethinking. The theory is fine as far as it goes. The problem is it doesn’t go far enough. People who say the just war theory should be scrapped because modern warfare makes it irrelevant miss the point. Even nuclear war is unthinkable, though not thereby impossible, precisely in light of just war principles like proportionality (the force used should be reasonable in light of the military goal) and discrimination (don’t kill noncombatants by using indiscriminate force). But military conflicts like the one in Libya do raise questions that classical just war theory simply did not envisage. Some of the current confusion over the rationale and goals of the intervention may reflect that fact. Hence the need for fresh thinking aimed at developing the theory. For example: the typical case assumed by just war analysis is one in which a nation is weighing whether to take up arms to defend itself against what it regards as unjust aggression. Here principles come into play like just cause, competent authority, efforts to resolve the situation peacefully, right intention, reasonable probability of success, and good results proportionate to the harm the use of force will bring about. The basic question raised by Libya comes, of course, right at the start. Moammar Gadhafi was not attacking or threatening to attack the United States or its allies. Instead the Libyan tyrant was in the process of gunning down Libyans who’d had the temerity to rise up in protest against his tyrannical regime. Thus the grounds for intervention were said to be humanitarian: preventing the slaughter of Libyan civilians. Many Americans respond favorably to this rationale, and very likely with good reason. Without much tweaking of the principle, military intervention to protect innocent people from being massacred can well be seen as covered by the just war principle of resisting unjust aggression. But that only points to further questions. Here are a few. Should humanitarian intervention go beyond halting the violence and extend to regime change—toppling the tyrant? There seems to be no agreement on that at the upper levels of the American government, much less within the NATO coalition. And if the correct answer is sometimes but not always, the question then becomes: when? Even an authoritarian government has a right, and sometimes a duty, to use force when necessary to maintain or restore public order. But when does this use of force become unjust and merit outside intervention? Should the United States be prepared to intervene in a civil war on behalf of the side it favors? If so, when and under what conditions? Most people would agree that, generally speaking, intervention should first of all take the form of steps like sanctions and blockades, with direct military action employed only when and if it becomes necessary. But clearly there are exceptions—times when military action must come first. What are they? Just war thinking requires that the decision to go to war be taken by the competent authority. But who is that today? In Libya, America and its allies took the precaution of getting a green light from the U.N. Security Council. Is that step always necessary now, or should it sometimes be set aside in the interests of greater goods? And for the White House to ponder: Isn’t it in the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution to consult Congress before the shooting starts?
Bernard Nathanson and the Church of forgiveness
Apr 4, 2011 / 00:00 amAfter the death of Dr. Bernard Nathanson last month, we were reminded that somebody once asked him why he became a Catholic. Because, said Dr. Nathanson — a leader in the movement to legalize abortion who had performed or presided over many thousands of abortions before seeing the light and becoming ardently pro-life — no other religion provides as much opportunity for forgiveness as the Catholic Church does, and he had a lot to be forgiven for. Bernard Nathanson was a realist. What about the 75 percent of American Catholics who, according to polls, receive the sacrament of penance less than once a year or never? Escapists perhaps? This year as in other recent Lents, dioceses and parishes across the country are making a push to get Catholics back to this neglected sacrament. I wish them much success. The flight from sacramental penance has been one of the genuine disasters of contemporary Catholic life. What explains it? Many things undoubtedly combine to play a part: an often-cited loss of the sense of sin, fatuous presumption that God approves of me no matter what, shame at the prospect of confessing one’s sins after a long time (give it a try: it won’t hurt). But part of it, I feel certain, has to do with contraception. It works this way. Last time I looked, the surveys were reporting that something like eight out of 10 American Catholics said they thought contraception was okay and the Church was wrong about it. Obviously this includes many of childbearing, child-rearing age who are practicing contraception now. As far as the sacrament of penance is concerned, these people don’t want to confess contraception because they believe — or anyway say they believe — it isn’t wrong, and they don’t care to give it up. But they don’t want not to confess it since they know perfectly well that the Church says something different, so not confessing would be, well, kind of dishonest. The non-solution to the dilemma is not to receive the sacrament at all. Which is where we are now. I have no easy remedy for this situation, but one approach that might help a bit is to present the sacrament of penance not so much as an obligation but — as Bernard Nathanson understood — a marvelous opportunity: a chance to get rid of one’s burden of objective guilt and start over again with a forgiving God. As for those who may be somewhat more advanced in the interior life but who’ve neglected penance for whatever reason or combination of reasons: bear in mind that contrition and penance are closely linked to conversion and all but indispensable to it. All three go together to make up a complex, continuing process of lifelong growth in the Christian life — a process that necessarily includes awareness of one’s sins, a healthy sense of guilt, and the desire to be forgiven. The first letter of St. John says it best: “Sin is with us; if we deny that, we are cheating ourselves; it means the truth does not dwell in us. No, it is when we confess our sins that (God) forgives our sins, ever true to his word, ever dealing right with us, and all our wrong-doing is purged away. If we deny that we have sinned, it means that we are treating him as a liar; it means that his word does not dwell in our hearts” (1 John 1:8-9). Sometimes people say they don’t go to confession because they have nothing to confess. Tell that to St. John!
Of poetry, the “sacramental sense,” and liturgical renewal
Mar 18, 2011 / 00:00 amSome years ago the critic George Steiner published a provocative book called “Real Presences.” As far as I know, Steiner wasn’t a believer, but his book was a respectful look at something he considered a serious problem: the loss of the sacramental sense in Western culture. It can be read as a kind of appendix to Charles Taylor’s later, magisterial “A Secular Age,” which reflects on the secularization process as a whole. If Steiner was right—and I believe he was—this loss of sacramentality is the fundamental challenge facing both liturgy and poetry today. “I can see far though I never use eyes,/The sight that I see with is not your affair…” These lines from a recent poem by a friend of mine, Pavel Chichikov (that’s a pen name, of course), express an understandable exasperation. Like poets generally, this one knows all too well that the special “sight” with which he views the world isn’t widely shared any more. It’s the sacramental sense, and it’s largely been lost. I was reminded of these things while reading a new Chichikov volume, “From Here to Babylon” (Grey Owl Press). The poems are informed by a special sensibility—in this case, one with a deeply religious coloration—that goes beyond surfaces to the numinous dimension of reality. In modern times poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson have possessed this quality in an eminent degree. So does Chichikov. As in this, on a tree in winter: On the stricken tree I saw the ChristLeaning toward the current of the river;Underneath the foolish soldiers dicedTo win a spotless garment without seams—They gambled with the little ivory flowersThat grew along the margin of the stream.This is how poets see things. And it’s a way of seeing largely unappreciated now. Liturgy presents a similar case—a sacramental action requiring a knack for seeing in a certain way that few people today possess. This may be why the liturgical reform envisaged by Vatican II hasn’t succeeded as well as hoped. Yes, liturgical abuses that cropped up here and there back in the 1970s did have something to do with it, but, offensive as the abuses were, the problem goes beyond a few clown Masses and readings from “The Prophet.” At bottom, liturgical reform didn’t work so well because “active participation” in liturgy was widely taken to mean staying busy—reciting words, singing songs, shaking hands, doing this and that—instead of seeing with eyes of faith that which liturgy makes sacramentally present. Now we’re preparing for the introduction, shortly before next Christmas, of still still another English translation of the Mass. Critics of the new translation say they prefer the version now in use—pedestrian, flat, not much removed from everyday speech. The new English version may or may not touch transcendence (we’ll find out soon enough), but it tries. The big question may be how many people today are equipped to recognize success even if it succeeds. In his apostolic exhortation on sacred Scripture, “Verbum Domini,” Pope Benedict speaks of the Church’s need for the witness of contemplatives in a world “excessively caught up in outward activities.” Is contemplation the key to an authentic renewal of liturgy? Perhaps. If so, poetry, which looks beyond surfaces and seeks to share what it sees, has a role to play. We need poets like Pavel Chichikov for their own sakes and also to point the way in the great project of restoring the sacramental sense.
Looking to 2012, an uncertain future for social conservatives
Mar 2, 2011 / 00:00 amWriting recently about Rick Santorum’s quest to become the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, George Will remarked that Santorum’s chances depend on social conservatives who currently feel ignored and would be naturally sympathetic to someone like the former GOP senator from Pennsylvania. I venture no opinion on Santorum’s prospects. But about the present condition of social conservatives—for whom abortion and the defense of traditional marriage are issues of paramount priority—Will is entirely correct. Pro-lifers in the Republican-controlled House have lately been making a push for abortion-related legislation that social conservatives happily support. Unfortunately, there is little chance that the legislation can get through the Democratic-controlled Senate and virtually none that President Obama would sign it. And with this exception, there just isn’t much on the horizon for social conservatives to cheer about. Congress rolled over and played dead a while back on the issue of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and it’s scary to think what the Senate might do if Obama gets a chance to nominate another pro-abortion justice to the Supreme Court. Still, the social conservatives’ sense of frustration is hardly new. The Democratic party gave them a cold shoulder nearly four decades ago. As for the Republicans, whenever I write on these matters I can count on hearing from people who wish to remind me that, despite its official conservatism on social issues, the GOP has often been more talk than action, and Republican presidents have sent more than their share of pro-choice justices to the Supreme Court. No wonder social conservatives are out of sorts. Like other Americans advocating various other causes, they want change. Who will give it to them, and when, are the great imponderables. Catholic voters over the years have contributed a lot to bringing about this present state of affairs. Another conservative columnist, Michael Gerson, cut to the heart of the matter with words that deserve to be taken most seriously. Remarking on the fact that the number of Catholic Republicans in the House had risen to 64 (as against 68 Democrats), Gerson asked what difference that would make. His answer: “Judging from the broader behavior of Catholics in American politics, not much.” “A century ago,” he wrote, “many Catholics voted Democratic out of ethnic solidarity. Today, most Catholics vote exactly like their suburban neighbors. Catholics are often swing voters in elections because they are so typical….There is something vaguely disturbing about the precise symmetry of any religious group with other voters of their same class and background. One would hope that an ancient, demanding faith would leave some distinctive mark.” But even though Catholics as a body share the values and voting patterns of everybody else in their neighborhood, their Church, as Gerson notes, marches to a different drummer. Quite simply, the Catholic Church in its teaching is neither simplistically “conservative” nor stereotypically “liberal” by contemporary secular standards. Rather, it’s distinctively itself. More than most groups, and certainly more than either of our political parties, the Church, proceeding from moral principle, combines “conservative” and “liberal” stands on issues in a coherent body of policy views that it brings to the political debate.Obviously, not all individual Catholics also fit this profile, but some do. Typically, such people are strongly pro-life and committed to traditional marriage, and also strongly supportive of comprehensive immigration reform and of economic policies based on social justice. Even more than generic “social conservatives,” these Catholics seek a party and candidates to support in 2012. I hope they find them.
Identity
Feb 14, 2011 / 00:00 amRecent, apparently unrelated developments point to a stepped-up effort by the bishops to bolster the Catholic identity of Catholic higher education and Catholic health care in America. Along with many other people, I wish the bishops well in this enterprise, but I can’t help noticing that the new initiatives come mighty late.Expressing concern about “the ability of our institutions to carry out their mission in conformity with our faith,” Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York cited “increasing political and social pressures that are trying to force the Church to compromise her principles.” Archbishop Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, was speaking specifically of Catholic hospitals, but the much the same concerns apply to Catholic colleges and universities.Start with them. Last month USCCB announced plans for a 10-year review of the bishops’ policy document on the Catholic identity of Church-related institutions of higher learning. Worked out in collaboration with university representatives, the scheme calls for bishops to meet one-on-one in the months ahead with the presidents of Catholic colleges and universities in their dioceses.The bishops will discuss the results at their general meeting next November, and the findings will then be presented to Archbishop Dolan for whatever action he may care to take.It would be hard to quarrel with sitting down and talking. “Dialogue between bishop and president provides an important means to foster a mutually beneficial relationship,” says Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry of Los Angeles, chairman of the USCCB education committee. No doubt. But recall that it was in 1990—21 years ago, that is—that Pope John Paul II issued guidelines on the Catholic identity of colleges and universities in a document called Ex Corde Ecclesiae (From the Heart of the Church). It took a full 10 years for the American bishops to come up with an acceptable document on applying the Pope’s principles in the United States. Meanwhile the Catholic identity of many of these schools—though not all—continued its long decline. Can that process be reversed now?And then there are the hospitals. USCCB on Jan. 31 released an exchange of letters between Archbishop Dolan and Sister Carol Keehan, D.C., president of the Catholic Health Association. The centerpiece was Sister Keehan’s affirmation that “an individual bishop in his diocese is the authoritative interpreter” of Catholic health care ethics. Good for Sister Keehan. But the real news may be that her statement was considered news.In part, the background here concerns an ugly controversy in Phoenix pitting a Catholic hospital against the local bishop over whether a procedure the hospital approved was or wasn’t a direct abortion forbidden by Catholic moral teaching. The upshot was the excommunication of the hospital’s top nun-administrator and a decision by the bishop that the hospital itself was no longer a truly Catholic institution. Note, too, that months earlier the Catholic Health Association split with the bishops over the issue of abortion in President Obama’s health care plan. It was credited with an important role in getting the legislation passed.Although they differ in many ways, the basic situations of Catholic hospitals and Catholic colleges and universities are much the same. The factors at work to push these institutions ever farther from the Church include money, ideology, and pressure to conform to secular standards of performance that are more or less in conflict with the Church’s values. If new efforts are now envisaged to address these problems, that’s all to the good. But as I said—it’s late, mighty late.
Champions of fact or churners of opinion?
Jan 31, 2011 / 00:00 amIt was a slow Saturday afternoon in the newsroom of the Washington Daily News. This was the fall of 1956, and the Daily News, a Scripps Howard tabloid, published six days a week but not on Sunday. When the last Saturday edition was off our hands, the rest of the day could be mighty quiet.A sub-editor on the city desk took a phone call. A man had driven onto Key Bridge, stopped his car, gotten out, leaped nearly 100 feet into the chilly Potomac, and drowned. Hanging up, the editor spotted me and told me to go see what was going on. I was only a copy boy, but what the heck — this was Saturday afternoon. I caught a cab, rode out to Key Bridge, and talked to a policeman, picking up a few more scraps of information. Full of self-importance, I phoned the city desk and told the sub-editor what I’d learned. He stopped me with a question: “Did the guy leave his keys in the ignition or take them with him?”That was one of the few lessons in journalism I ever got, and one of the best. The Daily News, now long defunct, was no great shakes as a paper, but the people who worked there were professionals intensely concerned with getting the facts in the belief that even a seemingly trivial fact might shed light on the mysteries of human behavior. Facts were the coin of the journalist’s realm, cherished and indispensable.The theme set for this year’s Vatican-sponsored World Communications Day, celebrated January 24, was “Truth, Proclamation, and Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age.” That’s a mouthful, but at least the focus on digital media makes sense. Digital is where the action is these days, and the emphasis on truth is a reminder that, whatever else digital media may be, they’re not a realm of fact but opinion. You say your piece, I say mine. In much of this egalitarian media world, one version of truth is as good as another.Perhaps the assault on the ancient elitism of print journalism is for the best, but what’s been gained in self-esteem has been lost in the all-important matter of putting people in touch with reality as only facts and the reporting of facts can do. This isn’t new — newspapers have been moving this direction for three decades or more — but now the bloggers have made it a matter of high principle.And it comes at a price. A Gallup poll last year found 57% of Americans saying that they don’t trust journalists to report the news fairly. The shift away from facts and in favor of opinions surely has something to do with that.The handling of the Tucson shooting tragedy in major sectors of the media was a case in point, offering as it did a worrisome glimpse into the fantasy world inhabited by some of our most prominent shapers of opinion, left and right. Hard on the heels of the tragedy itself, we were treated — at inordinate length — to self-congratulating moralizing at the expense of certain conservatives who were said, without any evidence of a causal link, to share the blame for the behavior of a mentally disturbed man. This was followed by yet more media moralizing about a noble leader summoning us all back to the civility and rationality we’d supposedly abandoned en masse. What we got, in short, was a deluge of opinion rather than fact. Opinions have their place in journalism, but they’re dangerous substitutes for facts.
Roe v. Wade anniversary
Jan 20, 2011 / 00:00 amAccording to the polls, most Americans don’t much care for abortion. That being so, the mystery of why legalized abortion remains the law of the land 38 years after Roe v. Wade needs probing. Based on the experience of these nearly four decades, two facts stand out. One is that a significant number of Americans have been and still are convinced that the Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1973 was not just a technical mistake in constitutional interpretation but a grave injustice that will continue to poison national life unless and until it’s corrected. The other is that a significant number who more or less agree that abortion isn’t a good thing, at least in most cases, nevertheless don’t care enough about it to take the necessary remedial action: putting committed pro-life politicians in the White House and Congress as a required step toward correcting the injustice of Roe.But, an ardent prolifer may object, didn’t voters last November choose a large number of new pro-life U.S. senators and representatives? Indeed they did—two years after they threw large numbers of pro-life members out of Congress. The polling data show that a majority of Americans don’t support the virtually unlimited access to abortion that now exists. Yet people who are opposed to abortion, at least tepidly, regularly vote for pro-choice candidates. The result is this pro-life/pro-choice seesaw. Up and down—it’s been that way for 38 years. So let us return to our question: How come?It appears to me that the only possible explanation for this voting behavior is that, no matter what many people say they believe about abortion, when push comes to shove the issue doesn’t carry all that much weight with quite a few. For them, clearly, it is not the great moral issue of our times that convinced pro-lifers—and not a few pro-choicers as well—consider it to be.And the fact that it isn’t can only be understood as a reflection of the value such people assign to human life before birth. Not that it’s unimportant exactly, but that in the end it’s less important than something else. Currently, it appears, quite a few things fall into the “something else” category. Last November, for example, the state of the economy was the overriding issue for a majority of voters. It is easy to understand why that was so and, practically speaking, hard to argue with it.But some people rationalize their tepid support—or non-support—of the right to life of the unborn by appealing to more philosophical grounds. A cluster of issues and concerns then gets subsumed under the heading “the right to choose.” The bottom line is that freedom of choice is absolutized in preference to human life.It’s unlikely that many of the people who do this really think the matter through. In verbalizing priority for the right to choose, they’re simply exhibiting some intellectual furniture that automatically comes with the position they hold on abortion and other issues. But, even so, for a mass of Americans who don’t particularly care for abortion, the “right to choose” serves as a convenient, and—they imagine—principled, reason for not doing much about it. Meanwhile the proponents of choice in academia and the media who call the shots for these less sophisticated souls relish the values of the individualistic libertarianism sustaining this entire can of worms. All of which merely underlines the magnitude of the task of education and persuasion facing the pro-life community after 38 years.
Searching for the motives behind the WikiLeaks fiasco
Jan 3, 2011 / 00:00 amThe latest WikiLeaks fiasco—hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables spilling out in the world’s media like the contents of an overturned water pitcher—raises an important question that seldom gets asked: Why do they do it? Why do leakers leak secrets, that is? In the case of those who do it for money, the motivation is perfectly clear: they do it for personal gain. This seems not to be the case with WikiLeaks, where the source this time is said to have been a disgruntled private first class in Baghdad. But if not money, then what does move such people to take big risks and potentially do great harm? During years of handling media relations at the national and international levels for several church groups, I drew some conclusions on that. A non-exhaustive list of motives for leaking would include at least the following. (But, you ask, does leaking really occur in church-related settings? Yes, little ones, it happens even there.) Start with altruism: to head off a mistake (or what the leaker considers a mistake) or correct an abuse. Often in combination with other factors, this is what frequently drives whistle-blowers. Not uncommonly, the aim is to rally support for a course of action that seems to be losing out in some internal deliberative process. Altruism clearly is at risk of shading off into something much less attractive. One writer speaks of “adolescent self-righteousness” said to be operative in the WikiLeaks case. Ideological motives: to tilt the playing field in favor of your point of view, to embarrass and punish opponents in debate, to propagandize by giving only one side in an argument in hopes of influencing public opinion. This was the motive in 1967 behind the leaking of documents from the papal birth control commission. The goal was to manipulate opinion in such a way as to discourage Pope Paul VI from doing what he did a year later anyway—reaffirm the Church’s teaching against contraception. Odds and ends: to accomplish one or more of a gaggle of mean-spirited private purposes—getting revenge, burnishing your own reputation, puffing up your sense of self-importance as a mover and shaker, currying favor with a journalist or journalists in hopes of getting favorable coverage for oneself now or later, or just having some malicious fun at somebody else’s expense. The triviality of the motives in such instances by no means eliminates or even diminishes the quantity of harm that the leaking can do. These motives and others not listed here can and frequently do combine in particular acts of leaking. Altruism and self-seeking, for example, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and a leaker may wish to serve some high public purpose while simultaneously undercutting a hated rival. It’s important to grasp, too, that the phenomenon of leaking in itself constitutes an implicit argument against abusing secrecy by keeping things confidential that ought to be publicly known. In such cases, the secrecy is an incitement to leaking, and the leaking may actually be a way of promoting the common good. Items like that may be part of the Wikileaks cache, though probably not enough of them to justify leaking this whole body of confidential documents. As for the rantings of web fanatics defending a totally open and unfettered ethos in their medium of choice—ranting is ranting, even when it’s done on behalf of some genuinely good cause like freedom of expression and most certainly when done, as here, in the service of mere anarchy.