Articles by Russell Shaw
The Significance of the Next Synod
Oct 31, 2016 / 00:00 amWhen the pot is boiling, turn down the heat. You can’t be sure, but that could well have been part of the reasoning behind Pope’s Francis’s decision to choose as topic of the next world Synod of Bishops “Young People, Faith, and Vocational Discernment.” For months, speculation out of Rome had focused on the possibility that the Pope would tell the 2018 synod to debate ordaining married men as priests in countries with an acute clergy shortage. Francis himself was said to be interested in that. If so, it’s not unreasonable to think that topic may have been set aside in view of the surprisingly contentious synods on marriage in 2014 and 2015 as well as the ongoing debate on how to understand Pope Francis’s follow-up document, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love). That’s enough excitement for now, someone might reason. However that may be, the theme chosen – youth, faith, and discernment – should not be dismissed as an option in favor of blandness. When 250 or so prominent bishops from around the world gather at the Vatican two years from now, they’ll have an opportunity to make a much needed course correction in thinking about vocations. The key to it is “vocational discernment.” As matters stand, there are two common ways of understanding vocational discernment – and neither is quite right. One is to suppose that the big decisions young people face are only about things like choosing a college major and prepping for a career, and that the relevant question is: How can I make the most money and have a comfortable life? Much bigger issues are at stake, and a question of far greater importance comes first: What does God want? The other mistake is to think vocational discernment is mostly or exclusively for people who think that God may be calling them to the priesthood or religious life. Discernment certainly is essential for this group. But not only for them. In fact, discernment is necessary for everybody, including those called to be lay Christians in the world. “Every life is a vocation,” Pope Paul VI once said. Pope St. John Paul II couldn’t have been clearer in his 1989 document on the laity: “The fundamental objective of the formation of the lay faithful is an ever-clearer discovery of one’s vocation and the ever-greater willingness to live it so as to fulfill one’s mission…. This personal vocation and mission defines the dignity and responsibility of each member of the lay faithful and makes up the focal point of the whole work of formation” (Christifideles Laici, 58). Vocational discernment is a lifelong task – we have to examine our life situations constantly to see what God asks of us here and now. But, as the synod theme suggests, it’s especially important in the formative years when young people are weighing large choices that will shape the rest of their lives. Good programs to help them exist some places, but elsewhere the old, narrow thinking about vocations prevails. The Synod of Bishops could help change that. In doing that, it would be helping to remedy the shortage of priests and religious. As more people practice vocational discernment, more will hear God’s call to be priests and religious – as well as committed lay Catholics. A canny friend of mine frets that ordaining married men as priests could slip into the synod debate under the rubric of vocational discernment. Here’s hoping it doesn’t. The vocational questions I’m talking about are important enough to merit discussion in their own right.
The Pope and the Martin Luther Anniversary
Oct 17, 2016 / 00:00 amAt the end of October Pope Francis will travel to Sweden to join a Lutheran World Federation observance opening the 500th anniversary year of Martin Luther’s break with the Catholic Church and the start of the Protestant Reformation. The Pope’s generous gesture will dramatize how far Catholics and Lutherans have come in recent years in reconciling their differences – but also the distance they have yet to travel to restore unity. Among the recent indicators of progress already made, Francis’s trip joins the publication of a German Catholic bishops’ conference document calling Luther a “teacher of the faith.” Indeed, Luther undoubtedly was that, yet he was also something considerably more complex. The complexity is suggested by historian Christopher Dawson’s description of the tempestuous Augustinian as “a man of titanic power and energy, who combined…the vernacular eloquence of the demagogue with the religious conviction of the prophet.” A teacher he certainly was, driven by a craving for fidelity to what he took Scripture to mean and incensed at what he regarded as – and what often enough were – abuses existing within the Catholic Church of his day. But even so, Luther championed doctrinal and practical innovations of his own. So did other Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Anabaptists and the ever-growing crowd of other new sectarians who took the path he opened up. Now the principle of sola scriptura – Scripture as the sole rule of faith – became a principle of disunity. As Brad Gregory of Notre Dame explains in his important study The Unintended Reformation (Harvard University Press), from the earliest years of the Reformation the reformers disagreed among themselves about Scripture’s meaning and in doing so produced a wide range of conflicting truth claims. Today, to speak of Lutheranism as if it were a single faith community would be misleading. Leaving it to Lutherans to sort out the relationships among them, I note that in the U.S. alone there are at least three principal Lutheran bodies. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is the largest and most liberal group, but not the only one. Each distinguishes itself from the others in doctrinal and practical terms. At a time when sentimentality sometimes undermines ecumenical thinking, there are those who ask what difference doctrinal differences among Christians make – isn’t God pleased with all of us? The question deserves to be taken seriously, since a certain amount of doctrinal diversity on open questions is not only tolerable but, up to a point, desirable. Still, beyond that point, wherever anyone situates it, differences do matter. The New Testament itself is full of stern warnings against false teaching and false teachers who, as Paul says in the letter to the Romans – a document Luther greatly esteemed – “create dissensions and difficulties, in opposition to the doctrine which you have been taught” (Rom 16.17). Representatives of the Evangelical Lutheran Church and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last year published a joint statement citing numerous issues where they said “church-dividing” differences no longer exist between ELCA and the Catholic Church. But on other issues – among them ordination, including the ordination of women, the papacy, and moral questions like abortion – they conceded that disagreements continue to separate Lutherans and Catholics. If doctrine is important – and it is – then leaders on both the Catholic and Lutheran sides have plenty of work to do before the unity shattered five centuries ago is restored. As Pope Francis’s gesture shows, the quest for unity has come very far. But let’s not deceive ourselves – it has a long way to go.
New Threats to Religious Liberty
Oct 4, 2016 / 00:00 amLast June five justices of the U.S. Supreme Court thumbed their noses at religious liberty. They accomplished that without spoken comment simply by turning down an appeal by a family pharmacy in Washington state from a lower court order requiring the pharmacists to violate their consciences by dispensing an abortifacient. So troubled was Justice Samuel Alito by his colleagues’action that, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas, he issued a dissent – unusual when the court merely refuses to hear a case. “If this is a sign of how religious liberty claims will be treated in the years ahead, those who value religious freedom have great cause for concern,” Justice Alito wrote. He was right. Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, two members dissenting, has underlined how right Alito was. In a conflict between non-discrimination laws and religious liberty, a commission report says, non-discrimination as defined by the government wins. Although the commission lacks enforcement authority, its report unquestionably reflects an ominous, growing consensus in secular liberal circles. Not only that, but the civil rights watchdog’s chairman, Martin R. Castro, accompanied the report’s release with a statement calling “religious liberty” and “religious freedom” frequent code words for “discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia” and other reprehensible behavior. This was deeply and gratuitously offensive. Some proponents of religious liberty no doubt have been guilty of intolerance, and some perhaps still are. But religious liberty itself is no more invalidated by that fact than speeding laws are invalidated by drivers who speed. Religious liberty is part of the Constitution, embedded in the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment. By contrast, non-discrimination isn’t mentioned in the constitutional text and tortuous interpretation has sometimes been required to find a basis for it there. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion legalizing same-sex marriage last year was an egregious instance. But an incident back in 1783 points to the most compelling reason for concern about these matters. At that time the papal nuncio in Paris asked Benjamin Franklin, the American representative there, to sound out the Continental Congress on the establishment of a Catholic diocese in the then-emerging new nation. The Continental Congress replied that it had no “jurisdiction and power” over what the Church chose to do about that. This was a historic turning-point. In a departure from the practice of centuries, religious freedom would be unfettered in the United States. The civil rights commission would reverse that 180 degrees and subject religious groups and institutions – as well as individual believers – to government control for the sake of punishing behavior the government deems discriminatory. Are a Christian school that doesn’t renew the contract of a teacher who enters into a same-sex marriage or a Catholic hospital that doesn’t allow abortions being discriminatory in some pejorative sense? For those who share the commission’s views, the answer presumably is yes. This isn’t a future threat. It’s happening now, and not just to a pharmacy in Washington state. The best-known instance to date is the HHS Mandate by which the Obama administration sought to force the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious groups to provide contraceptive coverage, including abortifacients, in employee health insurance. The Supreme Court told the contesting parties to find a compromise, but the outcome is uncertain. However it turns out, there’s more to come. The idea that religious liberty must give way when it conflicts with a current state-approved version of non-discrimination is a central tenet – a matter of faith, you might say – for today’s aggressive secularism.
Is the mercy of God unconditional?
Sep 20, 2016 / 00:00 amIn a message to a gathering of bishops of the Americas in Bogota, Colombia, Pope Francis made a point that’s always worth recalling but especially timely now in this Year of Mercy. Sin exists, he said, within “a history of sin to be remembered.” “Which sin?” the Pope asked rhetorically, then answered, “Ours: mine and yours.” All of us are sinners, and all of us need mercy. Here’s something to think about against the background of the continuing discussion of Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), the document on marriage that Pope Francis published earlier this year. The fundamental question underlying that document comes down to this: Is God’s mercy, like his love, truly unconditional or does its operation depend in a sense on those who are to receive it—that is, on us? Clearly the mercy of God is immense, beyond measuring. He is ready at any time and in any place to forgive literally anybody for having done literally anything. But, that said, it also appears that God’s forgiveness requires something on our part – sorrow for our sin. To be genuine, moreover, sorrow for sin also requires something else. Usually that it is called a “firm purpose of amendment” – the determination not to sin again. Obviously this isn’t certainty of not repeating one’s sin, for who can guarantee that? Rather, a firm purpose of amendment is the honest intention to make a serious, sustained effort not to sin again. And that intention must include determination to begin the effort here and now, not to delay until some point in the future when it may be easier nor to proceed a little at a time according to somebody’s notion of “gradualness.” The account in chapter 8 of John’s gospel of the woman taken in adultery, frequently cited in discussions of these matters, is a good example. Yes, in this moving and dramatic episode Jesus does indeed extend mercy to a sinner. But he also tells the woman, “Go and sin no more.” He doesn’t say cut back a bit or put it off until it’s convenient. He says, “Sin no more.” But, someone might object, isn’t the conversion of St. Paul an instance of God’s mercy reaching out to its object even before sorrow and a purpose of amendment were present in Saul, who at that time was a furious persecutor of Christ’s followers? Yes, it is. But note that in persecuting those early Christians, Saul of Tarsus truly believed he was doing the right thing. His very zeal, mistaken though it was, helped draw God’s mercy to him. The first letter to Timothy explains: “I obtained the mercy of God because I acted ignorantly, in unbelief” (1 Tm 1.13). The pre-conversion Paul was wrong but he honestly thought that he was right. God stepped in mercifully but forcefully to correct that mistake. Perhaps all this helps shed some light on Amoris Laetitia. Writing in the Vatican weekly L’Osservatore Romano, a Spanish theology professor, Father Salvador Pie-Ninot, argues that Pope Francis’s apostolic exhortation is an exercise of papal teaching authority requiring “religious submission of mind and will.” If so, then of course the same must also be said of St. John Paul II’s document on marriage Familiaris Consortio and his encyclical on moral principles Veritatis Splendor. But to assent to something requires understanding what it says. Amid the ongoing debate over Amoris Laetitia’s meaning, these thoughts may help readers seeking to situate Francis’s document in relation to the tradition of magisterial teaching.
What are voters to do?
Sep 9, 2016 / 00:00 amIf this presidential campaign isn’t the strangest race for the White House ever, it will do until a stranger one comes along—and I’m in no hurry for that. With good reason, many Americans are asking what went wrong with the system that it should have come to this. The question needs an answer—and effective remedies too—before the election of 2020 rolls around. Meanwhile we must make it through the election of 2016 with the campaign as it is, which is to say strange to the point of bizarre. Its strangeness resides in at least two related things: first, the candidates; then, the manner in which the campaign is unfolding. Of course both candidates have their committed defenders, and no doubt I will hear from some of these for what I’m saying now. But both of the candidates are—as Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia put it in a classic understatement—notably “problematic,” though obviously in different ways. Problematic, moreover, to a degree that suggests neither of them is qualified to hold the office of president. It hardly needs saying that this raises a serious problem for conscientious voters. The problem is seemingly—but only seemingly—solved by limiting the criteria for choice to one or two issues. But doing that, even when the issues are important ones, is arguably to indulge in a form of reductionism that robs the question of its genuine complexity, which includes the predictable but largely ignored foreign and domestic crises the next president almost certainly will face. In circumstances like these, what are voters who want to do the right thing supposed to do? For what it’s worth, here are two possibilities. One defensible line of reasoning is along these lines: since both options for choice are bad, the correct thing to do is to choose neither. In this case, don’t vote for anyone for president. A second defensible approach is to do one’s best to decide which candidate would do less harm than the other, then vote for that one. Yes, there’s no way of knowing for sure who would do less harm. But life is often like that. The best you can do is seek out reliable information (avoid cable news pundits and ideological blogs), practice thoughtful, prayerful deliberation, and on that basis make your choice. With the first of three potentially crucial presidential debates fast approaching on September 26, the campaign also is strange for the way it’s so far taken shape. The discussion of issues has not been totally abandoned. But up to the time this is written it’s been largely swept aside in the media, its place usurped by seemingly insatiable fascination with the candidates’ personal weaknesses and with the name-calling that feeds the sour enjoyment of unpleasantness called “schadenfreude.” The media piously deplore all this while day after day reinforcing it. No one ever accused an American political campaign of being too genteel, but this one is remarkable for a nastiness that appears to reflect the sneering, snarling atmospherics of the brave new world of social media in which it’s taking place. Next January, regardless, we’ll have a new president. Whoever it is, he or she will come to the Oval Office mistrusted and disliked by a very large number of Americans. Yes, to some extent we’ve been here before—after all, the election of Abraham Lincoln was the cue for a war. But no one remotely resembling Lincoln is running this year. If that doesn’t worry you, maybe it should.
An old book and a continuing problem
Aug 23, 2016 / 00:00 amI’d been running into references to the book every now and then for years. People told me I really ought to read it. But somehow I never got around to that. Then a friend forced my hand by buying a copy and sending it to me. No excuses now, so I sat down and read. I was amazed. The book is A Canticle for Leibowitz (HarperCollins). Its author is Walter M. Miller, Jr. Miller published one other book, but apparently it never took off. He died, a suicide, in 1996, leaving Canticle as his unique literary achievement. It isn’t a book for everybody. Some people will be offended by its eccentric but unmistakably Catholic religiosity, others will find the story it tells simply too disturbing to be read with equanimity. The story is futuristic fiction about a post-nuclear holocaust world hell-bent on repeating the mistake and next time finishing the job. It is organized in three sections, each of them a distinct narrative separated from the other two by many hundreds of years. They are joined by a common theme: human folly groping toward and eventually achieving technological mastery—and then making use of it to destroy itself. Such sanity as exists in Miller’s crazy world is found in the Church and, especially, in a monastic community founded after the first outburst of nuclear madness by an atomic scientist named Leibowitz. The founder intended that his monks, like their predecessors centuries earlier after the collapse of the Roman Empire, should serve as preservers and transmitters of civilized knowledge in a dark age. During World War II Walter Miller flew 55 combat missions as a radio operator and tail gunner on a bomber. Among the targets: the historic monastery at Monte Cassino. Given that experience, it’s hardly surprising that he took a dim view of fallen human nature and the survival prospects of a civilization ruled by technology. One hears the author’s voice in the reflections of a fictional abbot: “The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier for them to see that something was missing…some tree or shrub that would not grow.” Human perfection? And it is that absence, Miller suggests, which drives human beings in frustration and disappointment to the precipice of self-destruction. A Canticle for Leibowitz was first published in 1959, at the height of the cold war. Massive retaliation was the heart of U.S deterrent strategy. Just three years in the future lay the Cuban missile crisis, with the threat of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange a real possibility. That was then. This is now. But during a presidential campaign in which whose finger will be on the nuclear trigger is an issue, Walter Miller’s dark vision remains pertinent. Seventy-one years after the atomic-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nine nations possess nuclear weapons and several more could develop them rapidly if they chose. “When mass murder’s been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier,” Miller wrote. A Vatican message for the anniversary of the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki appealed for “the graces of pardon, reconciliation, solidarity and hope.” That also—in its strange, funny, alarming way—is the message of A Canticle for Leibowitz.
What was it that set Al Smith apart from other Catholic politicians?
Aug 4, 2016 / 00:00 amEighty-eight years ago a Happy Warrior from the streets of New York ran for President of the United States. His name was Al Smith, and he deserves to be remembered now as another bitter presidential campaign enters its decisive phase. In writing my new book Catholics in America (Ignatius Press) profiling 15 prominent Catholics who mirror the pros and cons of the Americanization process at work in American Catholicism, I had no hesitation including Smith. Here was a Catholic politician who stood by his Catholic faith despite what it cost him politically. The Church and American politics today would both look greatly different—and healthier—if Catholic politicians since Smith had generally followed his lead. He was born poor in Lower Manhattan in 1873. Dropping out of school at age 13 to help support his family after his father’s death, he rose by dint of intelligence, decency, and hard work to become a four-term governor of New York. He was recognized as a champion of progressive social legislation on issues like workmen’s compensation, pensions for women, and child labor. In 1924 he sought the Democratic vice-presidential nomination. It was then that Franklin Roosevelt, in a nominating speech, called him a “Happy Warrior”, and the tag stayed with him the rest of his life. Smith didn’t make it onto the ticket in 1924, but in 1928 the Democrats turned to him as their presidential nominee. To no one’s surprise, least of all Smith’s, the reality of an unapologetic practicing Catholic running for president evoked a new upsurge of the anti-Catholicism that had plagued American life since colonial times. Even before Smith’s nomination, the Atlantic Monthly published an “open letter” asking whether, as a Catholic, Smith could be trusted to uphold religious freedom. Smith defended himself, but things went downhill. The resurgent Ku Klux Klan opposed him. A U.S. senator denounced the Catholic hierarchy while promoting talks by ex-nuns who had supposedly “escaped” from their convents. Smith’s religion became a large, ugly issue in the presidential race. In September, speaking in Oklahoma City, the candidate confronted the bigotry head-on. Calling the constitutional prohibition of a religious test for public office a “vital principle” of the American system, Smith said he knew of “no greater disaster to this country than to have the voters…divide upon religious lines.” He fought back against his anti-Catholic critics, Smith said, “not only because I am a good Christian but because I am a good American.” Probably no Democrat could have won in 1928, the crest of an economic boom for which the Republicans took credit. But Smith was overwhelmed, receiving 41 percent of the popular vote and 87 electoral votes to Republican Herbert Hoover’s 58 percent and 444 electoral votes. States that commonly ordinarily Democratic went for the GOP candidate instead. Smith’s political career was essentially over. He died in 1944. In September of 1960 another Catholic presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy, traveled to Houston to deliver a rebuttal of the anti-Catholicism that once again had reared its head. Speaking to an audience of Protestant ministers, Kennedy declared that as president he wouldn’t let religion affect how he did his job, thus giving voice to the separation of faith from life that the Second Vatican Council would soon stigmatize as “one of the gravest errors of our time.” Kennedy opened a door through which other self-identified Catholic politicians have rushed while supporting things like abortion and same-sex marriage. Which is one reason why it’s worth recalling a better model: a Happy Warrior named Al Smith.
Can Americans fix our problems if we no longer share common values?
Jul 21, 2016 / 00:00 amSpeaking at a memorial service for the five Dallas police officers killed by a gunman in retaliation for police shootings of blacks, President Obama rightly stressed the need for Americans to come together around shared values arising from “a common humanity and a shared dignity.” The need is clear. But how can it be done? Like the president, who said he feels “doubt” about that, sober people wonder whether it’s even possible in the wake of the recent wave of killings. The likelihood of a rancorous and divisive presidential campaign increases that uncertainty. As events in Dallas and other communities remind us, racism and its progeny—discrimination, suspicion, hostility, violence—are deeply entrenched in America as they have been from the beginning. Recall that among the founders who proclaimed a national commitment to equality and justice were slave owners. Echoes of moral dualism on race still resonate in America. But the problem of finding shared values also exists at another level. The moral consensus that once existed, imperfect though it was, was grounded in an amalgam of Judeo-Christian morality and natural law. Its breakdown among elite groups began in the 19th century, continued to the middle years of the last century, and burst into the open and was popularized in the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The world view emerging from this process is now conventional wisdom for the culture-forming organs of American secular society—elite research universities and law schools, federal courts, foundations and think tanks, national media, and the big-money circles that fund the secular enterprise. The values of this world view reflect moral libertarianism of an individualistic sort that exalts the virtually unbounded right of individuals to do as they please over the communal values of traditional morality according to which rights are defined and limited by objective moral truth. Where conflicts occur under the regime of the new morality, newly asserted rights are favored over old values. Ideologies like gender theory lend a spurious intellectual sophistication this process. The results can be seen in such things as the weakening of marriage and family life (the U.S. marriage rate has fallen from a postwar high of 16.4 per 1,000 population to around 7 per 1,000 now), the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage, and a flamboyantly aggressive new campaign, eagerly championed by leading secular media just as they have championed other such campaigns, on behalf of transgender rights. To be sure, supporters of the old moral consensus can still be found, although they have difficulty getting a hearing in a cultural setting where access to the public forum is granted—and often enough withheld—by the secular elites. In this setting, Pope Francis is one of the few religious voices heard regularly, but the attention paid to him by the media is highly selective. The media take note when he says something they can interpret as advocating changes in the Church which they support. But when he emphasizes traditional doctrines and values, they aren’t listening. Changing the state of affairs sketched here won’t happen quickly. The recovery of the moral tradition as a guide for America would go a long way toward tamping down the flames of racial conflict by giving practical substance to abstract concepts like President Obama’s “common humanity” and “shared dignity.” As things stand, though, the secular elitists are wedded to a deconstructionist, libertarian morality and determined to impose it on us all. The first imperative for those who see the folly of that is reasoned resistance.
What the pro-life movement needs to do now
Jul 8, 2016 / 00:00 amIn the dead of winter every year thousands of pro-lifers throng the streets of downtown Washington making a public statement on behalf of life. Converging on the Mall for speeches in the shadow of the Washington Monument and the White House, they march up one of the capital city’s broad avenues to the marble palace that houses the Supreme Court. It is not recorded that the justices take any notice of their pro-life visitors. None of them has ever stood on the steps and addressed the March for Life. On the evidence, the Supreme Court today remains the bastion of pro-abortion support that it’s been since the day in January 1973 when it abruptly and with no visible precedent legalized permissive abortion throughout the United States. If there was any doubt about where the court stands, it disappeared on June 27, last day of the court’s recently concluded term. It voted 5-3 to overturn portions of a Texas law setting standards for abortion clinics, including physical conditions comparable to surgical centers and hospital admitting privileges for doctors who do abortions. Justice Stephen Breyer, speaking for the majority, said the requirements “place a substantial obstacle in the path” of women seeking abortions. Similar provisions in other states also presumably fail to meet the Supreme Court’s “substantial obstacle” test. Pro-life Americans might reasonably say the Supreme Court is a substantial obstacle to regulating the performance of abortion. In one sense, the solution to that problem is obvious: replace two of the pro-choice justices with pro-life ones. If elected president, Hillary Clinton certainly won’t do that. Donald Trump has said he would, and has issued a list of names from among which he would make his selection. But there are two problems with that: first, Trump needs to get elected, after which he must get two shots at filling Supreme Court vacancies that don’t presently exist and have them confirmed by the Senate. There’s no certainty any of those things will happen. This points to an unpleasant but necessary conclusion: it would be self-defeating to go on sending abortion-restricting laws to the Supreme Court as long as it’s virtually certain the court will overturn them, reaffirming and strengthening its own prochoice precedents in the process. Miracles do happen of course, but there’s no sign of one happening here, as the outcome in the Texas case has painfully reminded us. Is this a counsel of despair? Not at all. The pro-life movement simply needs a strategy built around things like education, motivation, and services to women at risk, along with an expanded pro-life agenda that includes many other issues along with battling abortion. Call it building a Culture of Life. Getting the Supreme Court to reverse itself on abortion shouldn’t be abandoned as the longterm goal, but pushing test cases to bring that about should be put on hold until the time—not too far in the future, let us hope—when there’s a realistic chance of that happening. As for the courts, defending the religious liberty right to refuse cooperation with abortion should keep pro-life lawyers occupied now and in the foreseeable future. And when those thousands of pro-lifers march through the streets of Washington again next January on the anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade decision, I hope to see many of them carrying banners, singing, and praying not only in opposition to abortion but in favor of Culture of Life issues from gun control to ending the death penalty. Give it some thought, folks.
St. Thomas Aquinas and angry American voters
Jun 13, 2016 / 00:00 amAmericans, a goodly number of them anyway, are angry. Opinion polls and both parties’ primaries are evidence of that. But will this anger be put to good use or squandered? At the moment, squandering appears the better bet. A passage I stumbled across while reading around in Josef Pieper’s wonderful little book The Four Cardinal Virtues got me thinking about these matters. Pieper, a philosopher of note in his own right, was a brilliant expositor of St. Thomas Aquinas whose deeply Thomistic virtue book is a masterpiece. Still, someone might reasonably ask what does the 13th century Angelic Doctor can possibly have to say to 21st century America? Judge for yourself. Here’s the passage from Pieper, in a chapter on the cardinal virtue of temperance, that caught my attention: “The combination of the intemperateness of lustfulness with the lazy inertia incapable of generating anger is the sign of complete and virtually hopeless degeneration. It appears whenever a caste, a people, or a whole civilization is ripe for its decline and fall.” No sober observer of today’s America can seriously ignore deny the presence of intemperate lustfulness in a broad swath of popular culture. But how about the anger of the people who’ve given vociferous support to some of our presidential candidates? Is their wrathful discontent a kind of blessing in disguise—a bulwark against the decline and fall of which Pieper warns? Following Aquinas, Pieper leaves no doubt that intemperate anger is as bad a thing as intemperate sexual passion. Yet “anger is ‘good,’” he writes, “if in accordance with the order of reason, it is brought into service for the true goals of man” among them the righting of wrongs and the elimination of injustices. But aren’t righting wrongs and remedying injustices just what the anger of the anger candidates’ supporters want? Underlying their disgust with “the establishment” and “the system” is well-founded disgust with a political system that has become visibly dysfunctional and an economy in which a handful of lucky CEOs are rewarded with multi-million-dollar compensation packages even as debate rages over a proposed $15 hourly minimum wage. If you think that the anger widely felt in the face of these disturbing circumstances has the potential of becoming, with proper guidance, an engine driving reform, you may reasonably find that anger encouraging. In which case I regret to tell you that the chances of reform happening are not good. There are several reasons for that. Among them is the fact that the anger candidates haven’t gone beyond tapping into a preexisting reservoir of public wrath in order to win support, without offering practical reform proposals that they would pursue if elected. Add the fact that it’s now somewhere between highly probable and certain that the presidential campaign of 2016 will be an unusually ugly affair of mutual defamation and personal insult aimed at stoking still more anger without directing it to any positive result. The result: whoever wins will enter the Oval Office facing an ugly ocean of resentment in the country and in Congress—anger, yes, but anger of a destructive, unfruitful kind—making our recent years of stalemate look like a golden age of political comity and creative dialogue. Josef Pieper joins St. Thomas in naming the forms of intemperate anger as blind wrath, bitterness of spirit and resentment bent on revenge. If that is where America is headed, instead of celebrating anger in the service of noble goals, we need to pray. Pray what? That’s obvious: God help the United States. Image: Karsun Designs via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
New dispatches from our endless culture war
May 20, 2016 / 00:00 amAlthough the wave of battles now underway in several parts of the country over religious freedom laws and LGBT rights may come as a surprise to some people, it shouldn’t. At least since last year’s Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, and probably longer than that, it’s been clear that something like this was bound to happen. Recall Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in the Obergefell case holding that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. In that lengthy document Kennedy devoted a single paragraph to the rights of religious believers who disagree. Such people, he said, “may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned.” But what of that? The Constitution “does not permit the State to bar same-sex couples from marriage on the same terms as accorded to couples of the opposite sex,” he insisted. Kennedy’s words echo the secularist line that believers can believe whatever they want, but values grounded in religious faith must be overridden if they conflict with the utilitarian calculus underlying secularist policy goals. The most infamous instance is probably the “mandate” attached by administrative fiat to the Affordable Care Act and equiring church-related institutions and groups to include coverage for contraception—including abortifacient drugs—in employee health plans. A Supreme Court ruling on the merits of a compromise is expected before the court adjourns in late June. More recently, the same-sex marriage ruling a year ago touched off efforts to enact state-level religious freedom laws exempting people with moral objections from having to facilitate these unions. Some 20 states have adopted such measures. But the gay rights movement and its secular supporters fiercely oppose such laws. In vetoing one in Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe called it “an attempt to stigmatize.” To which Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington and Bishop Francis DiLorenzo of Richmond, who supported the legislation, angrily retorted, “We do not ‘stigmatize,’ we serve.” They cited the Church’s extensive educational and social services as evidence. The latest addition to this battleground concerns transgender rights. North Carolina has come under sustained attack by culture warriors of the left for having adopted a law that would require transgender individuals to use public bathrooms and showers designated for persons of their biological sex. This was in response to the enactment by the city of Charlotte of an ordinance taking the opposite tack on this less than burning but notably tasteless question. While there are real issues for discussion in some of these lifestyle controversies, in times past many would have been settled by moral consensus and good manners. Now, by contrast, they become matters for legislation and litigation. Twenty years ago historian Gertrude Himmelfarb published a collection of essays reflecting on the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The book was titled One Nation, Two Cultures, and its conclusion was that the United States had become a country starkly divided between two conflicting world views—one based on traditional values, the other embodying an ethic of relativistic individualism. “Society is polarized in significant ways,” Himmelfarb wrote, “and those who deny or minimize this polarization are obscuring the reality.” But not to worry, she added. In the end, “let us be content with the knowledge that the two cultures are living together with some degree of tension but without civil strife or anarchy.” That coexistence was fairly cold comfort even then. And if Himmelfarb were writing now, one wonders, would she still find grounds for being even this upbeat about America’s polarized cultural condition?
Amoris Laetitia as a whole
Apr 28, 2016 / 00:00 amNow that the dust stirred by publication of Pope Francis’s new document on marriage has started to settle, it’s time for assessments that avoid the overwrought tone of some early responses. Here, then, some preliminary thoughts. Shortly after the document was released, I got a phone call from a reporter in Rome who wanted to know what I thought. Answering that question, I said something like this: “Up to now we’ve been accustomed to seeing the Church as a teacher. Now we’re seeing it as a facilitator.” Thinking about that later, it occurred to me that the idea I was expressing was summed up years earlier in the title of Pope St. John XXIII’s famous social encyclical Mater et Magistra—mother and teacher. The idea is that the Church performs both a maternal, comforting, consoling role and also a role as an authoritative teacher. In discussing a pastoral approach to divorced and remarried Catholics whose first marriages haven’t been annulled, Pope Francis stresses the maternal, with pastors as facilitators of a discernment process meant to reintegrate these people in the community of faith. But that doesn’t mean the document is without a teaching component. Indeed, its very writing and issuance were teaching acts. In this instance, Francis simply concentrates on the pastoral side. There can be no reasonable objection to that. It’s important, though, not to separate teaching from pastoring. Sound teaching is itself a fundamental pastoral act. Does Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Marriage) separate the two? Not really. But at times it leans that way. Like much of Francis’s writing, the document isn’t overburdened with verbal precision. It invites interpretation. And interpretations to date conflict. For example, Father Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor of the influential Jesuit journal La Civilta Catolica and a papal advisor said to have had a hand in writing the document, contends that it removes all barriers to the reception of holy communion by the divorced and remarried. But Cardinal Raymond Burke, a hero among conservative Catholics, holds that it “does not propose new doctrine and discipline” but only applies “perennial” teaching and rules to current facts. Amoris Laetitia is heartfelt and earnest, long and loosely written. Some passages are beautiful, others problematic. The temptation is all too real for commentators to cherry-pick quotes to demonstrate what they wish to demonstrate. In these circumstances, the sensible way to read it is to take it as a whole. Taking it like that, Cardinal Burke seems to get it about right: “The task of pastors and other teachers of the faith is to present [the document] within the context of the Church’s teaching and discipline.” Where matrimony is concerned, the indissolubility of valid marriages is central to that. So is the character of moral truths as norms rather than mere “ideals”—a squishy word Amoris Laetitia uses repeatedly. If pursued systematically and with intellectual honesty by divorced and remarried persons under spiritual guidance loyal to the faith, the discernment process outlined in the papal document is sufficiently rigorous that relatively few are likely to undertake it. Not all who do will conclude they are eligible to receive communion. The central challenge will be to make sure that pastoral practice truly reflects sound doctrine. In the end, that is the greatest pastoral service the Church can do for those struggling with the plague of divorce and remarriage. In the face of today’s sea of moral uncertainties, people aren’t looking for an invitation to cheap grace but for the solid rock of Christ’s moral truth.
To vote, or not to vote?
Apr 19, 2016 / 00:00 amAs the presidential primaries wear on, a potentially serious dilemma has begun to take shape for some voters. The question isn’t for whom to vote in November but whether to vote at all. Yes, the candidates of both parties who are currently considered to have a serious shot at the nomination do have their enthusiastic supporters. But for other voters these office-seekers inspire not just distaste but uncertainty about the moral acceptability of voting for any of them. Keep calm. This is not a prelude to arguing for or against the policy views of Hillary or Bernie, Donald or Ted or John. Rather, the question I’m raising here is precisely this: if you believe in conscience (as some voters now do) that the candidates in a particular election hold morally insupportable views on various serious matters, what should you do? Some people already know their answer, but the fact that others are uncertain underlines the need for timely reflection on these matters. The Catholic bishops of the United States anticipated the question last year and gave an answer worth considering. In a statement called Faithful Citizenship setting out general principles and presenting their own policy views, bishops said this: “When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other human goods.” Which is to say: either don’t vote or else vote for the one you believe will do the least harm. Notice that the bishops call not voting “extraordinary.” When counseling voters, civic-minded religious groups generally tell them to inform themselves on the issues and candidates and cast their ballots in light of a responsible judgment about who will best serve the common good. Faithful Citizenship does plenty of that, and what it says is worth considering. Catholic social teaching, the bishops point out, is grounded in four basic principles: the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. In a key passage unpacking the meaning of these principles, they say: “Every human being has a right to life, the fundamental right that makes all other rights possible, and a right to access those things required for human decency—food and shelter, education and employment, health care and housing, freedom of religion and family life.” Ideally, political debate would operate in the framework of principles like these. Alas, that’s hardly the case with American politics lately. What we’ve had instead has been, in the bishops’ words, “a contest of powerful interests, partisan attacks, sound bites, and media hype.” Now Americans find themselves facing the unpleasant but predictable consequences of that approach to politics: candidates for the nation’s highest office whom some serious-minded, well-informed voters can’t conscientiously support. In Democracy in America that astute observer Alexis de Tocqueville blamed such an outcome on what he called “the natural instincts of democracy.” "I hold it proved,” the Frenchman wrote after an extensive tour of the United States two centuries ago, “that those who consider universal suffrage as a guarantee of the excellence of the choice made are under a complete delusion. Universal suffrage has other advantages but not that one.” Someone may shrink from saying de Tocqueville was right, but in times like these you can hardly say flatly that he was wrong.
The conflicts within the conflict over replacing Justice Scalia
Mar 3, 2016 / 00:00 amTo no one’s particular surprise, the process of filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by Antonin Scalia’s death has morphed into a huge Washington-style power struggle. What may not be so obvious is that the struggle is actually three struggles in one. These layers of meaning are worth examining for the light that sheds on the troubled state of America today. On one level, this is a fairly conventional political fight, another of those Democrat-Republican sumo wrestler matches that make up a familiar part of the national scene. This in turn provides the context for the argument about whether the Senate has a moral obligation either to accept or reject a nominee proposed to it by President Obama in the closing months of his presidency. That question might be worth discussing if it weren’t for the fact that not a few vociferous participants in the present debate would probably be arguing the opposite side if the political roles were reversed—Republican president doing the nominating, Democrats in control of the Senate. On a slightly deeper level, then, this is a battle to control the Supreme Court and determine its future direction. Numbers tell the story. With Scalia’s death, the court is divided 4-4 between liberals and conservatives (although the split becomes 5-3 any time that swing voting Anthony Kennedy votes with the liberals). Any Obama nominee for the court is nearly certain to give court a solid liberal majority of five, even without Kennedy. Considering the advanced age of several of the court’s members, this seems likely to swing in one direction or the other under the next president. But the prospect of having a guaranteed liberal majority in place even before Obama leaves office doesn’t bode well for conservative interests. At its deepest level, finally, what we are seeing as the Scalia succession fight unfolds is another battle in an ongoing war—a culture war—over fundamental values. Abortion, euthanasia, religious liberty, and church-state relations are part of it. Same-sex marriage is a particularly good illustration. Last June the court ruled 5-4 that gay couples have a constitutional right to marry. Implicitly or explicitly, the approval of same-sex marriage involves a profound displacement of the meaning of marriage itself—from a relationship fundamentally oriented to the begetting and nurturing of children to one whose chief purpose is the gratification of the partners. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in this not unexpected but highly controversial decision, with Justice Scalia contributing a vigorous dissent. By no means, however, was that the end of the matter, either in the Supreme Court or in American life. Beyond the constitutionalizing of same-sex marriage lies the determination of gay rights militants and their allies to bring about enforced conformity among those who disagree—to coerce individuals and institutions with conscientious objections to gay marriage to fall in line with the new order or pay for it. Last year’s scrap over the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and briefly spent time in jail for her convictions, was a hint of what’s to come. The question will return to the Supreme Court in due course. Against this background, Antonin Scalia’s emphasis on the text of the Constitution and the intentions of its drafters can be seen as an effort within the discipline of law to raise a bulwark against the relativism and moral libertarianism threatening to engulf us. Here’s one more reason, by no means the least, why Scalia will be missed.
The coming celibacy debate
Feb 22, 2016 / 00:00 amSpeculation and trial balloons floating lately over the Vatican walls suggest that Pope Francis wants to open up a discussion of married priests in the Church. According to reports, this will be the topic of the next world Synod of Bishops in a couple of years. Yes, I know the Church already has some married priests, and many of them are admirable people doing excellent pastoral work. The point now would presumably be to broaden the practice in the western Church and increase the number of such priests. The argument for doing so is the need to make more priests available to provide the Eucharist to Catholics as the number of celibate priests drops in many places. If it were done, it would most likely be by ordaining so-called “viri probati”—older married men of exemplary character—to function as what might be called (inaccurately) “weekend priests” available for service much the way many permanent deacons now are. This is hardly a new idea. It’s been batted around at least since Vatican Council II more than half a century ago. As the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, recently remarked, it would be hard to object now to a “positive and constructive” discussion of this matter. Pope Francis apparently agrees. Whatever might come of such a discussion, here’s one vote for making sure that celibacy and a celibate priesthood retain their honored place in the Catholic Church of the future. Three strong reasons for priestly celibacy occur immediately to me. First, availability. An unmarried priest, unlike a married one, has—in theory at least—the ability to give himself more freely to others, whereas a married man has a duty to give particular, preferential time and attention to his wife and family. It goes without saying that married men can be exceptionally generous too. And many are, with a generosity that extends far beyond their families. Still, Cardinal Parolin was speaking realistically when he remarked in a recent speech that celibacy allows a priest to “travel light” in his efforts to “reach everyone, carrying only the love of God.” The second reason is witness. It is painfully obvious that we live today in a sex-obsessed cultural environment where even perverse forms of sexual expression are not just accepted but encouraged. In these circumstances the practice of celibacy gives desperately needed public testimony to the fact that enslavement to sexual urges is not an inescapable part of life. Some people claim the practice of celibacy is unnatural. And indeed it is if by “natural” you mean the condition of human nature deranged by sin. If, however, “natural” refers to nature restored by the action of grace in a loving heart, then it isn’t celibacy but lust that’s unnatural. As Cardinal Parolin pointed out, celibacy is “not the absence of profound relationships” but an instrument of liberation that makes “space” for them. Finally, there is the spiritual reason for priestly celibacy. It’s not easy to express but it’s of great importance. Holiness is for married lay men and women as well as for priests. But celibacy adds a special dimension to priestly holiness, just as married love does for the married. In this way celibacy fills out the dimensions of holiness within the Body of Christ, the Church, and opens up a unique and irreplaceable pathway for the following of Christ. If there’s to be a discussion of ordaining married men, here’s hoping it keeps the compelling case for priestly celibacy plainly in view.
Lent and temptation
Feb 4, 2016 / 00:00 amIt would be like telling the story of World War II and leaving out Hitler. That’s what telling the story told in the gospels would be like without taking account of the devil. He and his evil companions are a sinister presence throughout. The gospel narrative concerning what might be called the first Lent is testimony to that. I mean the 40 days Christ spent in the desert before launching into his public career. At the end of it, Satan appears and proposes three famous temptations, recorded in the narratives of Matthew and Luke. Turn these stones into loaves of bread. Throw yourself down from the peak of the temple and be rescued by angels. “Fall down and worship me”—Satan, that is—and in doing that become ruler of all the kingdoms of the world. A mysterious episode, to say the least. What’s it all about? Many things, no doubt, but one thing stands out—vocation. And here it has much to tell us about ourselves. Jesus goes into the desert in order to engage in vocational discernment. Yes, he knows he is called to be messiah, redeemer. But exactly how? Satan offers not just one possibility but three: Be a messiah who makes people feel good by satisfying their physical wants (stones into bread); or be a messiah who awes people into submission by astonishing feats (hurtle down from the heights of the temple and let angels bear you up); or be a messiah in perhaps the most obvious way of all—pay homage to the devil as the price of worldly power and glory: be a kind of vicar of Satan on earth. Jesus’ answer to all three proposals is an unequivocal no. These are not ways of being messiah as his Father intends. According to the divine plan, the redeemer will redeem by sacrificing his life. And that is the sort of messiah Jesus chooses to be because it conforms to the will of the Father. “All very interesting,” someone might say, “but what does this story of demonic testing have to do with us and with modern day Lent as we experience it?” That, too, has many answers. One in particular strikes me. It’s along the following lines. The story of the temptation is not simply about the discerning of a vocation but about discerning a vocation correctly and living it in the manner God intends. This is a matter of importance for everyone, but it’s especially important for people who think of themselves, not without reason, as already being more or less pleasing in the eyes of God. The big danger for people like that is that, even though they do indeed see and accept God’s call, they may grow complacent over time—slightly off-track, a bit out of focus as it were. Nothing dramatic, mind you, yet not entirely right. Here is where self-inspection, repentance, and a renewed act of conversion become matters of urgency in the interior life. And here is what Lent especially invites good people to do. I’m reminded of something St. Ignatius Loyola said: “It is a mark of the Evil Spirit to take on the appearance of an angel of light. He begins by whispering thoughts that are suited to a devout soul, and ends by suggesting his own.” For good people in particular, Lent is a time to take a closer look at whether some Satanic solicitation—call it the temptation to be too pleased with themselves—has begun whispering to them.
Why does the media seem to think everything Trump says is newsworthy?
Jan 8, 2016 / 00:00 amThe potential presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, a media critic when it suits his purposes, is a creature of the media. Trump has a knack for saying outrageous things, and journalists have heaped lavish free coverage on his outrageousness. The result: a candidate who has never held public office and has made the art of personal insult a significant part of his chosen path to the White House. Piety probably isn’t going to solve this problem, but in the Jubilee Year of Mercy proclaimed by Pope Francis a concerted prayer campaign for an end to the politics of outrage and insult could only help. This is not just a matter of practicing civility and niceness. Nothing less than the common good of the nation is ultimately at stake here, and it is no violation of church-state separation to pray earnestly for that. However all this turns out, the media response to the Trump phenomenon represents pack journalism at its worst. One reporter records the candidate’s latest outrageous remark, so all the reporters feel they must do it, too. And have kept on doing it, over and over again, up to the eve of the primary season that’s now hard upon us. Perhaps the journalists believe that they make amends for giving so much attention to Trump by joining their coverage with frequent name-calling. But in fact even the name-calling seems to help Trump. Every knock a boost appears to be the name of the strange game being played by the candidate and the press. Pack journalism has always been a journalistic fault, but it’s become more of one in the age of the internet and Twitter. Covering the news under any circumstances is a rapid-fire enterprise in which deadlines play a crucial role and accuracy is forever at risk. But now we are reaping the dubious advantages of a competition-driven 24/7 news cycle produced by the advent of new media technology. The results are not pretty to behold. I was reflecting on these depressing matters when I came upon a post-Christmas goodbye column by Walter Pincus, a serious journalist who has written coverage and commentary on national security affairs for The Washington Post for more than forty years. Pincus took his leave by voicing three concerns about the news business. Although he didn’t mention Trump, what he said fits. One concern was how much the influence of media has grown in these four-plus decades thanks largely to the revolution in media technology. Next was the increased skill of newsmakers at using media to shape what the public gets told according to the way they want it told. “In many ways,” Pincus wrote, “I feel that journalistic ventures have become ‘common carriers,’ printing whatever newsmakers say—even if they know it to be untrue or inflammatory—just because…such stories generate readers, viewers and, these days, hits on the Web.” His third concern was this: “The current competitive rush to be first in both breaking news and slick commentary is leaving behind the facts….The public is left to make up its mind on important subjects by choosing between arguments without knowing much about the facts that may or may not underlie them.” In short, Pincus concluded, we are increasingly becoming society in which public relations is “a key part of government and our politics.” Via the Trump campaign, the politics of outrage and electronic pack journalism are now delivering a powerful symbiotic one-two punch to the common good. Should we be worried about that? You bet we should.
Belloc and Christendom
Dec 26, 2015 / 00:00 amChatting with a British bishop who’d said the famous Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc sometimes came to his home when he was a child to visit his father, a friend, I asked the obvious question: What was Belloc like? The bishop didn’t say a lot, but I do remember this: “…an old man in a rumpled, stained black suit.” The image has stuck with me, as apparently it did with the bishop. That would have been Belloc in the last years of his life. (He died in July, 1953, just short of turning 83.) He kept writing until near the end—after all, he made his living like that—social criticism plus history and biography of a polemical nature, vigorous and clear but scarcely unbiased. But the language—ah, the language. Here was Belloc’s great gift. From beginning to end his writing was a model of simple, elegant English prose. Lately I’ve been reading a pocket-sized Belloc book that I found on the shelf without even knowing it was there. Its title is Hills and the Sea, and it’s a collection of short essays the author published in British popular periodicals early in the last century. First appearing in 1906, the volume was republished (by Methuen) in 1913. A point of interest in my copy is an inscription on the title page, written when the book was presented to someone as a gift: “For the precious moments just before repose, beauty and adventure here at hand in Belloc’s unsurpassable prose.” And here, virtually at random, is a specimen of the writing that earned that effusion: “There was no breeze in the air, and the little deep vessel swung slightly to the breathing of the sea. Her great mainsail and her balloon-jib came over lazily as she swung, and filled themselves with the cheating semblance of a wind. The boom creaked in the goose-neck, and at every roll the slack of the main sheet tautened with a kind of little thud which thrilled the deck behind me.” “That looks pretty easy,” you say? Try doing it, my friend, and you may think differently. Do people still read Belloc? As with many writers who write a lot, his output was a mixed bag. Undoubtedly, too, he holds no interest for those who imagine European history and European culture began in 1789 with the French Revolution. But for people with an appreciation of Europe’s Christian roots, he matters. Readers who wish to tackle Belloc a little at a time will find a helpful introduction in The Essential Belloc, a compilation edited by Father C.J. McCloskey, Scott J. Bloch, and Brian Robertson and published by St. Benedict Press. His unquestioned masterpiece remains The Path to Rome, a rambling account of a journey—a pilgrimage, really—that he made, largely on foot, in 1901 through the heart of the Old Continent to the Eternal City. What is the book about? The answer, you might say, is whatever pops into the writer’s head. But on a deeper level its subject is no less than the Christian soul of Europe. The ideological ideal of today’s vision of a secularized Europe requires the creation of a uniform continental identity from which national identities and religious identity have been erased. By contrast, Belloc’s writing is full of glimpses of the Europe that was—Christendom—presented in inimitable prose and well worth cherishing even now. In the long run, history will declare the verdict among Christendom, a secularized European monolith, and…an Islamicized entity now perhaps starting to emerge.
Catholic voters and 2016
Dec 14, 2015 / 00:00 amWith the election of a new president less than a year away, at least one thing about the outcome seems reasonably clear: whoever the winner turns out to be, a majority of the voters identifying themselves as Catholics will probably have voted for him or her. That’s been the pattern for a long time now, and there is no reason to think it will change next November. And why should it? People like to be on the winning side. Why should Catholics be any different? Hold on though. When I’m tempted to think that way, I recall something said a while back by columnist Michael Gerson. Writing about Catholic voting patterns, Gerson remarked that Catholics are so often swing voters because, being “so typical,” they tend to vote “almost exactly like their suburban neighbors.” Gerson, a non-Catholic, didn’t consider that good news. “There is something vaguely disturbing,” he remarked, “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.” The erasure of such distinctive marks is of course part of the homogenizing effect of the process of cultural assimilation to which American Catholics, like the members of other religious and ethnic groups, have been subjected in the last two centuries. Among other things, this assimilation has involved—and goes on involving today—a steady, increasingly visible diminishment of religious identity. The issues facing the nation in the election of 2016 are deeply serious and extremely complex. Catholics serious about their obligations as citizens and as Catholics could well come to different conclusions about candidates. What they cannot, or anyway should not, do is substitute semi-automatic conformity with the judgment of their peers for conscientious evaluation of the office-seekers. Ranking high among the issues for consideration next November is the future direction of the Supreme Court. Four of the court’s current members—Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Scalia, and Kennedy—are now 75 or older. (Ginsburg tops the list at 82.) Barring a miracle of longevity, some and perhaps all of these will be leaving the Supreme Court in the next several years. And so, obviously, might others. Thus a two-term president could well have the opportunity to name four or more new justices of the Supreme Court before leaving office in 2025. In doing that, he or she would have shaped the court as it will be for the next quarter-century—which means shaping it on a host of sensitive issues involving, along with much else, religious liberty and conscience rights as these pertain both to institutions and individuals. Does it matter? You bet it does. As a young reporter unexpectedly assigned to the Supreme Court beat many years ago, I soon learned that the overriding reason why this was a good place to be lay in the fact that just about every big question in the nation’s life sooner or later comes before the Supreme Court for an answer. To be a member of this vastly powerful body is not a ceremonial position, and choosing those who will serve there is one the most important functions entrusted to a president by the Constitution. Here is something responsible voters—including assimilated Catholics—need to take with the utmost seriousness when casting their ballots for president in November. Amid the customary blather of a political campaign, Americans should ask themselves which candidate they trust to name new justices to the Supreme Court of the United States.
Roots of the Great Divide
Nov 13, 2015 / 00:00 amThe inability of parties to America’s culture war to communicate meaningfully with one another on issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and assisted suicide is a disturbing fact of national life today. One observer remarks that the two sides seem to be living in “different moral universes.” But that isn’t new. The problem is the same one analyzed in depth by, for example, Notre Dame philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his acclaimed book After Virtue, which first appeared in 1981. What is new since then is the extent to which this breakdown in communication has come to frame the public policy debate. This is not the same as healthy pluralism. People who see it for the societal crisis it truly is trace it to the collapse of moral consensus grounded in natural law (or in the Judeo-Christian tradition or whatever else someone might choose to call it). Some applaud the collapse, others deplore it. In any case, having emerged in European intellectual circles in the 18th century and grown throughout the 19th century, it came to a head in the closing decades of the 20th century. Obviously people in the past often violated the principles of the old moral consensus. Yet everyone, or nearly everyone, acknowledged their validity and binding force. Then came the collapse. Now some continue to subscribe to the old morality of the consensus, while others promote a new morality of individual rights and doing as you please. The result, MacIntyre famously remarked, is that “modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.” Pope Francis’s U.S. visit was a hopeful sign that the Holy Father’s charismatic style could be a powerful instrument for the working of God’s grace in the lives of individuals. In the end, though, it takes something more systematic and stable than personal charisma to sustain policy agreement on the level of society. Here there are three, and only three, possibilities: force, manipulation, and persuasion via rational argumentation. In a democracy, force can take the form of either the so-called tyranny of the majority or, as we have been reminded by the Supreme Court in its rulings on abortion and same-sex marriage, the tyranny of elite opinion mediated through decisions of the federal judiciary. More interesting is manipulation. Its rationale was laid out back in 1922 in Public Opinion, a book by Walter Lippmann, already on his way to becoming an establishment icon. As a White House staffer, Lippmann had learned from the Wilson administration’s campaign to whip up support for its World War I policy. His conclusion: “The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class.” Setting policy should be reserved to “experts” engaged in counseling elite political decision-makers, with the latter preserving democratic forms while selling the decisions to voters by the techniques of manipulation. Familiar? This is the formula for most political image making today. Finally there is persuasion via rational argumentation. This was a live possibility when the policy debate occurred within the context of a moral consensus. But now that consensus is gone. In his classic We Hold These Truths, published in 1960, Father John Courtney Murray, S.J. sadly concluded that as the foundation of public policy “the tradition of reason, which is the tradition of natural law, is dead.” And although he hoped against hope for its revival, half a century later there’s no real evidence of that happening. As we await national elections in less than a year, this impoverishment is a cause for alarm.