Gender as a Mental Construct

Marxism, Natural Law, Sexual Ethics, , , ,

In his Poverty of Philosophy, Karl Marx attacked eternal truths and natural law as nothing more than constructs of the bourgeoisie to repress the working class.  This has powered the campaign of his intellectual progeny to take everything that is natural and paint it as a “social construct” that fuels the engine of repression.  The most recent, and perhaps the most pernicious example of this is gender.  By labeling it as a social construct, all natural differences between the sexes, including complementarity, explained away as effects of changing social conditions.  All that needs to be done is to construct the right social conditions and equality and androgyny will usher in a sexual utopia.  

WHO Should We Listen To?

In combating the social contagion of transgenderism, we must first irradicate the mind virus that leads to it.  Ironically, this global mind virus has spread even into the World Health Organization who  defines gender as a social construct in this way:

Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed.  This includes norms, behaviors and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time. Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities…Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs… Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.

Notice first the circular nature of the experts’ definition.  They say it “interacts” with sex but is different than sex.  Its definition is teaming with sexual terms—“women, men, girls, and boys”  Those terms are only meaningful in relation to each other.  A women is a human being whose body is ordered towards the gestation of new life while a man is human being whose body is ordered towards the gestation of new life in another.  Girls and boys are merely immature versions of those two.  No amount of verbal gymnastics of degrading a woman by reducing her to her function as a “birthing person” will change this inherent sexual relationality.  The fact that WHO advocates for transition “treatment” modalities such as hormones and surgery which make the person “look” more like the opposite sex also betrays the fact gender and sex are inseparable.  Is it really a social construct that men have beards and women have breasts?  If it is not, then why would it be necessary for a woman to “transition” to a man physically?  If gender and sex can be different, then why all the effort to match them up?  If gender identity is “person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender”, then why is it necessary to touch the external at all?

Why We Shouldn’t Give Them a Hearing

Once we grasp that the purpose of labeling gender a social construct is to apply the magical Marxian dialectic to it, then we are more apt to defend it in a way that combats this directly.  We need to actively reaffirm what is natural.  First there is the fact that we are social creatures which means that society, rather than being a vehicle of oppression is a necessary element of our fulfillment.  Boys and girls are first formed in masculinity and femininity (and their interaction with each other) in the social setting of the family.  They learn how they have a unique capacity for self-giving based on their sex and they enter into society as a whole and form families of their own in order to fulfill this capacity. A further element that must be combated is the overt dualism that animates most people’s thinking.  Because we are a body/soul composite, the inner experience can never be divorced from the outer reality.  Any attempt to do so ultimately leads to a disintegration of the person which manifests itself externally in the mutilation of the body.  Hylomorphism means that essentially everything we consciously experience has its foundation in material reality  We might imagine something like a unicorn, but that image must come from our experience in the real world of either a picture we have seen of a unicorn (from someone else’s imagination) or a mixture of our own images of a white horse with a horn.  Likewise we might imagine what it was like to be Louis XVI, but could never fully imagine what he felt like when he was about to be guillotined.  It is simply outside of our experience.  The philosopher Thomas Nagel has an essay entitled What Is It Like to be a Bat? in which he gives a deeper explanation of this limitation of consciousness in relation to the “inner” experience of other beings.   

The point is that a man feeling like a woman is by definition outside of his range of experience.  He only has experience of being a man who feels like a woman (which is by definition still a man).  He may know what it feels like to be confused, but he is confused as a man.  How can a man struggling with gender dysphoria know that what he is experiencing is “feeling like a woman”?  Doesn’t someone have to be a woman to feel like a woman?   How does he know that what he feels like is exactly what a man should feels like?  This is why he must go to the cultural priests (psychologists) and receive their blessing that his feelings are authentic.

The fact that an expert must authenticate the experience returns us back to the fundamental truth that transgenderism is ultimately a mental construct by those who are seeking to eliminate all hierarchies by destroying nature itself.  It is designed to power the latest instance of the Marxist dialectic.  This is not to trivialize the experience of those who suffer from gender dysphoria but to discredit the so-called experts who are willing to sacrifice them to their ideology.

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Fulfillment of the Law

Bible, Church, Church and State, Natural Law, The Life of Jesus, ,

As Moses departed from the people of Israel, he promised that God would send another prophet just like him (Dt 18:15).  This prophet would not only lead them into the True Promised Land, but would give them a new law.  So the Jews were constantly on the lookout for this “new Moses” and the early Church repeatedly preached Jesus as the Mosaic prophet they were looking for (c.f. Acts 3:22, 7:37).  It is no surprise then that Our Lord, just after beginning His public ministry in Matthew’s gospel (addressed to the Jews), climbs a mountain and delivers the Sermon on the Mount.  For just like Moses who had to climb Mount Sinai to bring the law from God down to the people, the new Moses, God Himself, speaks directly from the mountain about the Law.

Chronologically and culturally removed from the Sermon on the Mount, it is often confusing for us when the Bible speaks of “the Law”.  What exactly does that mean and, more specifically, what does it mean when Our Lord tells those gathered that “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill” (Mt 5:17)?

The Old Law

In his treatise on Law in the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas enumerates three kinds of precepts of the Old Law: moral, ceremonial, and judicial.  By placing all of the Old Law within these three broad categories, we are able to better understand both our relationship to the law and the manner in which Christ can say that He did not abolish it but came to fulfill.

When most people think of the “Old Law” the Ten Commandments immediately come to mind.  It serves as the foundation for all the moral precepts contained within the Old Law.  The Decalogue is in a certain sense superimposed upon the Natural Law, making the precepts of the Natural Law specific.  Some of the precepts are easily discernible based on the natural law—“thou shall not kill…thou shall not bear false witness”.  Other precepts require wisdom and reflection such as “thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”  Still others, especially those of the first tablet require Divine instruction.  Nevertheless, they do all relate to what can be known from the natural law.

Second, there are the ceremonial precepts of the Old Law.  These pertain to Divine Worship.  This would include things like sacrifices, sacred things such as the tabernacle, Old Testament “sacraments” such as Seder Meals and circumcision, and observances that distinguished them as worshippers of the True God (not eating pork, etc.).

Finally, there is judicial law.  Judicial law is similar to civil law in that it determines the way that a People is governed.  It maintains the sovereignty of the People, it governs relations within the People, and governs how citizens interact with non-citizens.  Much of the book of Leviticus lays out in detail how Israel is to govern itself in these areas.  Israel was to be a “light to the Gentiles” but must remain a distinct People because “salvation comes from the Jews.” 

Fulfillment of the Law

With three types or precepts of the Old Law, there are also three ways in which Christ fulfilled them.  When we speak of “fulfillment” we must first grasp intention.  The moral precepts, reflected in the Ten Commandments, are the direct intention of God with respect to how we are to relate to Him (1st-3rd Commandment) and to each other (4th-10th Commandment).  As St. Thomas says, there can only be dispensation of the law when the letter of the law frustrates the intention of the Lawgiver.  Therefore, there is no abrogation of the moral precepts of the Old Law.

Christ, nevertheless, fulfills the moral precepts in Himself.  He perfectly follows the moral law.  In so doing, He wins graces for His followers such that they are empowered to do the same thing.  It is as if He gives us the power to “re-read” the Decalogue not in terms of rules but as a prophecy.  “in Christ you shall not make false idols…in Christ you shall not covet your neighbor’s goods” etc.   

Christ likewise fulfilled all the ceremonial precepts.  The purpose of the ceremonial precepts was to prefigure and act as a foreshadowing of the mystery of Christ.  All of the sacrifices find their meaning and fulfillment in His sacrifice on the Cross.  He is the true tabernacle.  Baptism becomes the “new” circumcision.  All dietary laws are abrogated because the Bread of Life has become man’s true food.

The judicial precepts had as their purpose setting apart the Jews for the sake of the Messiah.  In Christ there is no distinction between Gentile and Jew so that the judicial precepts are no longer binding (Heb 7:12).  The catholicity of the New Israel means that the theodicy of the Old Israel has ended and the principles of the New Covenant can guide men in civil life, regardless of the form of government they take.  Church and State work together, each within its respective sphere, to bring men to salvation, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s” (Mk 12:17).

 We see then how Christ came not to abolish but to fulfill the Law.  He fulfills the moral, ceremonial, and judicial precepts of the Law, but each in a unique way.  The moral by empowering men to live according to God’s law.  The ceremonial by giving us Himself on the Cross and through the Sacraments.  And the judicial precepts through the Church.    

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Sin and the Dimensions of Providence

Sin, Spiritual Warfare

One of the themes that St. Paul reflects upon in his letter to the Romans is the role that Sin plays in Divine Providence.  He does not say it using those terms directly, but it is clear from his statement that God “where sin abounds, grace superabounded” (Rom 5:20) that there is an important reflection for the Romans (and us) to make related to Sin in their own lives.  It is this theme that I would like to take up here.

Recall what has been said a number of times previously in regards to Providence.  It has two dimensions or aspects.  The first relates to God’s overall plan for Creation.  At the center of the plan is Christ.  This is why St. Paul keeps coming back to the typological relationship between Christ and Adam in Romans 5-7.  The sin of Adam becomes the type of all sin and becomes in a very real sense the cause of the Incarnation.  I am not taking sides in the Scholastic debate over whether the Son would have become man if there was no sin, only dealing with reality as we have it.

Adam’s Sin and God’s Providence

What we very often don’t think about is that God could have stopped Adam from sinning.  And He could have done so in a way that still protected Adam’s freedom of choice.  He could have stopped the Devil from entering into the Garden.  He could have given Adam an actual grace by which his intellect or will were strengthened against the temptation of the Devil.  He could have inspired Adam to pray against the temptation.  He could have sent His Guardian Angel to crush the head of the serpent.  He could have continually done this so that Adam never sinned (this is exactly what he did with Mary) and Adam would have been the freest human person ever.

So, then we must ask why God permitted Adam to sin.  Permitted is the key word because God did not cause Him to sin.  Yet He chose not to stop him and so there must have been some good that otherwise would not have been.  That good was the Incarnation of His Only Begotten Son.  Again, this is not an answer to the debate, but a fact that it was better for the Son of Man to save us from our sins than to be merely incarnated.  It reveals something of God and His glory that otherwise would not have been shown forth.

It is also a fact that God permitted that particular sin of Adam.  Again, Adam could have fallen any number of ways.  But God allowed that particular sin with all its circumstances for a very specific reason.  Adam sinned exactly as he did because it brought about and prefigured the specific act of redemption God wanted. Felix culpa!  “O happy fault that merited so great of a Redeemer.”

But Adam was not a mere pawn or instrument in the divine economy.  God also had Adam’s good in mind when He permitted him to fall exactly as he did.  This does not mean that Adam received the good, only that God allowed his sin in order to give him some good.  It is impossible to know what the specific good or goods that God would give to Adam as a consequence of that particular sin, but one can readily see how this would be possible.  For Adam needed humility and trust in God’s Providence, both of which could have been given to him as a consequence of his sin.  God would not permit the sin to happen if there was not some personal good that was also possible. 

Admitting the possibility though does not mean that Adam received the consequent goods.  Repentance is the gateway to receiving those goods.  This is what St. Paul means when he cautions the Romans not to think that grace was a direct result of the sin (Romans 6:1). It is a result of God’s omnipotence that He can bring good from our sins.  For sin is literally nothing and only God can bring good from nothing.  Try as we might, we can never do evil and expect good to come from it.

Providence’s Second Dimension

What we have been discussing is the other way in which sin plays a role in God’s Providence—personally.  God’s Providence is not just in His governance of the world as a whole, but also His governance of the world as if you are the only one that matters.  He will not cease providing you and me with what we need at each and every moment of our lives.  It is a direct effect of His wisdom and His love; wisdom in His governance of all things for my personal benefit and His ceaseless willing of my good.  God doesn’t just will my good generically, but personally and at each and every moment of my life.

While we might intellectually assent to this, we cannot realize it without asking why God permits us to fall into some sins and not others?   Most certainly there are sins from which we personally could never escape.  Those seem not to plague.  Others keep us humble and aware enough of our faults that we do not sin in more serious ways.  Others help us eventually to see that we have been trapped by a lie of the Evil One.  Not sure why God permitted it, ask Him.

This is a spiritually fruitful practice not just because it helps us to grow in self-knowledge, but also because it helps us to see what God wants to give us and heal us from.  In order for this to happen we cannot hide in shame from our sins or try to rationalize them away.  Trusting in God’s mercy we must face them head-on in a spirit of repentance.  Once repented, we are opened to receiving the greater grace within God’s permission.  As St. Thomas says in a gloss on Romans 5, some sinners “by the help of divine grace are humbled when they consider their sins and so obtain a greater grace (Ps 16:4)”.  In short, when we sin we must run to repentance and filled with both sorrow and love, anticipate the good that God has for us

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On Dating Christmas

Advent, Apologetics, Christmas, History, Scripture, , , ,

Each Christmas a friend of mine sends me a text wishing me “seasons greetings”.  He casts a wide net capturing the “spirit” of the season wishing me a “Merry Christmas, Merry Natalis Solis Invictus, and Happy Kwanza” and, just in case, throws in a “Happy Festivus” for the rest of us.  Rather than continually engaging him each year, I now simply respond “Merry Christmas…and as for the rest, I have already aired my grievances.”  His point is rather clear—Christmas is just as made up as the rest of them.  It is an indirect attack on the historicity of Christ, but also a direct attack on the dating of Christmas as December 25th.  Having addressed the indirect attack in other posts, it is the direct attack I would like to address in this post.

The Problem of Accuracy

One of the problems we must admit right away is related to the accuracy of the date.  The Church Fathers are not unanimous in the dating of Christmas and very few mention December 25th.  It is not until much later that the Church selected that date to mark the Solemnity of Christmas.  Part of the problem is the abundance of calendars used in the ancient world.  The two most commonly ones that were used Egyptian and the Julian Calendar.  The Jews also used a calendar based on the lunar cycles (354 days) rather than on the solar cycle (365).  These were considered obsolete when the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in the 1500s (although the Orthodox still mark Christmas on January 7th which is the equivalent to December 25th on the Julian Calendar).  The point is that our December 25th is not the same day as the December 25th using the Julian Calendar, which was the one in use in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ.  We have to admit that there is a “translation” problem that makes the exacting dating difficult.

This does not mean, however, that the selection of December 25th is arbitrary and meaningless.  But this is to yield to the sentiment that somehow accuracy and meaning are synonymous.  Just because we cannot accurately calculate the date of Christ’s birth doesn’t mean December 25th is arbitrary.  In fact, it is the most fitting date to celebrate the historical reality of Christ’s nativity because it preserves the meaning of Christ’s birth.

There is a principle at play in the discussion that, in our Big Bang/Evolutionary ideal, is often forgotten.  Nothing within Creation is arbitrary.  Even the tiniest activity is charged with meaning, not because of the Butterfly Effect, but because of Christ.  To put it in biblical terms, “in Him were created all things in heaven and on earth…all things were created through Him and for Him” (Col 1:16, emphasis added).  At the center of Creation, at the center of history, is Christ.  All of Creation points to Him and all of Creation finds its meaning in Him.  Christ really is the answer.  He is, to use Aristotelian terms, the Final Cause of each thing in Creation.  This was His reason for creating so many natural images so that He might use them to describe Himself and His Kingdom. 

The Fittingness of December 25th

With this in mind, why is December 25th fitting then?  To grasp this we must go back to “the beginning”.  Many of the Jews and ancient Christians believed that the Sun was created on March 25th.  It is assumed that when God created the Sun to “separate day from night” (Gn 1:14), this separation was equal.  This only occurs on two dates throughout the year—the two equinoxes in the Spring and the Fall.  The date for the Vernal Equinox in the Julian Calendar was March 25th.  God chose the fourth day for the creation of the sun because it was the day in which the “sun of righteousness” (Mal 4:2) was to come into the world.  Its creation is for the sake of God Himself entering Creation.  This entering into Creation occurred when the Holy Spirit overshadowed His Mother at the Annunciation.  It is for this reason To mark Christ’s conception the Church celebrates the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25th .

As an aside, March 25th is also believed by many Church Fathers to be the day Christ died.  “On the third day, He rose again” and man was re-made.  Again, we see the parallel with Creation.  The Sun is created on the 4th day and then “on the third day” (Day 6) man is first made.  This only seems like a stretch when we forget the principle articulated above.  If all things really were made for Christ, then this is exactly what you would expect.

If Christ was conceived on March 25th, then it would be reasonable to celebrate His birth nine months later on December 25th.  This is the reason for the December 25th celebration.  In support of this date we also have the witness of nature itself.  “The true light which has come into the world” (Jn 1:9), comes right after the Winter Solstice, when the amount of light coming into the world from the Sun begins to increase.  December 25th is most certainly fitting.

The three Wise Men knew all of this.  This is why they followed the Star.  They knew nature points to the True King.  The choice of December 25th is a defense of the primacy of Christ, not just over Solis Invictus, but over all of Creation.  We too would be wise to pay attention to this principle.

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On Marrying Young

marriage, Natural Law, , ,

Over the past 40 years, the median age of men and women getting married in the US has risen steeply.  Catholics, it seems, are no different in this regard.  A Pew Research Center study in 2014 found that only 14% of Catholics between the ages of 18-29 were married.  Marrying at a much later age has become the “new normal”.  Statistics are helpful, but they do not answer the most important question as to whether this is a good thing or not.  The answer, not surprisingly, is a resounding “No”.

To see why this question is answered in the negative, we must first make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural.  Normality expresses to what degree a man conforms to a cultural norm.  These norms are always relative to the culture in which they are established.  In the best of all possible worlds, they are also relative to what is natural.  It is when the natural and the normal coincide that the behavior in question leads to true flourishing and happiness (in the fullest sense).  While it may be normal to get married older, it is questionable whether it conforms to what is natural.

A Natural Time to Get Married?

Marriage in itself is natural for the human person, but the question is whether the nature of marriage itself demands that the spouses wait until they are older to marry.  To address this question we must first ask how we determine what is natural.

One way that we can do this is by looking at the biological reality of the human body.  What I mean by this can be best illustrated by an example.  We know that, despite being deeply immersed in a Freudian-Kinseyan paradigm, children are not sexual beings.  If they were, then they would develop sexual capacities before the normal age of puberty (12-16).  This is why, as I have written previously, something like Drag Queen Story Hour is an abuse of childhood. 

While we might readily admit that biology reveals the grievous nature of sexualizing children, we tend to make a the same error when it comes to marriage and sexual development.  Is it reasonable to think that God made men and women sexually mature by their late teens and early 20s only to have them enter a holding pattern for up to a decade?  Perhaps you could say yes, except for the fact that they also experience their strongest libido at the same time. 

Sexual desire is the strongest desire we experience because it is meant to fuel the courage to make the necessary gift of self necessary for marriage and family life.  It is at its strongest at such an early age because it is meant to propel the man and woman out from their parents so as to become parents themselves.  The problem is that we now tell young adults that, despite the fact that they experience strong sexual desire, they are too young for marriage.  There is the obvious disconnect then between God’s design and lived reality.    

With these considerations in mind, it becomes clear that there is something contra-natural about waiting so long to get married.  As mentioned, marriage in and of itself at any age is natural so we cannot say it is against nature.  It does however tend towards being contrary to the nature of marriage itself, especially because it is the foundation of the Family.  Rather than making it possible to be “fruitful and multiply” it contributes to what would more accurately be called the modern “fruitful and maintain” paradigm.  Again to be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with waiting to marry in individual cases, but in the general trend and attitude towards the later marriages.

Marriage as a Life Accesory

Once we are able to grasp that younger marriages conform with God’s design for marriage, we can begin to ask why many people fail to see this.  To say that “Marriage is natural” means that it is one of the things that fulfills our nature (i.e. become virtuous).  This fulfillment comes not just because we biologically passed on our genes, but because Marriage and the Family are foundational for our moral growth.  The Family is a school of virtue, not just for children, but for the man and woman as both husband and wife and then father and mother. 

Our culture, on the other hand, treats marriage as if it is merely an add-on.  The professional has taken precedence over the personal.  Marriage is not even considered until a certain level of professional success is achieved.  The person trains himself to link fulfilment with professional achievement.  They also become very set in their ways and their capacity for self-giving in marriage and family is diminished.  We should expect the age to continue to increase unless a fundamental shift in attitude occurs.  The longer the person waits, the less they are “ready” for marriage. 

This putting of the occupational cart before the conjugal horse fails to acknowledge that, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out, the communion of persons in marriage is a fundamental human good upon which all human goods are built (Veritatis Splendor 14).  To add it into an already settled life is to risk disintegration because the true accessories have been placed before the essential.  Professional decisions are for the sake of supporting a family.  Rather than seeing education and careers as means to supporting a spouse and family, they have become competitors.  The attitude is “once I go to school and get a job, then I will think about marriage” rather than “I am choosing to be trained in this profession because it will allow me to take care of my family.”  And this attitude is encouraged even by well-meaning Catholics.

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The Muddled Creationist

Evolution, Faith and Reason, Science, Scripture, , ,

There is perhaps no movement in the Church that has been more destructive to confidence in Sacred Scripture than Theistic Evolution.  Proponents usually defend their position by saying “truth cannot contradict truth” so that the lens of science can be applied to the biblical account of origins confidently.  But the amount of exegetical gymnastics that it requires ultimately destroys faith in the truth and historicity of the first eleven chapters of Genesis.  Once faith is shaken in the beginnings of the Bible, it is not long before other books fall victim to the same fate. 

At first glance it seems to be a reasonable position especially with our modern disdain of fundamentalism, no matter what position they actually take.  As Christians, the full evolutionary explanation, one marked by a completely material explanation of the origins of life, is unacceptable.  But rather than rejecting it outright as false, they attempt to tweak it so as to avoid being lumped in the fundamentalist creationist camp.  They insert God into the gaps in evolution by saying that either He guided it or stepped in at certain points.  The evolutionary fence-sitting seems like a compromise but all it ends up doing is compromising the Faith itself.

Avoiding the Evolutionary Creep Deep into Genesis

I mentioned the first eleven chapters of Genesis as being in the crosshairs.  We should not be surprised about this because St. Peter warned us that scoffers in the end times would deny the truth of the Flood.  He even tells us how they will deny it—by saying ‘all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation.’ (2 Peter 3:3-7).  This describes what has become known as uniformitarianism.  This “theory” posits that all geological features can be interpreted in terms of slow-and-gradual processes.  Layers of sediment and the natural processes all proceed at exactly the same pace throughout the history of the world enabling us to somewhat accurately measure time based on the fossil record.  If those processes are not uniform then really nothing can be said as far as timing.  If there was, say a world-wide flood, burying the surface of the Earth for 100 days, the receding of the waters would not only profoundly change the face of the earth but also lay down layer upon layer of sediment almost all at once.  This would mess up the “biological clock” and leave evolution without enough time to work itself out.  Combine this with other similar catastrophes that were not as large and any dating of the Earth would certainly be overestimated.

Darwin himself recognized that the Flood must go— “Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection, if it be a true principle, banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure” (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species).

Even if we ignore the fact that fossils only form when something is buried quickly, uniformitarianism has been called into question as a scientific theory.  Many geologists, especially those who don’t have an atheistic axe to grind, agree that  it should retired.  We have many recent examples of catastrophes that have resulted in an “aged” landscape.  A good example that refutes uniformitarianism is near Spirit Lake in Mt. St Helens in Washington state that was created in a mere few hours and has the “appearance of being millions of years old.  Nevertheless, it is nowhere near being as sure a theory as it is often portrayed. 

What is sad is that many theistic evolutionists feel obligated to adjust their interpretation of Noah’s Flood by making it either a mythical event or just a small local flood because it does not fit with evolution.  This is non-sensical unless you are also willing to explain away all the animals on board (why is this necessary?) and God’s promise never to do it again (there are local floods all the time).  Darwin had at least this right—if the Flood really did occur then it is practically impossible that evolution is true. 

Not a Science Textbook

There are those who willingly accept the historical truth of the Flood yet still claim that we should accept evolution because Genesis is not a science book.  This is a bit of a non-sequitur because no one claims that it is.  Science could not explain creation for the simple fact that it is a supernatural event.  The Six Days of Creation describe supernatural actions performed directly by God (Wisdom 9:1).  It definitely explains how  it was done, even if it doesn’t do so using scientific language.  It is a dogma of the Faith that each thing was created out of nothing by God’s Word (“through Him all things were made”) and not through any secondary causes (more on this in a second).  Science could no more explain how God did it than it could explain how Christ turned water into wine or rose from the dead.  Science can only explain natural phenomena.  The fact that it is a supernatural event explains the rather oblique language, but it does not clear the way for an evolutionary interpretation.  The language is meant to add clarity not obscurity.  To say that the “dust of the earth” really means “ a monkey’s body” or that the birds being formed on the fifth day before the reptiles on the sixth day isn’t really meaningful since evolutionary theory has birds evolving from reptiles or the fact that the whales and other sea-going mammals were formed on the fifth day before the land animals on the sixth day from which they supposedly evolved also doesn’t matter is putting the evolutionary cart before the scriptural horse.  It may not be a science textbook, but there is no reason to use oblique language when there is a perfectly understandable explanation.  Truth cannot contradict truth indeed.  Why would we assume that the Scriptural text should be adjusted when it is clear that there is little more than a scientific hypothesis that reptiles evolved into birds?  It is almost as if God anticipated the Theory of Evolution and directly refuted it through the order in which things were created.

As promised, we will return to the dogmatic declaration that all things were created directly by God and find a rather large stumbling block for theistic evolution.  The First Vatican Council declared

“If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God; or holds that God did not create by his will free from all necessity, but as necessarily as he necessarily loves himself; or denies that the world was created for the glory of God: let him be anathema.” (Vatican I, Dei Fillius, Canon 5).

The bold text means that God did not use any secondary agents to create each new kind of living thing.  This Biblical kind is distinct from biological species (a nebulous term anyway), but it does leave the door open for microevolution even broadly speaking (say for a horse to become a zebra for example).  But it closes the door on is macroevolution because it does not permit any belief that one kind (say reptile) became another kind (say bird).  Evolution, even guided, also necessitates on God’s part an adherence during creation to natural laws.  This too draws the Church’s anathema upon the theistic evolutionist.

Ultimately then the theistic evolutionist can only subscribe to a microevolutionary theory of variation with biblical kinds and requires God to regularly intervene in creation whenever a new kind is made.  What they don’t realize is that this ultimately makes them muddled Creationists.  They concede that God created each new thing, but then mix in microevolution to explain all the variation.  I say muddled because they are confusing what St. Thomas describes as the Creation/Providence paradigm.  During the days of Creation God created each thing according to its kind.  On the Seventh Day and beyond, no new kinds of creatures come into being (God rests from creating on the 7th day), but through reproduction and multiplication we might see distinct scientific species arise (think of my horse and zebra hypothetical).  But this really isn’t evolution at all, at least not as Darwinists define it.  Certainly, you could read Genesis literally and there would be no conflict with microevolution at all (this is why I have written about the need to not fall for the evolutionary bait and switch).

It turns out then that Theistic Evolution is nothing more than a Faustian Bargain.  In order to be intellectually honest to the Evolutionary explanation, Faith in Genesis must be replaced with faith in Darwin.  There is no compromise to be made between the two worldviews that does not leave the compromiser compromised.

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Christ Living in Me

Grace, Prayer, Spiritual Life, The Life of Jesus, , , ,

In the midst of his battle against the Arians, St. Athanasius once pithily said, “that which Christ did not assume, has not been healed.”  The point that the Father of Orthodoxy was making was that Our Lord assumed the entirety of our human condition in order to redeem and renew us (2 Cor 5:17).  He did not just generically redeem our actions, in lived them in order that they might be sanctified.  He became a worker, in order to redeem our work.  He entered a family in order to redeem family life.  He had friends in order to redeem friendship.  He ate in order to redeem eating.  He suffered in order to redeem suffering.  He died in order to redeem death.  The list can go on and on, but the point is that whatever He did, He did as the Divine Redeemer, taking both ordinary and extraordinary actions and supercharging them with sanctifying power.

Realizing Our Beliefs

This principle helps us to understand why He lived the “Hidden Years” of His life, seemingly doing nothing but living an ordinary life.  He did not just one day, as Pope Benedict XVI is fond of saying, pick up the mantle of Redeemer.  It was Who He was the moment He took flesh to Himself.  We might be tempted to file this away as an interesting reflection on the truth of the Incarnation, as something that we simply believe, without taking the time to realize it.

The necessity of allowing our beliefs to be realized is at the heart of theology.  What I mean by this is that it is not enough to merely intellectually assent to some truth (that is belief), it must become realized by becoming an active principle by which we live our lives.  St. Thomas Aquinas is not a saint because he wrote the Summa, he is a saint because he lived the Summa.  He modeled his life after the Church’s first theologian, St. Paul.

St. Paul believed in Christ’s full redemption and made it the principle by which he lived his life.  By way of the Galatians, he instructs us to do the same thing when he said “it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me; the life that I live in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God…”

We must first fully grasp that when St. Paul says this, he means it literally.  He is not talking about how he tried really hard to imitate Christ and got so good at it that he acts a lot like Him.  He means it quite literally that it is no longer his own life that animates him, but instead the life of Christ.  By exercising his faith in Christ as full-time Redeemer, he has become another Christ in the world and calls us to imitate him in order that we too might say the same thing.

Linking Our Lives to Christ’s

In short, the secret is that we must link our lives to Christ.  This happens not in some abstract way, but by linking each moment of our everyday lives to the moment in Christ’s earthly life that “matches” it.  This might still sound a little too abstract, so let’s take an example.

Let’s suppose that I just found out that a friend of mine has told a group of people something that I wanted to remain a secret.  I feel betrayed.  Rather than wallowing in that, I go to Christ in His moment of betrayal and speak with Him about the situation.  When He experienced His betrayal, being God, He also foresaw this moment in which I would be betrayed.  He submitted to it in order to redeem this moment for me.  He has already won for me whatever graces I am most in need of. I simply need to show up with my divinely bestowed claim ticket to receive it.  Still, it is His life, not just in the abstract, but really which moves me to respond in accord with the Divine Will. 

Returning back to Athanasius’ point, you cannot find a single moment of your life that does not link up to Christ’s.  Studying His life in the gospels is obviously helpful in making the connection, but it is not absolutely necessary.  You can just as easily tell Our Lord, “I unite myself to that moment in Your life when you were hungry and ask for the grace not to be hangry in my situation” as go to Him when He is hungry after fasting in the desert.  In either case, my willingness to go where Christ has already “remembered” me is the cause of the redemption and sanctification of the present moment.  This is why every saint counsels the necessity of meditating upon the life of Christ.  *****

Doing this occasionally is very fruitful, but once it becomes habitual, you will become a saint.  The life of Christ and your life become practically indistinguishable as you draw all of your movement from His life such that Christ re-lives His life in you.  This is what St. Paul was talking about.  He started by exercising Faith in the Jesus as the Son of God Who died for him and then carries all of that to its logical conclusion by uniting His  life at each moment with Christ’s.  It is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me!    

***Seeing each moment of Christ’s life as a mystery in which I participate through prayer and receive graces He has already won for me specifically is at the heart of adopting this habit.  It is Blessed Columba Marmion who has worked out the theology surrounding this, but I have summarized his thought in a previous post.

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Faith and the Suspicion of God

Bible, Faith, Faith and Reason, Virtue, ,

Are you suspicious of God?  This is a rather strange question to open an essay, especially one written by a believer.  It seems to be the question of the skeptic.  If we are honest, we will admit that, yes, on some level, I am suspicious of God. That level of honesty is difficult because it shatters the image each of us has of himself as a Christian.  Nevertheless, it is there.  God has willed it (even if only permissively) as an effect of the Fall.  We have each inherited from Eve a suspicion that God might not totally have our best interest at heart.  Satan placed the question of whether God was holding out on her in her heart and its echoes have been heard in the hearts of her progeny ever since.

There is further proof that suspicion is part of our default condition.  In those children whom He has adopted in Baptism, God has placed the remedy—Faith.  Without it we will eternally go on questioning God’s motives.  With it, suspicion is wiped away.  The point is that Faith is not natural, not something we can obtain or, once we have it, even increase on our own.  It is beyond our natural capacities and is totally supernatural.  Upon hearing of the power of Faith (Lk 17:5, Mt 17:20), the disciples do not say “Lord we will try harder to believe”, but “Increase our Faith.” 

Despite its supernatural origin, it is nevertheless a habit infused into our souls that we have the power to use.  But in order to use it properly, we must become more aware of its mode of operation. 

Natural vs Supernatural Faith

Oftentimes we equate supernatural Faith with human faith and think it simply means trust.  Like supernatural Faith, natural faith is a form of belief based on trust.  We might have faith that a pilot has been properly trained and therefore get on a flight even if we are anxious about flying.  Natural faith is based on reasons—the airline would not want to put inexperienced pilots in the air because it is too great of a liability, we know someone who is a pilot and he went through years of flight school, the FAA unlike most government agencies is effective in monitoring airlines, etc.  Ultimately there is a leap of faith involved, but the leap is based upon solid reasoning.

Supernatural Faith is not quite the same.  Like natural faith it involves first believing someone (trust) before believing in his testimony.  But with Faith there is no leap of faith involved.  God has picked us up and placed us across the chasm of mistrust and doubt.  He has given us a share in the trust that Christ had in the Father.  Now, Christ did not have Faith because He had the Beatific Vision from the moment of His conception, but nevertheless He merited for us the foundation of Faith—trust.  The problem is that we often put the cart before the horse and focus on what is revealed before we address the issue of trust in the Revealer.

There truly is no such thing as an “intellectual conversion”.  You can think all of the doctrines of the Faith are reasonable and still not have Faith.  You simply have right opinion.  That is a good thing, but it is not Faith.  Faith consists first in trusting the Divine Person and then, knowing that He cannot deceive or be deceived, you believe everything that He says. 

There is a great recent example of this in an interview Jordan Peterson gave.  Anyone following him over the last few years will see that he is coming to think like a Christian.  He even admits to seeing Christ as an important historical figure who lived.  But he does not, and never will be able to, convince himself that Christ lives.  He still sees Him as living in the past and only influencing today through some natural progression of His doctrines.  This is natural faith, but, as I have said previously, one does not graduate from natural faith to supernatural Faith.  Pray that he receive the gift of Faith.

Disposing Ourselves to Receive Faith

We can detect our own tendency to naturalize Faith by how we respond to the interaction between Christ and the Apostles when He tells them it was because of little Faith that they could not cast out the demons (Mt 17:20).  Most of us read that as a rebuke.  But how can He rebuke them for something that they don’t naturally have?  Instead He is making them aware both of the power of Faith (it can move a mountain) and their need to ask and ready themselves to receive an increase (Lk 17:5). 

Because Faith is the foundation of the spiritual life and thus the deeper the foundation the taller the edifice that can be built upon it—but we said it was a gift and thus we cannot strictly speaking increase our faith we can ask for more faith and do certain things which dispose us for a reception of stronger Faith.  As St. John Henry Newman says :

“…with good dispositions faith is easy; and that without good dispositions, faith is not easy; and that those who were praised for their faith, were such as had already the good dispositions, and that those who were blamed for their unbelief, were such as were wanting in this respect, and would have believed, or believed sooner, had they possessed the necessary dispositions for believing, or a greater share of the them.”

St. John Henry Newman, Dispositions for Faith, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.

There are two things in particular we can do to dispose ourselves to receive an increase in Faith.  First and most importantly is to ask.  Admit your unbelief and ask for an increase in Faith (Mk 9:24).  Second, exercise the virtue of Faith.  When you exercise the “muscle” of faith through its exercise, you will be ready for the Divine Spotter to add more weight on the bar of Faith.  The three exercises that are particularly helpful are:

  1. Make acts of faith, especially by reciting the Creed.  But also in general by affirming that you believe any particular doctrine you happen to come across in your spiritual reading or discussion.  I find this practice particularly helpful during homilies that otherwise would not move me.
  2. Study the Faith.  When you also understand you are able to make a firmer assent to what is believed.
  3. Teach the Faith or openly profess the Faith in front of others.  This requires first a trust in God that He rewards those who proclaim Him and then a trust that He has spoken truthfully.
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Scriptural Bingo

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In Book VIII of his Confessions, St. Augustine details his conversion.  After begging the Lord to finally free him from enslavement to sin, he began to weep with bitter sorrow because he felt powerless to overcome it.  He suddenly hears the voice of a child, almost in a sing-song voice, say “Take and read, take and read.”  He reasoned that the voice had a divine source and immediately opened a book of the Epistles of St. Paul.  Happening upon Romans 13:13-14, “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires”, the saint was immediately converted to Christ with “all the darkness of uncertainty vanishing away” (VIII, 29).

Augustine had learned this approach from St. Antony of the Desert whom he had read about.  Antony entered a church and upon hearing the words of Christ to the Rich Young Man to sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me” (Mt 19:21) did exactly as he was told.  We might be tempted to think the men superstitious, playing a form of Scriptural Bingo.  Except, that is, for the fact that we are talking about two saints.  Let us then examine exactly what is going on there.

Faith in Sacred Scripture

In his Encyclical on Sacred Scripture, Providentissimus Deus, warned that “a thirst for novelty and unrestrained freedom” in Scriptural interpretation represented a great threat the belief in Sacred Scripture as the true Word of God.  Scripture itself became victim to the cult of the expert and Scripture Scholars, rather than the Church, became authentic interpreters.  The average Catholic comes to think Scripture above his paygrade so that, confused by the experts, he sets it aside.  Faith in Sacred Scripture as the authentic Word of God, addressed not just to experts but to every man, was toppled.

The saints, including Antony and Augustine, believed in the public revelation contained in Sacred Scripture.  But because it is God Who speaks, they also believed that Scripture was a vehicle of private revelation as well.  This does not make them closet Protestants but fully Catholic.  They believed that God also revealed Himself and His will to them personally through Sacred Scripture.  To grasp this fully, we have to do some theology.  “Doing” theology means that we take something we believe and work out the implications of it so that it becomes a real principle in our lives.  We move from just believing it to real-izing it.

Real-izing Our Belief in Sacred Scripture

Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit is the true author of Sacred Scripture.  To real-ize this we must first set aside the question of how inspiration works.  It is not that this is an unimportant question, but that there is a tendency to over-play the hand that man plays in it.  However it worked, we have to know that the Holy Spirit inspired the Sacred Author to say exactly what He wanted to say and how it was to be said.  In other words, the Holy Spirit is the One Who is speaking, even if He is using a human mouthpiece.  From this we can draw a couple of principles

  • Every single word is both inspired—“all Scripture is inspired by God”  (2Tim 3:16) and true—“He cannot deny Himself”(2Tim 2:13)
  • Because it is God Who is doing the speaking Scripture is “living and active” (Heb 4:13)

This second principle likewise bears some explanation.  Because it is God Who was speaking through St. Paul, He had foreknowledge of the fact that St. Augustine would read Romans 13 on the fateful day.  The words contained within their meaning exactly what Augustine needed to hear to move his heart, opening it up to receive the grace of conversion.  It is as if God Himself in that very moment spoke directly to St. Augustine telling him what to do.

The words therefore are more than a dead letter, they are also active.  This means that like all of God’s words they are performative.  They effect what they command.  Augustine was not just reading something directed to him personally, the words themselves contained the power for him to “make no provision for the flesh.”  It is the words themselves that move Augustine to convert.  Whenever God commands, He also equips. 

Augustine as Everyman

What happened to Augustine is really not unique in that regard.  It is the same thing that is supposed to happen to each one of us every time we open our Bibles.  Each time Christ told the Apostles “have no fear”, He wasn’t just telling them to calm down, but He was also taking away their fear.  But not just their fear, but everyone who ever laid the eyes of faith upon Mark 6:45-52 while in a state of anxiety.

The Apostles knew Christ’s words had power because He had commanded a storm to cease with a single rebuke.  We too must come to believe that same power flows from the same Word found in Sacred Scripture.  This is what I mean by faith in Sacred Scripture.  Once you real-ize that it truly is living—directed to you personally from the seat of Eternity—you can expect it to be active by causing something to change in you. 

The problem is that there are forces at work trying to undermine this by turning Scripture into an academic subject and subjecting it to literary criticism without having faith in it living power.  Ultimately this undermines faith by echoing Satan’s “did God really say?”.  God really is speaking through Sacred Scripture, not just to mankind but to me here and now.  Pray for the grace of an increase in faith in Sacred Scripture!    

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Our Lady and Temptation

Devils, Mary, Sin, Spiritual Life, ,

In 1926, Our Lord appeared to the last surviving Fatima visionary, Sr. Lucia, in order to ask her to spread the First Saturday Devotion.  In particular, He wanted the Faithful to fervently offer reparation for the blasphemies committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  Of special concern were blasphemies committed by those who “publicly implant in the hearts of children indifference, disrespect, and even hate against the Immaculate Mother.”  This wave of indifference and disrespect is fueled mostly by those who attempt to reduce Mary to the point that she is just like the rest of us.  We must oppose this tendency of what most aptly be called “over-naturalizing” Our Lady to the point of diminishing the transformative power of supernatural grace.

One way we can combat this is to highlight those areas of her spiritual life that were markedly different from us.  A good place to start is with Our Lady’s experience of temptations.  The reductionist says Our Lady suffered temptations just like the rest of us.  We might not know for sure whether or not she was tempted but we can say with assurance that her experience would have been profoundly different from our own.

On Being Tempted

Traditionally understood, temptations have their origin in three sources—the Devil, the World and the Flesh.  The Devil’s temptations take the form of suggestions to us.  They “arise from those things towards which each one has an inclination” (ST III q. 41, art. 4).  This means that he can “see” what we are inclined towards at a given time and then suggest to us to act upon that inclination in a disordered way.  As an example, when Our Lord was fasting in the desert we are told “He was hungry” and so Satan tempts Him first by trying to take advantage of his hunger. 

With Our Lord, the inclination towards food was natural and not disordered in any way.  For the rest of us, we have disordered inclinations that fall broadly into the categories of the World and the Flesh.  These both come about as a result of the wounding of Original Sin.  The World represents inordinate attachments to the things of this world to varying degrees.  It is a tendency to look upon the things that are made and not seeing the One Who made them.  Likewise, when we speak of the Flesh, we mean an inordinate love of sensual pleasure that manifests itself either in a horror of suffering or an insatiable desire for pleasure. 

While the Devil is active in tempting us by taking advantage of these inclinations, not all our temptations come from him.  These inclinations are “natural” in our fallen state and thus we can succumb to them without any instigation.  This is the “sin” that acts like “a law of my members” that St. Paul tells the Romans is constantly at war with his inward man (Romans 7:19-23).

Our Lady and Temptations

Our Lady then, because she was singularly privileged to be conceived without Original Sin, experienced temptations differently than we do.  She did not experience temptations from the Flesh or from the World.  In other words, she could only experience temptations that were suggested to her by the Devil.  The question then is whether she did in fact experience these temptations.

We must admit that Scripture is silent, at least explicitly, as to whether she was tempted or not.  But there is at least enough implicit data to suggest that Our Lady was in fact tempted by the Devil.

First, there is the principle of typology by which the archetype is always greater than the type.  Because the Old Eve was tempted by the Devil and fell, the New Eve must also be tempted by the Devil and overcome him. 

Second, there is the promise of the Protoevangelium (Gn 3:15) by which the New Eve, animated by a spirit of enmity, shall bruise the head of the ancient serpent.  This suggests not just a passive role, but a personal one by which she engages the Devil in a one-on-one fashion.

Our Lady’s hand-to-hand combat is described in Revelation 12:13-17.  It presents the devil as relentless in pursuit of her by which he tries to sweep her away in a flood of temptations, but God continually comes to her aid by swallowing up the waters of temptation.  Inserting temptations into the narrative may seem like a stretch until we read in verse 17 where the serpent grew angry at the Woman and went off to wage war on the rest of her children.  The devil’s primary weapon in that war is temptation.

Why This Matters

People are often annoyed by speculative questions like this because they seem too “scholastic”.  But the purpose of speculative questions in theology is to affect us in the practical realm.  St. Thomas in the already quoted question in the Summa (III q.41) on Christ’s temptation in the desert tells us that there are two kinds of temptations.  First there are those whose origin are the World and the Flesh.  These we should flee as near occasions of sin.  The other are those that come from the Devil.  Aquinas says:

“[S]uch occasions of temptation are not to be avoided. Hence Chrysostom says: ‘Not only Christ was led into the desert by the Spirit, but all God’s children that have the Holy Ghost. For it is not enough for them to sit idle; the Holy Ghost urges them to endeavor to do something great: which is for them to be in the desert from the devil’s standpoint, for no unrighteousness, in which the devil delights, is there. Again, every good work, compared to the flesh and the world, is the desert; because it is not according to the will of the flesh and of the world.’ Now, there is no danger in giving the devil such an occasion of temptation; since the help of the Holy Ghost, who is the Author of the perfect deed, is more powerful* than the assault of the envious devil.”

ST III q.41, art.2 ad.2

The point is that when the Devil tempts us, as Christian warriors we should stand our ground.  This does not mean we should or even can fight on our own, but that we must arm ourselves with the Cross and invoke the power of the Holy Spirit Who has led us into the desert of temptation and battle. 

St. Paul tells the Corinthians that if we rely on grace then we will never be tempted beyond what we can handle (1 Cor 10:13).  Our Lady’s experience confirms this as true.  If we “over-naturalize” her then our hope of winning the battle is diminished.  But we also learn that we have a powerful ally because Our Lady is undefeated in her battle against the Devil.  She will never let one of her children that turn to her fall in battle. 

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Opening Our Hearts

Redemption, ,

It is somewhat apropos that the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease.  Not just because of our collective lifestyles but because of the fact that it symbolizes the much larger heart disease that afflicts even the physically healthiest among us.  We are, as CS Lewis once put it, “men without chests.”  Our hearts are dying from neglect and we are greatly in need of transplants so that we can live truly human lives.

Transplant seems like a bit of an exaggeration, until we ponder the number of times Sacred Scripture speaks of getting a new heart.  Psalm 51 “create in me a clean heart O God” and Ezekiel 36:26 “And I will give you a new heart” among others could be brought to mind.  The point is that what we are about to discuss is no mere self-improvement project but a complete rebuild by the Master Builder Himself.  Why we must be in a receptive position will become clear in a second, but we must belabor the point so as to grasp what God is offering to us in Christ. 

Redeeming the Emotions

St. Gregory Nazianzen said, “what has not been assumed has not been healed.”  His point is that Christ assumed a true human nature and lived a truly human life in order to redeem ours.  Our Lord came not just to redeem us, but to heal us.  Just as that redemption starts now, so too does the healing.  More to the point, Christ He was effective in redeeming our affectivity.  He lived the perfect affective human life so that we could be healed.  He didn’t just want us to love our neighbor in some dry volitional way, He wanted us to feel the love too. 

Christ didn’t just heal our emotions from afar, but He wept in the face of sadness.  He commanded His disciples to “rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Lk 10:20), but then showed them how to “rejoice at that very moment” (Lk 10:21).  One of the most beautiful parts of The Chosen series is the way in which they depict the sheer delight that Our Lord felt and expressed when He performed a miracle. 

Christ gave us new hearts in order to love the right things in the right way, but until we grasp that this love includes the affective dimension, our love will always be mediocre.  I might love my neighbor because I want to help him, but that love will always be cold unless I feel compassion in the face of his need.  In order to be truly effective my compassion must be affective.    

This does not mean I let the perfect become the enemy of the good and only do something good if I can feel it, but that Christ’s redemptive act includes my feelings.  I should expect that I would feel it and if I don’t I should ask Him to further heal my feelings.  I should not just ask for sorrow for my sins, but sorrow that is felt.  There is no such thing as peace or joy that is not in some way felt in our hearts.  Even if we are suspicious of our affective dimension, we should never allow that suspicion to turn into hatred.

Encountering the Beautiful

What these new hearts will enable us to do is to encounter the beautiful.  It is not surprising that a culture that moves away from God is also no longer able to encounter beauty.  Beauty is what fuels the heart.  It is beauty deprivation in our culture that has caused the endemic heart disease. suffering from beauty deprivation.  Reality is marked by three transcendentals, three categories of being that all being share and that we were given natural radar for.  Our intellects are built to truth.  Our wills are built to goodness.  Our hearts are built to beauty.  We know what truth and goodness are, but we struggle with beauty.  Even St. Thomas’ definition of beauty as “that when seen pleases” is rather elusive unless our hearts are alive.  The beautiful is the thing that once we see it, see not just with our eyes but with the “eye of the mind”, we are moved, but not in order to possess it but to take delight in its existence. 

Our affections are moved because of this encounter with the beautiful.  But the moment we turn our focus away from the object that moved us and towards the pleasure it causes inside of us, we lose both the pleasure and the beauty.  In short, we begin to neglect our hearts and slowly they begin to die.  The problem is not the pleasure—that is what keeps the heart pumping—but the love of the pleasure.  To love the pleasure is selfish, but to love the object that stirred us in the first place is true love.  The pleasure then is felt love.

It is perhaps easiest to see when it comes to married love.  A wife will often tell her husband who insists on her beauty, that he is blinded by love.  But it is actually love that opens his eyes to the beauty.  He is fixated on the object of his affections and not the affections themselves.  The man who does this will never stop feeling those affections and in fact they will only get deeper as his love deepens.  She “has his heart.”  But if he can only focus on the pleasure her smile brings and not on the beauty of the smile itself, his love will die and his heart atrophy.

God made our hearts this way because He wants us to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.”  He wants us to feel the gift of reality by contemplating the beauty of created things.  In contemplating and not trying to manipulate them to maximize pleasure, they become signs of His Goodness and Love.

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Redeeming Work

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Nearly every large company presents itself to potential employees as deeply concerned with helping the new employee achieve “Work/Life Balance.”  The particulars might be different for each company, but the promise is the same—we will teach you the calculus by which the scales of life can be balanced.  But in truth they offer little more than guilt management techniques enabling the employee to decide how much of his life he is willing to trade in order to be professionally successful.  This balancing act always feels like a compromise because balance really isn’t the problem.  The problem is work itself.  Or, at least the way we experience it living as we do in our post-Edenic world. 

Man the Worker

By examining the nature of work itself, we can also see how it can be integrated into a rich and full life.  Work is, as John Paul II said, “a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth” (Laborem Exercens, 4).  It is fundamental because it is part of his nature to work and be perfected by it.  The Book of Genesis reveals this through God’s commandment to “fulfill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28).  Man is a worker because he is made in the image of God the Creator.  He Who made all things, made those things so that man could bring them to their completion.  In perfecting things, man himself would be perfected.   

But we know that is not the end of the story.  In choosing to “become like God” (Gn 3:5) on his own terms, man damaged his true God-likeness.  Work was infected by the curse of the Fall and work became labor.  Work itself became disintegrated.  Plagued by thorns and thistles, man becomes overly focused about the perfecting of things and forgets that work is primarily meant to perfect him.  As Pius XI put it, “for dead matter comes forth from the factory ennobled, while men there are corrupted and degraded” (Quadragesimo Anno, 135).

Even this is not the end of the story however.  The Son of God made Himself a worker so that work would get caught up in the Redemption.  Rather than succumbing to the heavy burden of work, we can submit to the yoke of Christ.  Work is still labor, but by laboring in the Spirit of Christ, it is no longer an obstacle but a means of sanctification.  Christ was, as John Paul II called Him, “a man of work…Who preached the ‘gospel of work’” (LE 26).  Now by accepting the labor associated with work as punishment for our sins and offering it as reparation, work becomes redemptive.

The Two Dimensions

Work then has two dimensions—objective and subjective—and both must be good in order for the “gospel of work” to penetrate our work.  In the objective sense, work is the practical manner in which man “subdues the earth.”  This means that the work itself must in a very real way facilitate the Common Good.  The good produced must be good for society and the work done on the “intellectual toolbench” must be ordered to the truth.  For many of us, our professional work will be the place where we fulfill our obligation to the Common Good.  It must in some way help others to truly thrive.  That is the only way to ensure a proper return for the talents that the master gave to the servants.

John Paul II had great concern for the changes to the nature of work that were coming about because of technology.  He was not a troglodyte who feared technology but thought that efficiency was a dangerous measure.  He saw technological development as a great good if it facilitated man’s work and enabled him to grow in virtue.  But, “technology can cease to be man’s ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work “supplants” him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave” (LE, 5).

The subjective meaning of work is the pre-eminent dimension.  Works gains its value from the fact that it is a person who is doing it and not primarily by the work done.  Some work is objectively better than other, but good work is that work which makes the worker morally good.  The best work for any individual is the work that will make him grow in virtue.  This is why the work itself, as long as it is good, does not matter so much as its character building effect on the person.  If more emphasis is placed on the subjective dimension of work, then we will cease to value work merely for its pay.      

Realizing that the most important thing we make in work is ourselves, we can see why “Work/Life Balance” goes about the problem of disintegration in the wrong way.  It is a subtle attempt at redeeming work on our own, rather than allowing God’s original vision for work to permeate our actions.

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Living Purgatory Now

Apologetics, End Times, Last Things, Sin, Suffering, , , ,

The contested doctrines are almost always some of the hardest to live by.  This is not because they are difficult, but because they are contested.  When a doctrine falls into the contested realm and Catholics are forced to defend it, there is an almost innate tendency to treat the doctrine as an intellectual problem and not as a saving truth.  One example of this comes to mind and is particularly apropos for the season—Purgatory.  Since Luther’s revolt, Catholics have spent so much time on their heels defending its existence, that they haven’t always lived as if it does.  There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that we have not spent enough time meditating upon death.  Memento mori the desert fathers and early Christians were fond of saying, not just as a mere platitude, but because death is a fact of life.  Meditating on our own death is of course fruitful, but when it comes to living as if Purgatory exists it may be best to focus on those we know who have died.  All too often we are quick to canonize the dead and thus ignore the reality that if they were saved then they needed purgatorial purification to get there. 

Praying in Faith, Hope and Love

To speculate on the destiny of loved ones who have died is not being “judgmental”.  But it is presumptuous not to.  In the majority of cases, we will have known the person well enough to know (at best) that they weren’t yet perfected.  It is uncomfortable to think this way, but it is necessary because Purgatory then becomes the realistic basis for our hope that they were saved. 

And it is hope that can animate our prayers for them.  CS Lewis in A Grief Observed said he never really, really believed in Purgatory until his wife died.  Then he prayed with fervent hope that she would be purified so as to come quickly into the presence of God.  His belief in Purgatory took flesh because he realized his beloved still needed his help through prayers and penances. 

Meditating on the sufferings of the souls in Purgatory and being able to put faces on those otherwise general mass of suffering souls makes Purgatory a real doctrine.  Our prayer comes alive and with it, our faith in the doctrine itself.  Praying in faith, strengthens our faith.  Praying for suffering people increases our charity.  Knowing that they are approaching perfection increases our hope.  Those faces don’t need to be someone we know.  They can also be aimed at people in specific circumstances: “I pray for the soul that has entered Purgatory most recently”, “I pray for the soul who most loved Our Lord in the Eucharist”, “I pray for the soul who is most abandoned”, etc.  We might not know them personally now, but we will have gained a friend in eternity.

Undergoing Purgatorial Purification?

I mentioned above that we can be sure that our loved ones undergo purgatorial purification.  That is because, short of the Virgin Mary, everyone, even canonized saints underwent purgatorial purification.  Many of them underwent them in this life rather than in the next.  And herein lies the other way in which we might come to true faith in the doctrine of Purgatory: ask to undergo those sufferings now.

This begins by once again meditating upon the sufferings of Purgatory.  The pains of Purgatory are very similar to those of hell.  Although the person is completely in love with God, they experience a pain of loss in the knowledge that their sins and their momentary delight was traded for time with the Beloved.  Likewise they experience a pain of sense in that they are “saved through fire” (1Cor 3:11).  Cut off from uniting their suffering to the merits of Christ, they must suffer “alone” to heal the stains of their forgiven sins.  Now the face we put on it must be our own.  We must imagine how great the suffering is.

After doing this, we trade that suffering for suffering now.  The suffering now is different in that the pain of loss is felt less severely because it is in a certain sense natural.  Likewise the pain of sense is less because our sufferings can be united to those of Christ.  The obstacle of course is that we lack the courage to make this bargain.  It feels really scary to give God carte-blanche over our sufferings.  But we must remember that God is not a masochist but a Father Who disciplines in the wise and gentle way.  Our sufferings now, especially those dealt by Providence, are the most wise and gentle sufferings, hand-chosen by God in order to purify us.  Jesus told St. Faustina that He rather there not be Purgatory because He will send enough suffering, that united to His, will purify us, without the need for Purgatory.

But there is another aspect of this that we all too often forget.  The holy souls in Purgatory are suffering greatly, but they are also filled with joy.  This is important for us to remember because the reason we are hesitant to give this to God is because we are focused only on the suffering part.  But the suffering is just a means to the end of closer union with God.  Suffering is the gravity that thrusts us into the Heart of God.  It takes away all of the impediments to drawing closer to Him provided we will to suffer the things He sends through His Providence.  St. Catherine of Genoa speaks of how the pains in Purgatory is occasioned by love delayed.  By allowing our purification to happen now, that love will be less delayed.

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Becoming Men with Chests

Anthropology, Virtue, , , , , , ,

CS Lewis once described modernity as being inhabited by “men without chests.”  His pithy characterization highlights the fact that men no longer are educated to have a healthy emotional life.  Lewis describes how in reviewing an elementary textbook, he came across a description of a waterfall as “sublime”.  The authors insist that the speaker is “not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.”  Lewis is concerned that such language, even in what appears to be a mere throwaway remark, betray a certain universal prejudice towards sentiments as nothing more than private feelings that have no objective basis in reality.  Devoid of any real meaning attached to emotions, modern man suffers from a shrinking of his heart.

Lewis gives a sketch of man as having three parts: head, belly, and chest.  By head he is referring to our spiritual faculties and by belly our bodily sensations.  For most of us, that would be a sufficient description.  But in order to be more than mere parts, they must be an integrated whole—they must be connected in the middle by the chest.  To ignore the chest is literally disintegrating, you might even say dehumanizing.  “It is by this middle element that man is man; for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite a mere animal.”  It is the heart that makes humanity unique and it is through its proper integration that we become fully human.

The heart is the “place” where man’s hybrid nature meets and where man is most properly himself.  But most of us have learned to be suspicious of our own hearts—and rightly so.  But we cannot remain masters of suspicion without doing great harm to ourselves.  We must confront this suspicion head on if we are to be authentically happy.  After all happiness is not just a feeling, but a happiness that isn’t felt isn’t true happiness either.

Lewis thought part of the problem was in education.  Although he doesn’t go into details about a proper pedagogy, it most certainly would begin by defining what we mean are talking about when we speak of the Heart.  For modern man, the heart is really the place where our feelings reside.  But this is far vaguer and narrower than the classical and Biblical notion of the heart.  There are different kinds of feelings that we experience and these feelings are on different levels according to the unique powers of the human soul.  There are the mere vegetative feelings like hunger and thirst.  There are the animal feelings like contentment and anger.  Finally, there are the spiritual feelings like peace and joy.  When we speak of a heart that is fully alive, then we are speaking about a heart that has the capacity for the animal feelings (under the control of reason and will) and the spiritual feelings.

Men without Chests

At the end of his first chapter in The Abolition of Man, Lewis sums up the modern dilemma as follows: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”  His point is that without a healthy emotional life, we will never be able to be virtuous—it is like asking a castrated horse to reproduce.  Notice what he is saying—neither the Stoic nor the Sentimentalist can be truly virtuous.  To see why this is we need to reflect briefly upon the nature of virtue and its relationship with the emotions.

Temperance and fortitude and all their sub-virtues are ordered to the proper use of our emotions, or to use a more Thomistic term, the concupiscible and irascible passions.  Notice the italics are use.  Our emotions are not something that are to be killed or to be allowed to run free, but something that, when properly put to use, enable us to enjoy the good. 

An example will help.  All too often we hear “Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.”  This is not the virtue of courage.  The truly courageous person does not feel fear, but daring.  Daring, when moderated by courage, gives him a motor by which he can energetically fight against the evil he must not avoid.  Without it, he will succumb to fear or only fight back only weakly.

Virtue conditions the passions to act in accord with reason.  When the courageous man is faced with evil, he does not need to deliberate or wait to stir up daring, it is automatically conditioned to arise in the face of some threat.  In fact it may arise before he is even conscious of a threat and act as an alarm for the person. 

Passions not only make the act easier then, but also make it better. St. Thomas says that when the passions are involved in a morally good act then it makes the act more meritorious.  This is because the entire person—head, heart and hands—is involved in the act as opposed to simply white knuckling it.  White knuckling is still good but doing so fervently is better.  The less interior resistance we have to doing the good, the better the action is.  So, despite popular misconceptions, there are moral reasons why we should be emotionally healthy as well.

Feeding Our Nature

Returning to Lewis’ point, education in the emotions is important because it is the thing that makes virtue easier.  But this education must be aimed not so much on the feeling, but on the object that invokes the feeling.  This cannot be emphasized enough.  As long as the student is focused on the waterfall and not on the pleasure of the feeling of awe or wonder that can only be described as “sublime” he is focused on the good before him.  The minute he turns to the pleasure as his focus, the pleasure is gone and the object is deemed boring.  But if he remains focused on the object, he can learn to contemplate it to find out why it evokes such a response and if the response is, in fact, the appropriate one.  This is one of the reasons why we must always protect and promote children’s capacity to wonder. 

It is by taking in reality that they begin to grow in self-knowledge as well.  Combined with education from parents especially, the child learns that there are right and wrong emotions.  The right and wrongness depends upon the object that causes it.  A young girl touching a cobra because she is charmed by it, needs to be shouted at so that she associates fear with it instead.  All too often parents attempt to diffuse children’s emotions rather than guide them.  This only causes moral problems later on down the road as Lewis points out “By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”    

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Truth and Reality

Creation, Defending the Faith, Devils, , , , ,

The devil is a one-trick pony.  Everything he does to mankind is simply an echo of his original temptation to Eve, “you shall be like God.”  Throughout history he has dragged many souls into hell by coming up with creative ways in which he could coax men into usurping the role of God.  I say creative not in the sense that the devil can create anything.  He can only twist and distort what God creates by breathing lies into creation.  Only God truly creates while the devil fabricates, a fact that I want to spend some time focusing on.

God creates by simply speaking something into being.  He creates through His Word (c.f. Col 1:16).  Reality came into being not through some evolutionary process, but through God’s “let there be…”.  Mind you I am not saying that things don’t come into existence naturally, only that the different kinds of things (what we might call the different natures) and reality as a whole were spoken into being during the first six days of Creation.  It should not be a surprise that this foundational truth, the same truth we profess in the Creed that “through Him all things were made” is under attack.  And because it ultimately has its cause in the diabolical, it is so subtle that we might not even realize what is going on.

Lies and Reality

Human words are meant to describe reality, even if they inevitably short-change it.  The words themselves are said to be true only to the extent that the ideas they convey conform to reality.  To say “oranges are orange” conveys the truth about the color of oranges, but it does not fully describe what an orange is.  On the other hand, to say that “oranges are blue” is a falsehood because it does not describe the reality that is an orange in any intelligible way.

Now, admittedly the orange example isn’t real (as far as I know).  But it is illustrative of a larger, one might say, diabolical problem.  There are two possibilities at play here.  A person may be ignorant of the color of oranges or he may want oranges to be other than they are.  The first man is a fool and the second is a liar.  The folly of the fool can be remedied with the truth.  The liar is another story.

All lies are attempts to use words to change reality simply by declaring it so.  It is a poor man’s “let there be…”.  I say poor man, but it is really diabolical having its roots Satan who is the “Father of lies”.  He is always trying to upend Creation and make it appear to be something that it is not.  It is an attempt to “be like God” and make reality whatever you want it to be.  It is, to quote the diabolical Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood vs Casey, the freedom “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood vs Casey, 1991).

The Father of Lies in Our Times

I said at the open that the devil was always seeking to institutionalize his plan and develops unique strategies for particular ages.  He has been particularly successful in our age because we have failed to recognize the mechanism by which he is shaping the spirit of the world.  For most of us, Political Correctness is a minor annoyance that we do our best to avoid.  But for the devil it is the tool by which he blinds men to reality.

Notice how the term itself, Political Correctness, creates the aura of an alternate reality.  It creates a realm where words are correct, but not true.  It does this by politicizing, that is, making public, that which is personal and private.  It is made political because it must have the “power” to make other people conform to the alternate reality. 

There are many other examples, but the renaming of “Mother” to “Birthing Person” comes to mind because it is relatively new.  We laugh at the absurdity, but we fail to see the danger because we have grown so accustomed to it.  It is simply an attempt, albeit by employing the law of gradualism, to divorce motherhood from femininity and femininity from biological sex.  It is a (not-so) subtle attempt to overthrow reality by lying.  We intuitively grasp this, but instead of fighting back we laugh at the absurdity.  It is no longer funny.

Have you ever won an argument with a liar?  Of course not.  When someone is lying you do not use arguments to refute them.  You simply insist on the truth.  Yet many of us repeatedly resort to arguments to counter Political Correctness.  They are too adept at changing meanings of words to give any room for logic.  Can you deny that a mother is a “birthing person”? Instead we must insist on the truth through precision and clarity.  Simply refuse to adopt any of the Politically Correct language.  We must have the courage not to play the game and simply tell the truth regardless of the consequences.  Words not only convey reality, but they form our ideas about it.  Only the truth can set us free to roam throughout reality.  If we do not stop the abuse of language that abuses reality, then we risk the eternal abuse of many souls.  People end up in hell for bad ideas too, especially because it changes what they become through their actions.   

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Preparation for Holy Communion

Eucharist, Mary, Sacraments, , , , ,

As mentioned in a previous post, the Church has long understood Sacramental Grace as operating in two dimensions.  On the objective plane we say that the Sacraments contain grace ex opere operato.  What this means is that grace is made available by the Sacrament regardless of either the faith of the recipient or the minister.  It is created “from the work performed.”  This does not mean however that the recipient of the Sacrament is a recipient of grace or even all the grace that is available.  That is because there is also a subjective plane by which the grace received is proportional to the disposition of the receiver.  In no other Sacrament is this distinction more important than in the Eucharist, not only because It contains grace, but because it contains the Author of Grace Himself.  Therefore, there is an abundance of grace available to the receiver provided that he is properly disposed to receive it.

Obviously then, preparation to receive Holy Communion ought to be the primary focus for those who desire closer communion with Christ and through Him the Holy Trinity.  But for most of us, our preparation is sorely lacking either through ignorance, neglect, or distraction.  Thankfully St. Louis de Montfort has left the Church a surefire way to prepare to receive Holy Communion that is sure to increase the graces we receive.

Our Lady of the Eucharist

To grasp the simplicity of his method we must first remove any abstractions we might have related to Our Blessed Mother.  What is meant by this is that we all too often forget that she was a real person who lived out her Christian life in the Early Church.  When Our Lord left her in St. John’s care, He wasn’t just taking care of her physical well-being.  Nor was He abandoning her to someone else’s care.  Instead, He was leaving her in the care of one of the men whom He had empowered to make Him present to her.  In other words, Jesus left Mary with St. John so that she could receive Him in the Eucharist daily.

Once we realize that Our Lady received the Eucharist regularly, we can begin to let our imagination take to flight as to what her disposition was like when she received Him.  Her heart was found worthy for her womb to house the Son of God would have daily received Him into that same Immaculate Heart with a renewed and deeper love than at the Incarnation.  Her fiat would have echoed in her Amen.  Separated from His physical presence, she would have run to the Communion rail to taste that presence once again.  She would have offered herself yet again as the Sorrowful Mother at the foot of the Cross and renewed her commitment to be Mother of all the Elect just prior to receiving.  She would have overflowed with adoration and thanksgiving after her reception.  She would have longed to receive Him again when she wasn’t at Mass.  The love with which she received Him grew so much that upon receiving her Viaticum she was taken body and soul to Heaven.  She was and is always Our Lady of the Eucharist.

St. Louis de Montfort, Our Lady, and Holy Communion

Knowing that Our Lady’s disposition was perfect for receiving Our Lord in the Eucharist may inspire us to imitate her example, but that is not the reason why this reflection is necessary.  When Our Lord is received by one of her children, she flies to that child in order to adore His Eucharist presence.  As she draws closer to Jesus within the bosom of the believer, Jesus only draws closer to the believer.  Her act of adoration brings more glory to God than all earthly acts of adoration and He pours His pleasure of being in her presence out on this child of His Mother.

All of this may go on without our awareness or we might, following the advice of St. Louis de Montfort, actively and consciously participate in it.  The Saint says in The Secret of Mary that the best way to prepare for Holy Communion is to “implore that good Mother to lend you her heart, that you may receive her Son there with the same dispositions as her own.”  We pledge that if she will give us her heart, then we will place Jesus in it.  For those fortunate souls that who are consecrated to Jesus through Mary, the two of them during Holy Communion will lodge within our soul.  Our Lady will share with Our Lord all our needs and will glorify Him more than in our asking.  As St. Louis de Montfort puts it, “Let us allow the King and Queen to speak together. Let us not disturb their divine colloquies by our restless thoughts and unsettled desires. Let us entrust to them the care of our future and the choice of means.”

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Avoiding Therapeutic Tyranny

Bioethics, Conscience, , ,

Because of the atrocities that were carried out under the Third Reich, there was a global awareness of the dignity of the human person especially when it comes to performing medical experiments. Experimentation today is mostly benign because of the fact that the war crime tribunal of Nuremberg articulated 10 standards by which researchers must conform when performing medical experiments on human subjects. These standards have now been adopted throughout the world and form the basis of our clinical trials system.  The first of these standards was that “[T]he voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”  The Principle of Free and Informed Consent as it has come to be known has been included in nearly every code of medical ethics throughout the world.  It is meant to protect human beings from a medical totalitarianism by which people are treated as guinea pigs.  Tyrants always try to control the population and, thanks to medical technology, the temptation to chemically control them is greater than it was even 75 years ago. 

The Principle of Free and Informed Consent

Although this principle has been articulated in secular code only recently, the Magisterium of the Church has taught this principle throughout the history of the Church.  Her teaching has been summarized succinctly in the Charter for Health Care Workers that was promulgated in 1994 by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers

“To intervene medically, the health care worker should have the express or tacit consent of the patient.  In fact, he ‘does not have a separate and independent right in relation to the patient. In general, he can act only if the patient explicitly or implicitly authorizes him.’…Besides the medical relationship there is a human one: dialogic, non-objective. The patient …‘should be called upon to share in the improvement of his health and in becoming cured. He should be given the opportunity of personally choosing, and not be made to submit to the decisions and choices of others.’  So that the choice may be made with full awareness and freedom, the patient should be given a precise idea of his illness and the therapeutic possibilities, with the risks, the problems and the consequences that they entail.  This means that the patient should be asked for an informed consent.”

Charter for Health Care Workers, 72

While the principle of free and informed consent is fairly straightforward, in practice it can be difficult to secure fully informed consent.  The response to a given medical treatment varies greatly from individual to individual.  This means that it is often impossible to explain to someone all of the possible complications involved in a given treatment modality.  Some complications may be extremely remote and a listing of all possible complications may only serve to frighten them away from participation.  At other times, not all of the related hazards are known. 

Free consent is somewhat easier to achieve in practice because it is essentially consists in a negative.  Any sort of coercion ought to be completely rejected.  Because the goal of the research study is therapeutic in nature, this therapeutic benefit should be sufficient “payment” for their participation.  They must remain free to determine whether the personal benefits outweigh the burdens.  Likewise, there must be no “outside” coercion from either public or private institutions that threaten the person in some way.

For this reason, the principle of free and informed consent should really be interpreted as requiring “reasonably” free and “adequately” informed consent as governed by the a “Medical Golden Rule.” The US Bishops in their Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services stated the principle in this way: “Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person’s surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences and cost; and any reasonable and morally legitimate alternatives, including no treatment at all” (27).

Why the Principle Matters Today

What makes this principle particularly important is that we are in the midst of the largest medical experiment in human history.  No matter where you stand on the Covid vaccine—its safety or its effectiveness—you should be appalled at the gross violation of this principle. 

First of all, the vaccines are advertised as “safe and effective”.  They may yet prove to be so, but at this point to make such a claim is really unsubstantiated.  Before such a claim can be made, there must be thorough risk-benefit analysis done.  Other than the J&J vaccine, this has not occurred.  They also have not been forthcoming with the data.  Why, for example, when we are concerned about getting people vaccinated, would the CDC not report hospitalization and death data comparing the vaccinated and unvaccinated? It gives the appearance of hiding something.  In fact, even if they aren’t hiding anything, it does gives credence to those who are concerned about a conspiracy. 

What about the rates of adverse events?  To say they are rare lacks a precision that they can readily quantify.  This is vitally important when different subpopulations have greatly different risks from Covid.  When, for example a 20-year-old already has a rare chance of suffering death or long term effects from the virus itself, why should they take a vaccine that also has rare side effects?  How can someone compare them without anything more than the vague designation of rare?  To appeal to public health is a two-edged sword as there is also a drain on public health should the person suffer one of said rare side effects.  Public health is far more than just the elimination of communicable diseases and people are far more than incubators. 

The point is that all of this and more makes it practically impossible to give informed consent.  But more disconcerting is the growing attacks on free consent.  The amount of coercion has reached a fever pitch.  Federal agencies, universities both private and public and private companies have all instituted mandatory vaccination.  Public officials have offered to pay people to be vaccinated and even have offered a lottery system that rewards one lucky winner a million dollars.  All of these forms are coercion are morally reprehensible and should be of grave concern to us all.  Mandatory vaccines today, mandatory sterilizations for the “public good” tomorrow.  Once the principle of free and informed consent is no longer recognized, there is nothing to keep it from becoming a therapeutic tyranny. 

The Covid vaccine might prove to be a good thing (that is why we are performing an experiment), but public health is not an element of the common good.  It is essentially a private good because not everyone shares in it equally.  Elements of the common good, as the name suggests, are shared equally among all the members of society.  Freedom of conscience (properly understood). on the other hand, is part of the common good.  To coerce vaccination, whether it is “safe and effective” or not is ultimately harmful to the common good and therefore must be opposed by even those who are personally in favor of vaccination.

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