Category Archives: Human Dignity

Masking and the New Religion

Apologetics, Church and State, Church Authority, Conscience, Culture, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Marxism, Moralilty, Natural Law, New Age, Paganism, Politics, Sacramentals, Sacraments, Virtue, , , ,

We have been hearing for decades that we are living in a post-Christian society.  This has mostly been a way to describe the fact that Christian values have been in decline.  But Christianity has still been the dominant religion; dominant, that is, until the Covid-19 crisis hit.  The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in our society marked the official changing of the guard.  While we have been hearing about the emergence of a post-Christian society for decades, Christianity was still the dominant religion.  No longer is this true, however.  Christianity has been toppled and replaced by a new Gnosticism that we call Science. 

To be clear, the issue is not against science per se, but what is more accurately described as religion masquerading as science.  After all, as Aquinas says “He who neglects the experimental order in natural science falls into error” in all aspects of knowledge.  To solve the Covid-19 crisis, natural science plays a necessary, although not sufficient, role.  The peddlers of the new religion, would have us believe that it is sufficient because all we need to do is “trust the science.”  We are saved by faith, not in Christ, but in Science.

The New Priesthood

Nor should we be quick to dismiss expert opinion.  But expert opinion is not fact, it still must be based on solid reasoning.  The problem is that expert opinion is often treated like dogmatic truth because the Scientific Elite are the new priests.  Based on their secret knowledge that only “experts” such as themselves can understand, they dictate religious dogma.  Spoken word becomes fact.  Thus says the Scientist—“Masks don’t work” and it is so.  Thus says the Scientist two months later—“Masks do work” and it is so.  The Shepherds have spoken and the Sheeple must follow suit.  Laws are made to punish heretics who dare to question the spoken word.

This, by the way, is why masks have elicited such a strong response.  The High Priest initially said that they don’t work.  Then he spoke again saying they did and that the Priests lied because they were worried about a shortage.  But if a person unapologetically lies once, how do you know they are telling the truth now?  Actually, a leading Priest at Johns Hopkins says, it wasn’t lying but that “[A]t first, researchers and scientists did not know how necessary mask wearing would be among the general public. Now we are aware that wearing masks is an effective way to help prevent spread of this coronavirus” (Emphasis added).  Given the timeframe and the rather dramatic shift from no-mask to mask, where did this awareness come from? Changing your mind is fine. But changing your mind without a change in the data is based not on science, but fiat.  If you search prior to the dogmatic declaration, scientific opinion for the most part deemed them ineffective.  The fact is that the Priests exercised their hidden knowledge (because there was no new data) and declared them so.  I would probably be clothed in a scarlet mask for this statement alone, but let me go a little further as a statistician and speak about what a reasonable approach to this question would look like.

The Statistician Speaks

First, proving a negative is extremely difficult.  To conclusively say “masks don’t work” is a practical impossibility.  Having said that, there is little data to suggest that they do work (a complete summary that is thoroughly documented can be found here).  There have been studies in the last few months that have suggested they might, but these are inconclusive at best.  They are all very poorly done because they are being done in the midst of the crisis.  To study the problem properly you need to set up what would be something akin to a clinical trial in which you had a placebo group to compare it to.  But you also have the problem that mask usage is almost certainly confounded with social distancing.  Is social distancing the thing that helps, or is it masks, or is it both?  You’d have to set up a study to separate them.  Secondly, not all masks are created the same or are equally effective.

Carnegie Mellon tracks (among many other things) mask compliance here.  Notice that many places are in the high 80ish% for compliance and yet “cases” continue to increase in all of those areas.  If any intervention works, then you should expect the slope of the line of increase to decrease (“flatten the curve”).  But the data suggests that the lines are actually steeper.  For example, see the plot below of my home state of North Carolina which instituted a Mask Mandate on June 26th and has had above an 85% mask compliance rate (currently 91%).  North Carolina is far from unique in this regard and you can find similar data for all your favorite states.

If we were true to “Science” we would look at this medical intervention and determine that it does not work.  A drug company running a clinical trial (where they are using their own money) would stop the trial and might even decide that the intervention is actually making it worse.

This might mean that…wait for it…masks are making it worse.  You would again need to study this, but it is a reasonable supposition given the data.  It also makes sense in that it could easily be creating a false sense of security or become a petri dish of germs just waiting to be deposited on someone else or an aritficial barrier suppresses the body’s natural barrier of the immune system.  To be sure though, if we were testing a drug and the data looked like this, we would stop giving it to people.

This tangent was necessary because it speaks to the reasonableness of mask mandates.  Law, according to St. Thomas, is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community and is promulgated.”  Any law that does not fulfill those four requirements—reasonable, aimed at the common good, proper authority, and made known—is not, properly speaking, a law.  Therefore, because they are not reasonable (or at least can not be proven to be at this point reasonable) we have no obligation to obey them.  As true Shepherds of the Flock, Bishops and Priests need to stop being so deferential to mask mandates precisely for this reason.

The New Sacrament

The revolt against masks then is really a revulsion to what they symbolize.  They have been made into sacraments through the words of the New Priests.  They are said to protect and so therefore they do.  Those who do not want to subscribe to this religion therefore will not want to wear them.  It seems like a small thing to do, but it plays a key role in the overall narrative that Science can save us.  As a sacrament it symbolizes the fact that the Coronavirus is a serious threat to our overall well-being.  If you are tempted to think “well 99.99% of people that get this will survive”, then you only have to look around at everyone wearing a mask to tell you that you should be scared anyway.  The smiling face of your neighbor, which would normally comfort you, is now hidden from your sight.  The masks will permanently disfigure us because when the next virus comes along, and it will, they will tell us “this is more serious than the Coronavirus (which it likely will be) you must put the mask back on.” 

By blessing the mask, the Priest also makes it into a Secular Scapular.  Through the words of Mary to St. Simon Stock, we know that the Brown Scapular helps to save you eternally.  Through the words of the Scientist, the mask saves us from Covidoom.  The Brown Scapular is an aid to our growth in virtue, the Covid Scapular signals that we have virtue.

One of the things that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century was their exaltation of Science as the new religion.  Lenin, Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Hitler all committed their atrocities using “Science” as their justification.  Had someone stood up to them early on, one has to wonder whether things would have been different.

Looking with Lust

Anthropology, Contraception, Human Dignity, Incarnation, Sexual Ethics, The Life of Jesus, Theology of the Body, , , , , ,

Our Lord would most accurately be labeled, at least according to modern standards, a total prude.  He reached a puritanical pinnacle by inventing a totally new category of adultery which he dubs “adultery in the heart” that occurs when a man looks at a woman with lust.  This divine priggishness makes it practically impossible for men and women to even be around each other, or at least that is how it seems.  The modern mind, trapped in a world without virtue, can only see two options: puritanical or prurient.  But Our Lord is really offering a third option, one that ultimately leaves us with the power to love freely and not free love-ers.

Anyone encountering the Sermon on the Mount for the first time must immediately be struck by the unbelievable idealism of the mode of life Christ is putting forth.  He would be the world’s most moralistic man except for one important detail.  Whenever Our Lord issues a command, He never simply leaves us to our own devices, but also seeks to give us the power to fulfill His commands.  His coming to “fulfill the law” isn’t just a matter of prophecy but a matter of grace.  Through the power of His grace we are able to fulfill even the most idealistic of His commands, the command not to look upon a man or woman with lust included.

Christ the True Moralist

Herein lies a major point of misunderstanding about Christ the moralist.  His commandments are such that they both contain the path to freedom while simultaneously leading us to freedom.  He is the Truth and the Way.  What Christ is commanding is really an offer that will free us from looking upon another person with lust.  The power to see the other person as a person and not merely an object of pleasure.  This power then opens the gates of freedom that enable us to love purely as the only true path to happiness.

This pathway to love however also requires us to properly understand what it means, and more importantly what it doesn’t mean, to look at someone with lust.  Lust is not just looking at person of the opposite sex, but is a gaze that is filled desire to use the other person.  In this regard it is helpful to turn to Pope St. John Paul II’s teachings in Love and Responsibility.

Love and Responsibility and Lust

The former Fr. Wojtyla sought to explain how attraction is felt between members of the opposite sex.  In encountering a person of the opposite sex, a man or woman has a natural response to the sexual value of the other person.  These responses come in two forms: sensuality or the reaction to the sexual value in the other person’s body, and sentimentality or the reaction to their perceived masculinity or femininity.    This spontaneously felt response, without the governing of reason, finds its culmination in the desire to possess the value.  Notice that it is the value itself that we desire to possess regardless of the person who possesses that value.  The other person becomes an object of use, rather than a subject to love.  John Paul II labels this phenomenon subjective egoism because it is based completely on how the person feels in response to the other person.  Lust then is the expression of the desire to possess the value, it is the choice to use the other person.

This distinction between interest and expressing the desire is important because merely acknowledging the sexual value of the other person (we might call this interest) is not the same thing as lust.  Interest is perfectly natural and in a very real way something that happens to us rather than something chosen.  It is not just the seed of lust but also the seed of love.  Once the interest is piqued, desire is sparked.  Desire sees the person as an object to be enjoyed but still is not sinful as long as the will resists that desire to use the person.  This too is an important element of love, but it must always be purified such that it is directed to the whole person.

A few examples might help.  A man sees a woman and is drawn towards some perceived sexual value in her body.  His emotional response brings him pleasure and he must now make a decision.  Will he continue to linger on the fact that she is “hot” and the pleasure that looking at her brings or will he remind himself that it is a person and that using her (even though all he is doing is looking at her) is wrong?  If it is the former, then he has lusted.  If it is the latter then he has, even in a very primitive way, expressed love for her by willing her good in choosing not to treat her like an object for his own enjoyment. 

Notice that what is being suggested is not repression.  The attraction is natural and there can be no love without it.  What has to be “repressed” is the urge to use the person.  The man may feel the attraction and move to meet her, but in order not to be lust, he must go to her as a person and treat her as such.  The attraction is still there, but it must move the man towards its proper end—the woman who has stirred his heart and not just her body.  In being free from lust, he is now free to love the woman and not his own emotional response to the sexual value of the woman.

Adultery in the heart has everything to do with what is happening interiorly in the man and it is from this that Christ offers freedom.  How this happens can be shown by two further examples. 

Imagine a married man meets another woman with whom he has regular contact and she awakens sexual interest in him.  He begins to develop sexual desire for her and so now he chooses to avoid her because he fears that he may lust after her.  To avoid the near occasion of sin is a good thing, but it is not yet freedom.  Freedom comes when there is no threat of lust, that is, when the man is chaste. 

Like all virtues, chastity governs the spontaneous arising of the emotions attached to attraction.  The man is simply able to acknowledge the woman’s beauty without being stirred to lust.  He is free now to see her as a person who is beautiful without any desire to possess either her or her beauty.  He can simply appreciate it as beautiful and move on.  The truly chaste married man only feels attraction for his wife. 

Likewise, the chaste unmarried man will feel the emotions of attraction, but they will be moderated such that they do not move him to use the person.  Instead he is drawn towards the person and able to pursue her purely based on her personality and not solely on her attributes.  He can see her in truth and not be blinded by those attributes.  He is completely free in his love for her.

Our Lord’s prudery then is nothing less than an offer for authentic freedom.  Our Lord practiced chastity to the perfect degree and has offered us each a share in His virtue in order to free our hearts to love to the full.

Augustine and the Culture of Euthanasia

Bioethics, Culture of Life, End of Life, Human Dignity, , ,

Nearly sixteen centuries after its publication, St. Augustine’s City of God remains a seminal text in Christian political philosophy.  With the Fall of Rome as his backdrop, the Doctor of Grace contrasts the forces at work that seek to claim men’s souls.  History, from the Fall of the Angels to the Fall of Rome, has consisted of battle between the City of God and the City of Man.  From the vantage point of over a millennium and a half, one can see how, using the Augustine’s principles, Christendom emerged as the City of God dominated the City of Man.  But we seem to be living in a time where the transition is going in reverse and the weeds of secularism are choking out the wheat of Christendom so that Augustine’s text can serve as a blueprint of sorts for restoring the City of God and rebuilding a Christian society.

Without diving into all of the themes Augustine presents, the focus will be on his opening theme: suffering.  Why, in introducing the two cities, would Augustine choose to focus on suffering?  As he points out, the sack of Rome led to seemingly indiscriminate sufferings; both the good and the bad, the Christian and the Pagan suffered.  Suffering doesn’t seem to distinguish them at all.  But when we look not at the nature of the sufferings, but the response of the sufferer, we find great differences.  He says, “though the sufferings are the same, the sufferers remain different.  Virtue and vice are not the same even if they undergo the same treatment…What matters is the nature of the sufferer not the nature of the sufferings.”  So then suffering becomes like a great identification card enabling us to determine residency in either of the two cities.  

The Two Cities

Why this is so becomes apparent once we grasp that ultimately, the two cities are distinguished by their loves.  The “two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point if contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self…The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to its God ‘I will love You, my Lord, my strength.”  For Augustine suffering is brought about when men love the world more than God, the City of Man more than the City of God.  The good and bad suffer together because even the good (even if to a much lesser degree) love this world rather than despising it.

Both the Christians and non-Christians were equally affected but the sufferings of the Christians have “tended to their moral improvement because they are viewed through the eyes of faith.”   For the residents of the City of God suffering becomes an opportunity for growth in virtue and holiness.  “Viewed through the eyes of faith,” sufferings become necessary because they are the most expedient (i.e. most gentle and most merciful) way that God naturalizes us as residents in the heavenly city.  They may be free from criminal and godless wickedness they still see that they are not so far removed as to not to deserve to suffer temporal ills for them.

The residents of the City of Man see suffering as the greatest of all evils.  Rather than viewing them as opportunities, they see them as something to be avoided at all costs, even to the point of self-inflicted death.  From within this context Augustine visits the question of noble suicide within Roman culture.  Drawing from two historical examples at key turning points in Roman history, Augustine shows why suicide is always wrong.  His first case study is Lucretia.  After becoming a victim of rape she killed herself and Rome celebrated the nobility in doing so.  Augustine asks why should she, who was innocent, have suffered a worse punishment than the offender?  “One does not take vengeance on oneself for another’s crime.”  To suffer some injustice and then commit another injustice, even against oneself, is like killing the innocent.

His second example is Cato who killed himself as a political act, a steady refusal to live in a Rome led by Caesar.   As the prototypical Stoic, he thought happiness was only to be found in escaping the body and not something that was achieved in the soul through the body.

The City of God and the Culture of Euthanasia

But he does more than simply prove the immorality of suicide.  He also shows how one might argue against a suicide culture.  In this way he provides us with a blueprint for overcoming a Culture of Euthanasia.  In both of his case studies Augustine chose to focus on “cold-blooded” suicides.  Both Lucretia and Cato were deliberate suicides, not merely acts of impassioned despair.  Augustine thinks there is nothing noble about killing oneself and a culture that elevates it as such is a culture that bestows victimhood on its members.  He wants to empower men and women so that they can be truly noble in facing their sufferings, even the final ones, head-on.

Augustine’s argument and ours as well depends upon strong Christian witness.  If we are to overcome the Culture of Euthanasia we must preach that the only “sweet death” is one that opens wide the door to eternal life.  We cannot “accompany” someone who chooses to kill themselves because it is accompanying a lie that says that God does not use the death He has chosen for us as a means to bring about life.  Instead we should accompany them in their sufferings by encouraging them to dying with true nobility, the nobility of Christ.  Dying with dignity is dying as conformed to Christ.  We will never overcome the emerging Culture of Euthanasia until we suffer like true Christians and encourage others to do the same.  This was Augustine’s way and it needs to be ours too.   

A Not-So Hard Case

Abortion, Human Dignity, Moralilty, Science,

As the laws supporting abortion continue to be challenged, a common objection is raised that abortion ought to be legal when the life of the mother is at risk.  So common is this objection that the President, who has been arguably the most pro-life executive ever, says that it is a necessary exception.  Like all the other “reasons” for abortion this one too depends upon propaganda and ignorance.  Therefore, we need to have a reasoned response ready to refute this seeming “no-brainer.”

Notice first that I said it depends upon propaganda.  This is because it is an attempt to circumvent the “exception proves the rule” principle.  If this really is an exception, then you must be willing to concede the rule that abortion is otherwise always wrong.  The problem is that even if we were willing to make a concession in this situation, abortion supporters really want abortion on demand.  It is an attempt to play on compassion while creating a smokescreen that makes abortion legal and right in all cases.

That being said, it is also not an exception to the rule, a point that otherwise preys upon general ignorance.  Abortion, that is the direct killing of a pre-born infant, as either a means or an end, is always wrong and admits of no exceptions.  This does not mean that in true cases where a mother’s life is in jeopardy that she must simply suck it up and put her affairs in order.  Instead, in every case in which a mother’s life might be in jeopardy, there are moral solutions that do not involve an abortion. 

This brings up a point that merits further examination before we dive into the specifics.  It is certainly common sense but unfortunately is often overlooked, especially in the name of medical expedience.  There is always a moral solution to a problem of health.  This is not to say that it won’t involve additional suffering, but that these “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situations always have solutions that are good for the whole person.  I say this not to be callous but as a reminder that we should never think we have to do something wrong.  It is also meant to be direct challenge to the medical community that they only offer and investigate what would ultimately be moral solutions.  If doctors and medical researchers really care about the health of the person then they will care not just about the body, but the soul as well.  The first question for medicine should never be “can we” but “should we”?

Early Pregnancy

Looking then more closely at the specific situations in which a mother’s life is truly in jeopardy will underscore all that has been said so far.  These threats come most often at the beginning of pregnancy with what are commonly called ectopic pregnancies.  As the etymology of the term suggests, ectopic pregnancies occur when the developing person is “out of place” and implants somewhere other than the uterus.  This can occur in the abdomen or cervix, but the overwhelming majority of cases occur within the fallopian tube.  These pregnancies pose a serious risk to the mother’s life because of hemorrhaging.  As an aside, these types of pregnancies are occurring at much greater rates than in the past thanks to scarring from an increase in the incidence of sexual transmitted diseases (most especially PID), IUDs, tubal sterilization and contraceptive pills.

We should mention both that the child will never achieve viability.  There have been a few, though very few, cases of successful transfer of the child to the uterus but this is still an important area of research we should be devoting energies (and prayers) towards. Also of note is the fact that up to 2/3 of ectopic pregnancies resolve themselves, requiring no medical intervention.  In the remaining cases there are three treatment options.

The first is a chemical solution that uses methotrexate (MTX).  MTX directly attacks the outer layer of cells produced by the developing baby that serves as connective tissue to the mother.  The child detaches and then is washed out of the tube.  Note this has appeal because of it is the least invasive, but also has the most serious side effects.  It also does not treat the underlying cause of the ectopic pregnancy, increasing the likelihood that it will happen again.

Although the Church has not spoken definitively upon this issue, most moralists would categorize this as an abortion because it involves the direct killing of the child as a means to saving the mother’s life.  An unborn child may die as a result of treatment, but the treatment itself cannot be the killing of the child.  The death must be an unintended, although it could be foreseen, side effect of the treatment.  That is why one of the surgical options called a salpingostomy is not a moral option either.  The doctor makes a small incision in the fallopian tube and removes the child in the hopes of preserving the mother’s fertility.  This also amounts to an abortion because it is the direct removal of the child that “saves” the mother.

A third treatment is called salpingectomy.  This has been the preferred method of dealing with ectopic pregnancies by faithful Catholic for years.  It involves removing the portion of the tube that is at risk of rupturing.  Unfortunately, it is the same section that also contains the embryonic human being.  Although the baby dies, it is a double effect and not something directly willed.  This moral solution probably represents the best physical health option as well because it removes the damaged portion of the fallopian tube.  Depending on the amount that is removed (if it is ruptured then a total salpingectomy might be necessary), it does put the mother’s fertility at risk.  Therefore, it is not always preferred even though, by removing the problematic portion of the tube, it makes it far less likely that the problem would ever occur again.

This can seem like a very legalistic approach to things considering that the end result—the termination of the pregnancy—is the same in all three of the approaches.  But, like all moral decisions, the means we use to achieve the end matter just as much as the end itself.  The means we use to do anything must also be good.  The mother, even though she has not seen her baby, is still his mother.  Knowing that, despite the difficult circumstances, she did right by her child can bring her great solace.  But either way, the demand for abortion because of ectopic pregnancy is a red herring.

Later Pregnancy

What about later in the pregnancy?  A moment’s reflection also shows that abortion is not needed.  If the child is viable, then the mother can be induced or an emergency c-section can be performed.  There is absolutely no medical reason why a later-term abortion is necessary.  Even when the child is not viable, inducing labor for the sake of saving the mother’s life can be justified even though the child might not survive.  Obviously, this requires clinical judgment, but the situations where it happens that the woman’s life is in danger because she is pregnant, and the child is not near viability, are very rare (and some say non-existent).  Nevertheless, there is still no need for abortion in these cases either.

Upon closer scrutiny then this so called “hard case” really is not so hard.  I say that not because it is an emotionally and psychologically challenging time, but because it offers a clear moral path.  The need for abortion when the mother’s life is in jeopardy is not a real need and we need to present the facts as such.

On Embryo Adoption

Abortion, Bioethics, Conscience, Culture of Life, Fatherhood, Human Dignity, Theology of the Body, , , , , , ,

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, there are over 620,000 cryo-preserved embryos in the United States.  Even though the “vast majority” of them are still being considered for use for “family building efforts” and others have been “earmarked by the creating couples for use in research,” there are still as many as 60,000 unclaimed frozen embryos currently.  With the growing popularity of IVF, we should expect these numbers to rise dramatically over the coming years.  All this has left pro-lifers scrambling for ethical solutions that free these children from their cryogenic prison.  One Evangelical Christian group called Snowflake Embryo Adoption matches the embryos with women who are willing to “adopt” them.  In essence the embryos are implanted into the wombs of women who carry them to term and raise them as their own children.   This solution, as we shall see, is not without moral controversy.

We must first admit that the plight of these cryogenically preserved children represents one of the greatest injustices of our age because of the sheer numbers alone.  But because many of the “consumers” of IVF are couples struggling with infertility, very few people are willing to call it out.  Instead it remains hidden away in laboratories and freezers.  Despite intrinsic evil of IVF, we must never forget that the children themselves are not an evil but a good that came from the evil.  They are members of the human community, regardless of how they were conceived, and thus are subject with rights, including the right to a safe environment in which they can thrive.  These voiceless children are crying out for justice, a cry that we are obligated not to ignore.  Therefore, it would seem that “embryo adoption” offers a compassionate solution.  The adoptive parents did not bring the children into existence and are simply looking for a way to “right a wrong” by rescuing these children from a frozen existence. 

Adoption?

When framed in this manner, it seems rather straightforward that this type of adoption is an irrefutable good.  But this is a case where we must be careful with our terms.  To label this an embryo adoption is really a form of begging the question.  This is why many moral theologians prefer the term “embryo rescue”.  For everyone know that adoption is praiseworthy, but it is questionable whether this should be classified as a type of adoption.  Adoption has always referred to a legal process by which a child (usually although not exclusively) enters into a family and assumes all the rights and duties of a biological son or daughter.  Nowhere among these rights and duties however would we find the right to gestation.  That right is reserved only for biological children.  The question is whether this difference carries any moral weight.

The Church defines surrogacy as when “a woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of ‘donors’. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy” (Donum Vitae, A3).  Based upon this definition, embryo rescue is more akin to surrogacy than to adoption. The only difference is in the intention of the pregnant woman—in one case she carries the child for another and in the other she carries it for herself.  But surrogacy is not wrong because of the intention of the woman who is impregnated, but because of the nature of the act itself. 

A hypothetical will help to see why this is the case.  Suppose a woman and her husband go through the IVF procedure and find that the woman will never be able to carry a child to term.  She approaches her sister and tells her that they still have three “extra” embryos that are destined for destruction and asks if she would be willing to rescue one of them by offering her womb to carry the child.  She tells her that it would not be surrogacy, but “embryo fostering” because she is simply fostering the child for 9 months.  Verbal gymnastics aside, this clearly fits the definition of surrogacy, an action that the Church has always condemned surrogacy as an intrinsically evil act because it is an offense “against the unity of marriage and the dignity of the procreation of the human person.”  In other words, no matter how good the intention is, it can never be deemed morally licit.  Likewise, embryo adoption suffers a similar fate.

Surrogacy and the Rights of Spouses

Understanding why surrogacy is wrong will help to see why embryo rescue is not a real moral solution.  Notice that Donum Vitae said surrogacy was an offense, not against the procreative aspect of marriage, but the unitive.  A woman should only become a mother through her husband.  He has an exclusive right to her procreative powers and faculties.  When those powers are exercised without him, then the unitive good of marriage has been harmed.  She is a mother of the child, but her husband is in no way the father.  He neither had a hand in creating the child nor in its gestation (both of which a biological father does even in utero).  He may become the child’s adoptive father when it is born, but until then he is not a father.

The unitive good of marriage is maintained when husband and wife must become parents through each other.   Even in the case of adoption, they become parents together and not independently of each other.  This is why we should hesitate to call embryo rescue, adoption.  This solution then introduces a new injustice, mainly against the husband’s exclusive rights to his wife’s procreative faculties.  This is ultimately why the Church has said this is “a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (Dignitatis Personae, 19).

What can be done about this then?  For the time being we have an obligation to keep the children already in existence alive until a solution can be found.  This form of embryo adoption by which someone keeps the child from being terminated or subject to scientific testing would be laudable.  When St. John Paul II spoke on the topic he made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons”(quoted in Dignitatis Personae, 19).  Putting an end to this sanitized barbarism then should be our primary goal. 

Self-Esteem and the Spirit of Penance

Fasting, God's Will, Grace, Human Dignity, Lent, Prayer, Purgatory, , , ,

In his message for Lent, Pope Francis exhorted the faith not to let “this season of grace pass in vain!”  The Holy Father is echoing a sentiment that we have nearly all experienced.  We have all had the experience of letting Lent pass us by and many of us, despite the best of intentions, will suffer the same fate this Lent unless we do something different.  We need not just encouragement but a paradigm shift to see Lent and its purpose differently than ever before.

This paradigm shift begins with an understanding of the history of Lent.  This does not mean that we need to look at how the Church has classically celebrated Lent, but to understand where it comes from.  Like all the events within the Liturgical Calendar, the season of Lent is given to make the specific mysteries of Christ’s life present to us.  The particular mystery attached to Lent is Christ’s forty days in the desert.  Christ was driven by the Spirit into the desert for 40 days of prayer and fasting with one of the purposes being to obtain all the graces for all the Lents of all Christians for all time.  He did this not in any generic way, but in a very specific way because each member of the Faithful individually was there with Him.  As Pope Pius XII reminds us, “In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (Mystici Corporis Christi,75).  Lent then is the time where we go to Christ in the desert to lay claim to those graces He had merited for us.  We go not just in spirit but in truth because we are already there.

How We Should “Do” Lent

This understanding not only changes how we view Lent, but also how we do Lent.  Our typical approach is to see it as something primarily done by us.  We come up with a plan to “give up X” or “do this thing X” for Lent and then try to white-knuckle our way through it.  But if what we said above is true, then the proper way to look at it is that Christ is doing Penance through us.  The oft misquoted and equally misunderstood Scholastic maxim that grace perfects nature is apropos here.  Grace does not “build on nature” as if we do a little (or as much as we can) and God will do the rest.  It is all done by Christ—“I live no longer I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20).  Lent is no different.

This might sound passive or even quietistic, but it is the very opposite.  All grace requires our free response, but it first requires that we remove those impediments that keep us from adopting the true spirit of Penance that Christ won for us.  We often forget this as our primary role.  And this is why many of us struggle through Lent.  We try to do Penance without having the grace of Penance. 

Therefore our first acts should be to obliterate the obstacles.  These obstacles are not only interior but come from those unquestioned beliefs we have adopted from the spirit of the world.  These obstacles, two in particular, are the focus of this article and the next.  We will not fully receive the graces of Lent until we remove the spirits of self-esteem and luxury.

The Problem of Self-Esteem

Who could possibly have a problem with self-esteem?  To ask the question is to reveal that we have been infected with the spirit of the world.  For the spirit of the world always sends us mixed messages, locking us firmly in no-man’s land.  It takes some truth and twists it just enough that it blinds us to the implications of that truth.  It usually starts by baptizing it with a new name.  Then the new term, piggybacking on the old term, is given value by fiat.  “Self-esteem” is a prime example of this.

Self-esteem or “confidence in one’s own worth” is a psychological replacement for a theological term, dignity.  That a human being has worth is unquestionable.  But what has to be questioned is why a person has worth, that is, why a person should have any confidence in their worth.  The world would have us believe that the currency of “self-esteem” is valuable simply by fiat.  But it is not.  It is valuable currency because it rests upon the God-standard.  Human persons only have value because they are made in the image of God and because God has made Himself into the image of a man in Jesus Christ.  Our confidence lies in both of these things—our inherent God-imagedness and our offer of God-likedness in Christ.  The first can never be taken away, while the second must be achieved.   

The problem with self-esteem is that it overemphasizes the first and totally ignores the second.  The odd thing is that many in the Church have tried to “re-theologize” self-esteem through the language of “Temple of the Holy Spirit”.  This term is thrown around as an attempt to convince someone of their own worth.  But that is not how either Scripture or Tradition has understood it.  When St. Paul uses the term it is meant as a corrective to live up to the supreme gift of redemption (which includes the Divine Indwelling).  Tradition has taught that only those in a state of grace, that is those who have kept themselves unstained by serious sin, that are Temples of the Holy Spirit.  The language also betrays itself because a Temple, while it is the earthly home of Divinity, is also, and one might say primarily, the place of sacrifice.  In other words, you cannot say someone is a Temple of the Holy Spirit while not also calling them to make the necessary sacrifices within that same Temple. 

This leads us now to why the spirit of self-esteem is an obstacle to the spirit of Lent.  It always causes us to overvalue ourselves and destroys our spirit of sacrifice and penance.  If you don’t believe me, then let me propose a hypothetical.  Suppose, to use a seemingly trivial example, you are waiting for a parking space in a crowded shopping center and someone steals the space from you.  Now suppose you told me about it and I said “you deserved it.”  What would be your response?

I would bet that you would be angry with me and maybe even accuse me of being unjust.  But in truth, I would infallibly be right no matter what the situation was.  How do I know this?  Because God in His Providence thought you did.  Otherwise He wouldn’t have allowed it to happen.  This seems crazy until we follow out the line of reasoning.

Returning to our hypothetical, did God know the person was going to steal the space and did He allow it to happen?  Without question, but the important question is why.  And the answer ought to be “so that I could willingly accept it as penance for something I did wrong.”  In other words, you may not have deserved it this time, but you never got what you deserved last time.  The only thing that stops us from seeing this is our self-esteem.  “The space was mine and he had no right to take it.”  True, but that is not the point.  The point is that he did you a favor.  He gave you an opportunity to undo the harm you did to yourself when you sinned previously.  You offended God and all you have to endure is finding another space?  Yes, because your measly sacrifice when united to Christ in the desert becomes powerful.  Or you could just get stuck in how poorly treated you were and “pay down to the last penny” later (c.f. Mt 5:26).  Purgatory now is always better than Purgatory later.

So free from the false myth of self-esteem were the saints that they could even practice this for the big things. Not that they became doormats per se, but because they “humbly regarded the other person has more important than yourself” (Phil 2:3) that the only reason they put a stop to it is because of the harm the other person was doing to himself. In other words they would speak up not because of self-esteem but because of charity. In the spiritual life why we do what we do matters just as much as what we do.

The extreme cases obviously are far harder said than done, so we ought to just start developing the wisdom for the less extreme cases; not just because they are easier but because they are far more common.  This Lent let go of your self-esteem and see if there isn’t real growth in the spirit of Penance.  After all, these are the best kinds of Penance because they are not self-chosen, but come from the Provident hand of God.  When you meet with some slight during Lent, even if it seems like a big deal, say “I deserve this” and thank God for forming a spirit of Penance in you.

Next time, we will examine the second worldly obstacle: luxury.

Power Play

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Theology of the Body, , ,

As the Church marks the 50th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, much has been said regarding the prophetic character of Blessed Paul VI’s controversial encyclical.  In particular, the Pope predicted that four things would happen as contraceptive use spread throughout a society.  There would be an increase in marital infidelity, a general lowering of moral standards, a loss of reverence for woman as she is reduced to an instrument for the satisfaction of a man’s desires and governments would use coercive power to implement “family planning” policies.  In reading the signs of the times, the Pope saw the consequences clearly, but why he was so easily able to see this is just important.  For these consequences were just symptoms of a deeper mindset that the Holy Father feared would ultimately conquer the hearts and minds of men, a mindset that was just as soul-killing as the contraceptive mentality to which it was linked.  After uttering his prophecy of consequences, the Holy Father tells us the root cause is man’s unwillingness to “accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go” (HV , 17).

On the one hand this is nothing new.  One can even say that Original Sin itself is the mark of man’s unwillingness to accept his creaturely limits.  Man in his Edenic bliss can eat from every tree in the Garden, save one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (GN 2:16-17).  Made in the likeness of God, he is confronted with the choice to be “like gods who know good and evil” (Gn 3:5).  That is, he has a choice between conforming himself to the limits of reality, or shaping reality to his liking.  He quickly finds out that his decision was never a real option.  He passes his confusion on to his progeny along with a proclivity for choosing likewise.

Confusing Limits

Because man is now in a state of confusion, he must set out to discover reality as it really is.  To enter into a relationship with reality he must also (re-)discover himself as he really is (including his limits) as well.  At first, because of his confusion reality appears rock solid and he discovers many limitations in himself.  But as the field of discovery expands, he finds that he has the power to manipulate reality more and more.  His limitations become blurred except when he asks a simple question: does this new power over reality include power over myself?  If so, then it is actually a power within reality, which is the only true power.  Otherwise it is a grasping and remaking of reality.

In many ways chemical contraception represents a paramount example of this principle in play.  In the past contraception usually involved changing the act, but with the Pill and the like came the power to alter the reality of a woman’s reproductive system.  But this is no mere biological alteration, but an alteration to a person’s biology.  Therefore it has to be viewed through a personalistic lens.  Does the power the Pill gives over a woman’s cycle carry with it the power of the woman to master herself?  And, because a woman’s reproductive system is a relational system, does the Pill give the man in whom she enters into a reproductive relationship with a power to master himself?

Power

The wisdom of Blessed Paul VI’s condemnation of contraception begins to emerge, especially when we add a second principle.  With the emergence of new technology comes new power over reality.  This power is given at the service of controlling men.  The question is which men will be controlled.  Will the new power be used to control man himself?  Or will the power be used to control other men?  Or as CS Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means…the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

Blessed Paul VI was so accurate in his predictions because he knew that the Pill wasn’t really a medicine to control births, but a poison to control other people.  His forecasts are really about the power of one person over another.  More to the point, the Pill is about men exercising their power over women.  It tells women in order to gain her rightful share in society she must act like one of the big boys.  But because woman is a “misbegotten male” she must take a pill to do this.  But in truth it is a ploy in which man, who is fertile all the time, can find partners who are infertile all the time.  It absolves him of all responsibility and creates an injustice in which women are treated as inferiors.  What is so puzzling is that many of them, in the name of equality, swallow the pill anyway.  Shouldn’t society have to change and adapt to the feminine genius and not woman herself?  As then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (the future St. John Paul II) said ,

“Contraception makes no contribution to the woman’s personal rights.  Since it is a process that makes it possible to satisfy the ‘needs of the sexual instinct’ without taking on any of the responsibility for the consequences of sexual activity, it primarily benefits the man.  This is why, once accepted contraception leads to sanctioning his erotic hedonist behavior.  In this situation, inevitably, the man benefits at the expense of the woman.  He ceases to regard the woman in the context of transmitting life.  She becomes for him simply the occasion for enjoying pleasure.  If one adds to this the fact that it is inscribed in the very structure of man to take initiative in the sexual realm and that the danger of being violated is a threat primarily to the woman, then one must admit that the more constitution of the woman appears grim indeed.  Therefore, when contraception is used, the woman faces not only inequality but also sexual slavery.”

In his opening paragraph of Humanae Vitae, Blessed Paul VI recognized that technology, especially reproductive technologies, were a force that the Church was going to need to confront.  Unfortunately she has not been up to the task and many women have suffered because of it.  As the Church continues to celebrate this Golden Anniversary of Humane Vitae, let’s work towards a rediscovery of the golden wisdom contained within this prophetic document.

Defending Death?

Church and State, Church Authority, Culture of Life, Human Dignity, ,

In a previous post, two of the most common arguments for abolishing the death penalty, were examined and put to rest.  In the midst of this presentation, I promised to return to the topic because the arguments themselves are predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasoning behind the Church’s position, a position she has held from her beginnings.  When asked where the Church stands on Capital Punishment, most would put forward the “self-defense” defense, a position based upon John Paul II’s explanation in Evangelium Vitae and later included in the Catechism:

“If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm – without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.’” (CCC 2267)

In summary, provided that the threat to society from the person can be neutralized, then the death penalty should not be used.  Given greater and greater security measures, we should expect that the death penalty will eventually be done away with.  Or so the argument goes.  This may come as a surprise to many, but “self-defense” has never been the primary reason why the Church has allowed recourse to the death penalty.  And if it was, this would represent a novelty (i.e. a change in something belonging to the Tradition of the Church).  Instead the Church has taught from the beginning that the death penalty was a valid means of punishment.

“From the beginning?”

Within the classical tradition, punishment has three distinct purposes.  The primary end is the re-establishment of justice.  When a crime is committed, the order of justice is upset and is only restored when a proportionate punishment is given to the offender.  This is why the punishment must always be carried out according to the judgment of a competent authority.  The other two purposes serve only secondary roles.  First, the punishment must be ordered to the correction of the offender himself, that is, it is medicinal in some way to the person who committed the injustice.  Finally, it must serve a social purpose, primarily as a deterrent and isolation of the offender.

We can examine Capital Punishment in light of these three ends to see if it can be applied.  It bears mentioning that this is a different question as to whether it should be applied in a given situation.  This is a question that only the competent authority whose role it is to promote and protect the common good.  We are interested here only in the question of why in principle the death penalty is not immoral.  That being said, we can examine the primary end, namely the re-establishment of justice.  Does the punishment fit the crime?

Almost on an intuitional level we must admit that there are some crimes that are so heinous that the only fitting punishment is death.  If this sounds like vengeance then that is because it is.  Vengeance corresponds to the innate desire for justice that is written into human nature and it is a good thing when it is exercised according to justice.  This is why punishment should always be carried out by the competent authority.  If “all authority comes from above” (Romans 13:1) and “vengeance is mine, says the Lord” (Dt 32:35) then it is the competent authority that carries out the punishments of the Lord.

Even if you are willing to concede this, you might answer “no, there is no crime for which the fitting punishment is death.”  The problem with this position is first that it contradicts Sacred Scripture.  In the midst of His covenant making with Noah, the Lord says “Anyone who sheds the blood of a human being, by a human being shall that one’s blood be shed. For in the image of God have human beings been made” (Gn 9:6).  This is the principle of proportionality.  A principle that even Our Lord did not abrogate in the Sermon on the Mount in which He addresses His individual followers to avoid unjust anger and vengeance while at the same time commanding them to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”  There should be no vigilante justice, only those for whom the competence rests (c.f, Romans 13:1-4).  Our Lord teaches how we should respond as victims to violence, not as punishers.  It is with this awareness that the Church has always taught that society may have recourse to the death penalty as a punishment; from St. Paul to Augustine to Aquinas to Pope Innocent III to Pope Pius IX to Pope Pius XII to Benedict XVI.

The second problem is more one of common sense.  To say that a mass murderer deserves the same punishment (life imprisonment) as say a rapist is to ultimately destroy the principle of proportionality.  That a mass murderer gets only life imprisonment would suggest that a rapist who, “at least didn’t kill someone” should get less.  This leads to a sort of arbitrariness in punishment, including excess or even no punishment at all.  We cannot eliminate per se Capital Punishment as a proportional punishment.

Although it is not immediately obvious, Capital Punishment also serves the second purpose of punishment.  It serves a medicinal as well.  St. Thomas says that the death penalty leads to either repentance or puts an end to their sin, both of which are good for the person.  Death is not the worst thing that can happen to us—hell is.  Repentance obviously leads the person away from hell, but keeping a person from sinning even more keeps them from further punishment in hell

Finally, how the death penalty serves a deterrent.  This also needs to further explanation.  Many people take this to be an empirical claim and think that the number of murders is no less in places where there is recourse to the death penalty.  But the claim is more about the law as a great moral teacher.  As a deterrent the death penalty is not a part of someone’s calculation, but represents an overall hatred of murder.  Most people would not commit and murder and one of the reasons why they have such distaste for it is the horror of the death penalty.  Rather than being an affront against human dignity, it actually shows the great worth of human life.  Recall the reason that God gave Noah as to why he should use capital punishment—“in the image of God have human beings been made” (Gn 9:6).

A Novelty?

It was mentioned above that the “self-defense” defense would represent a novelty in the Church’s teaching and would be a break with unbreakable Tradition.  “Still”, one might say, “the Catechism says what it says.”  That is true, except that the paragraph must be read from within its proper context.  The teaching on the death penalty is presented from within the context of punishment, that is, as Capital Punishment.

“The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people’s rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people’s safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.” (CCC 2266)

This is merely a summary of the principles of what we said above.  What follows then in the next paragraph is meant to be an application of those principles based on the Holy Father’s prudential judgment.  He thinks that given the current state of the penal system, the ends of punishment—proportionality, expiation and deterrence— can be met with something like life imprisonment, rendering the only issue being whether or not society can be protected from further violence by the perpetrator.  As proof that this is a merely prudential application we need only look to the comments of the future Pope Benedict XVI when he said “While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia” (Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith).  It is both permissible to have recourse to capital punishment and to disagree with how it is applied.  The principle is set but how it is applied, like many things related to the moral teachings of the Church, is debatable.   Put another way, that it can be used as punishment is not debatable, when it should be used is.  As an aside, I should mention as well that, despite taking a lot of flak for it, Edward Feser offers an excellent explanation of why this is an imprudential judgment in his new book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of the Death Penalty.

In conclusion, the Church has repeatedly affirmed the validity of the death penalty as a moral option for punishing violent offenders.  Despite a move towards a more merciful approach, this particular doctrine will not and cannot change.  The death penalty should always be on the table.

Disorderly Conduct

Anthropology, Defending the Faith, Homosexuality, Human Dignity, , ,

It’s not always what you say, but also how you say it.  Even a man like St. Peter, characteristically known for his bluntness, recognized this and cajoled the peddlers of the Good News that while having a ready defense of the reason for their hope, it should always be done with reverence and respect for the other person.  The truth is naturally harmful to error, but it can always be presented in a manner that makes it more palatable to those who hold those errors.  This balance is at the heart of the Church’s pastoral mission.  That is why, when the self-appointed Apostle to the LGBTQ community, Fr. James Martin, says that the Church’s language regarding the homosexual condition is unnecessarily harsh, we ought to take his criticism seriously.

Fr. Martin takes exception to the use of the term disordered.  The Catechism uses the term twice within the context of same sex attraction (SSA)—once when referring to homosexual activity, calling it intrinsically disordered (CCC 2357) and then a second time calling the inclination itself objectively disordered (CCC 2358).  Many people, Fr. Martin included, are quick to point out that the term disordered refers “to the orientation, and not the person” (Building a Bridge, p.46).

Why We Use the Term Disordered

They are correct that in this context the adjective, disordered, is modifying the inclination and the action and not the person.  But this does not mean that the persons themselves are not disordered.  In fact, the Church believes that we are all disordered and those with same sex attraction are no different in that regard.  The particulars of their disorder may be different than mine or yours, but rest assured dear reader that we are all disordered.  If we weren’t then there would be no need for the Church.  The Church is given by Christ so that He might continue His ministry to disordered tax collectors and prostitutes throughout time and space.

The use of the term disordered is really meant to highlight an important aspect of human life, one that truly is Good News.  Life is not just a series of unrelated episodes, but has a specific purpose or end based upon the fact that we have an unchangeable human nature.  Those inclinations and actions which take us towards true fulfillment are said to be ordered to happiness, those which take us off that path are said to be disordered.  In short, homosexual inclinations and actions are only one of a number of things that are disordered; things such as lying and calumny are also classified as being intrinsically disordered by the Catechism (CCC 1753) precisely because they lead us away from a life of true fulfilment and happiness.

Nevertheless, the Catechism does single out the inclination as disordered and this also for a very good reason.  There is only one way in which order can be re-introduced back into our fallen nature—grace.  The Church turns her focus to this inclination rather than the many others because she wants to apply the medicine of grace to those who live with same sex attraction.  She is the lone voice crying out in the desert that SSA is a serious obstacle to the Promised Land.  That is, in their struggle for chastity and rightly ordered love, the person struggling with same sex attraction may unite their suffering with the suffering Christ, sanctifying the whole Church in the process.  This is why we should “build a bridge” to them and invite them in—not just because we want to see them healed, but because of their particular cross they might add to the holiness of all the members of Christ’s Mystical Body.

The Weight of the Burden

It is worth mentioning as well why so many people who suffer with SSA do read into the Catechism a specific condemnation of their being ontologically disordered—they read it as a noun rather than an adjective.  There is something much more fundamental to each person than their sexual inclinations.  In fact the Church, “refuses to consider the person as a ‘heterosexual’ or a ‘homosexual’ and insists that every person has a fundamental identity: a creature of God and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life”(PCHP, 16).  The truth is that no one is ontologically homosexual; there really is no such thing as “homosexuality” or “heterosexuality”.  There are only two sexual identities; male and female.  Our sexuality is the call of men and women to love as God loves in and through their bodies.  The unfortunate reality is that we live in a fallen world where there can be distortions that obscure our sexual identity.

This particular burden is especially difficult because it attacks one’s ability to relate to other people, both of the opposite sex and the same sex.  In other words, it disorders all your relationships.  This leaves the person feeling very isolated and very alone.  When they find a community of like-minded people, whose social action centers on making their inclination and actions ordered it is hard not to fall victim to wearing nothing but the homosexual label.  We are so much more than our feelings and our genitals however.  Even if the inclination were not disordered, wearing the label to the extent that many wear it, would lead to grave unhappiness.  That basket can’t hold the eggs of our identity and the Church wants those who struggle with SSA to know that.

We can see why then the Church might use the term disordered as a way to point out there is an ordered way of life in which things proceed in an ordered fashion towards true human fulfillment, but is the phrase “still needlessly hurtful. Saying that one of the deepest parts of a person — the part that gives and receives love — is ‘disordered’ in itself is needlessly cruel” (p. 46-47), as Fr. Martin suggests?  There might be a gentler term that could be used, but most that I can think of betray the truth.  Fr. Martin’s suggestion that we should call it “differently ordered” is problematic in that it implies that it is ordered.  It is, according to him then one different way of life that when lived out would lead to true personal happiness and thriving.  The Church cannot, as Cardinal Sarah says in referring to Our Lord’s encounter with the woman caught in adultery, be more merciful than her Lord.  The merciful call of the Church always echoes Christ’s compassionate call to conversion.  That is, it always mixes the bad news with the Good News, or rather begins with the bad news (dis) and ends with the Good News (ordered).  Come to think of it, maybe, just maybe, there is wisdom in the use of the term.  It’s not always what you say, but how you say it indeed.

 

***As a postscript, I would not recommend anyone spend money on Fr. Martin’s book as it is really a veiled attempt to circumvent the Church’s teaching through subterfuge and verbal gymnastics.  His unwillingness to engage any of his critics head-on always makes someone suspect in my mind.  Instead, buy Daniel Mattson’s book Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay.  For anyone trying to aid in the bridge building, this book should be one of the pillars.

Human Origins and the Transgender Person

Anthropology, Human Dignity, ,

“Where did I come from?”  What parent doesn’t cringe hearing those words come out of the mouth of their young child?  The parent’s mind goes to the birds and the bees while the mouth quickly intervenes saying “God put you in Mommy’s tummy.”  Although it is uttered by a mere babe, we cannot help but be struck by the profundity of the question.  Where do we come from and how are we made?  It is a question that touches deeply on both philosophy and theology and the answer can only leave us echoing the marvel of the Psalmist—“I praise you, because I am wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14).

The Platypus and Us

From our perspective, the platypus seems to be the strangest of all God’s creatures.  If we were able to step outside of ourselves, we would quickly realize that in truth humans are the oddest of His creatures.  Formed from the “dust of the ground” and “the breath of God,” we are the only creatures in which matter and spirit are wedded together.  We are neither wholly material or wholly spirit, but a morph of the two.  We must understand this point if we are to understand our origins.  We are not souls trapped in a body nor are we really smart apes.  We are both a body and a spirit.  Although this seems like common sense, it seems to have been greatly forgotten in a culture that tends to look at man in a dualist fashion.  Although the soul enjoys a certain prominence, the person is not just their soul.

What follows from this is that man is really capable of three different kinds of actions.  As a bodily being, he can operate on an animal level by which he experiences hunger and growth and the like.  As a spiritual being he can perform acts of pure spirits like abstract thought.  Man can know that 2+2=4.  What is entirely unique to man as a composite creature is that he can also perform a third type of act—one that only man can do such as appreciating beauty, proving a mathematical theorem and experiencing conjugal love.

The Origin of the Soul

Thanks to modern biology and embryology, we know where the body comes from.  But where does the soul come from?  It is created directly by God at the moment of conception.  There is no material power that can create a spiritual soul.  Being immaterial and having no parts, it cannot come from the parents the way the body does.  This leaves only one alternative, a sort of process of elimination, that leads to the conclusion that it must come directly from God.

It is not, as is often thought, as though the soul exists prior to the body.  How do we know this?  In short, it is the law of heredity that reveals this.  Children can inherit bodily traits from their parents.  A son can be the spittin’ image of his father.  But it is not just bodily traits, but also some of those traits that fall into our third class of actions that children tend to inherit.  Artists and musicians tend to rear children with the aptitude for the same.  Those gifted in mathematics tend to raise children with mathematical minds such that no mere environmental explanation exists. So widespread and common is this that it is easy to overlook the implication of it.

In short, we have to offer an account of our origin that factors in the hereditariness of these spiritual/material acts.  The only plausible explanation for this phenomena is that the soul is made for the body.  When the body is created, thought St. Thomas, God fuses a soul to it to match the body.  In that way our souls are entirely unique and thus when separated from the body (after death and prior to the General Resurrection) they still remain our soul.  He doesn’t just fuse a soul into my body, but He infuses my soul into my body.  They are a perfect match.

Now all human souls have the same essential qualities such as being capable of abstract thought, knowledge of first principles, and the capacity to love.  But each soul may differ in some of its accidental qualities such as taking spiritual delight in certain intellectual pursuits which coincidentally may coincide with those same bodily, hereditary tendencies that make the practice of art, music and mathematics easier.

This also confirms on one of the key concepts of St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, namely that the body reveals the soul.  If the soul is made to fit that particular body then this seems intuitive.  But this also means that one of the accidental qualities of the soul is sex.  In other words, gender or sex (or whatever we are now calling it) is not just a physical difference but a spiritual one too (see CCC 2332-2333).

The Transgender Soul

And now we begin to see why these philosophical musings are relevant.  There are many who claim that transgenders were born with the wrong bodies.  They claim that God “makes no mistakes” and that the biology was wrong.  But if the body is primary and God matches the soul to it, then this cannot be so.  If the body is biologically male then the soul is also spiritual masculine.  The soul is matched to the body and God “makes no mistakes.”

Further, to make biological changes to the body in the cases of someone who is conflicted will only serve to make matters worse.  They may not “feel comfortable” in their skin, but those changes will not touch their souls and will lead to an even deeper conflict.  How does a masculine soul express itself through a female body?  They will never be able to fully express themselves and thus will be forever wounded in their ability to give and receive love.  Instead we must be willing to help them discern the true source of their inner conflict without taking what amounts to a short-cut solution.

Tocqueville and the Bathroom Bill

Human Dignity, Politics

Each time I pick up Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, I check the copyright date just to make sure it really was written in the 1830s.  He seems to capture the American psyche perfectly—even after almost 200 years and offers incredibly relevant insight into the political issues that plague us today.  I am reminded of this once again this week as the fallout from House Bill 2 in North Carolina continues.  This law sought to block an “anti-discrimination” ordinance in Charlotte that would have allowed people to use the bathroom of their gender identity.

Now certainly Tocqueville has nothing to say about public bathrooms, but what he does write about helps us to understand why there can be no true civil discourse, especially surrounding this issue.  When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he found that democratic principles animated nearly every aspect of American life. What struck him most was what he called the equality of conditions among the people. Perhaps most surprising to Americans today, he found that love of equality—not freedom—was “the ruling passion of men” in the U.S. Tocqueville feared that the more the principle of equality takes hold of a society, the more pressure there is to see everyone as essentially identical. When equality reigns, any form of discrimination is bad because it classifies the other as somehow different. To discriminate seems absolutely un-American.  To exacerbate the problem, in a democracy many beliefs gain unquestioned acceptance because the only intellectual authority is the opinion of the majority. To remove the threat of the tyranny of the majority, Tocqueville thought that one crucial check was the power of religion in forming morals.

Even the most ardent secularist has to admit that the principle underlying the American hatred of discrimination—that “all men are created equal”—is the fruit of what Jacques Maritain termed the “hidden work” of the Gospel on the secular conscience. Specifically, it rests upon the dignity of the human person. No other culture and no other religion taught this.  It is only in a Christian culture that such an understanding of the equality of mankind arises.  But this equality does not mean that people are equal in every way. People are very different with respect to their roles and their contributions to the common good.  Yet, divorced from its religious grounding, the equality of men runs amok.

Tocqueville

Tocqueville also noticed that democracy and the love of equality affect the English language. In particular he found that Americans have a “passionate addiction” to generic terms because they condense many objects into a few words. Along these same lines, Americans often omit modifiers in order to avoid the hard work of scrutinizing ideas. An obvious example of this habit is the term “pro-choice,” which refers to someone in favor of performing a certain act without actually naming and, more important, scrutinizing what that act is.

Now returning to America’s obsessions with anti-discrimination, we must admit that man is a discriminating animal.  Through the use of his reason he is able to discriminate between what a thing is and what it is not. One could argue that to cease discriminating is to cease being human. To accuse someone of discrimination is to accuse them of being human—in that respect we are all guilty.  The fact that there are two bathrooms to begin with is because we discriminate between men and women and their toilet needs.  Public bathrooms are by their very nature discriminatory.

A moment’s reflection leads us to conclude that a key adjective is missing. It is not a question of discrimination, but whether the discrimination is just or unjust. By avoiding the use of the adjective just, Americans dodge the tough question of what constitutes just behavior.  And this leads to muddled thinking about a whole variety of practices.  Rather than looking at what is just we simply give in to the person who speaks the loudest (another democratic principle).  To cry “discrimination” is enough to get the ACLU involved, regardless of whether the discrimination is just or not.

In other words, any discussion about whether an action is discriminatory or not must be preceded by a discussion on justice. Broadly speaking, justice is defined as giving each man his due. Any act of justice flows from the realization that something is man’s due. In other words, a discussion of rights must come before a discussion of justice.

What does this have to do with the “Bathroom Law” as it has come to be known?  Tocqueville helps us to see our blind spots.  No one is immune to the cultural obsession with equality.  Leaving the specifics of the law to those more legally inclined than I and looking at the Charlotte ordinance it was meant to combat, we have to ask whether a transgender person has the right to use a public bathroom of their gender identity.  The problem again lies in the inability to make distinctions (i.e. discriminate).  “Transgender” is a catch-all term that includes people “whose gender identity, gender expression or behavior does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”  In other words, it can be a person who is actively trying to change their sex (gender identity) or someone who expresses themselves as a different sex by cross-dressing and the like (gender expression).  Further complicating this is that their sexual orientation needs to be factored in.  Who exactly would be protected by such ordinances?  Does a man who dresses like a woman (gender expression), but has an attraction to women (sexual orientation) have a right to use a women’s bathroom?

Claims of “discrimination” blind us to the fact that no one can clearly articulate who the law really affects.  Without any clear distinctions, how can we even begin to examine whether the law justly discriminates or not?  These toilet torts will always be unjust because the parties that are affected are not known.  At the very least, the NC law did try to make a clear distinction by using the Birth Certificate (which can now be changed apparently).  In truth it really is the desire for anything goes.  All human beings use the bathroom, so therefore a human being may use any bathroom.

A Right to Die

End of Life, Human Dignity, Suffering, , , ,

Ambiguity is the mother of all social ill.  The less clear we are in our social discourse, the easier it is to pull a fast one on society at large.  Many states across the country have fallen victim to this through the “Death with Dignity” movement.  “Right to die” legislation has been either been accepted or introduced into legislation in 28 states in our country.  With this issue being raised with such regularity, it is worth investigating the merit of a so-called “right to die.”

Before we can even approach the question of whether there is a “right to die”, we need to examine what a right is.  Despite all of the talk we hear about rights in our country, few can actually define what a right is.  It is the steady refusal to examine rights philosophically that leads to all the muddle-headed discussion surrounding rights.  A right is the moral power to possess, do, or exact something that is due to the person.  Within this definition we find that there are three components.  First, there is the person who owns the right.  Second, there is the person who has the duty to respect the right.  This can be either passive, as in a duty of non-interference, or active, as in the duty to satisfy the right, or both.  These two are bound together morally by the final component, the thing in question.

One of the great dangers that our culture’s obsession with rights poses is that there are always those who will use the language of rights to mask something far more nefarious than it appears to be.  Nowhere is this more obvious than in the “right to die” or “death with dignity” movement.  This is why having clarity about rights in general can protect many innocent people from suffering at the hands of those who are fighting for our “right to die.”  It will remove any doubt that there is such thing as a “right to die.”

Flatlines

First we can look at the holder of supposed right.  Is death something that is due to a person?  In the strictest sense, no, it is not something that is owed to someone.  Rights flow either directly or indirectly from human nature itself.  Ultimately any rights claim is based upon the assumption that the thing being claimed is a good.  As John Paul II said many times the right to life is the “fundamental right and source of all other rights” (EV, 72).  Even if you look to the foundations of modern liberalism rooted in the works of Hobbes and Locke, you will find that because all rights are given by nature, they assume that we all by nature have a self-interested attachment to our own lives.  In other words, the right to life is inalienable in that it flows from the fact that life is a good by nature.  This becomes clearer when we look at the person whose duty it is to respect the right.  If life is an “inalienable” right then this means that there is a corresponding duty to protect life.  Practically speaking, there is an obligation to protect another’s life when it is in jeopardy.

While this may appear to be quite cut and dry, reality is more complicated than that.  The question of a “right to die” arises not just because autonomy has run amok in the West.  Medical technology has made it so that we now have more control than ever over when and how we die.  Thanks to some medical interventions, patients can be kept alive long after nature would have taken its course.  From within this setting, we have to ask whether a person has a “right to be let to die.”

In essence the “right to be let to die” means that a person has the right to choose not to receive life-sustaining medical treatment.  In order not to interfere with the obligation of others to protect life, the treatment must be excessively burdensome in that its benefits are outweighed by its burdens.  Those responsible for taking care of the person still have the obligation to provide routine attention to the patient by bathing them, keeping them warm, controlling pain and providing food and water.

So while this means no one has the “right to die” per se, it is reasonable to assert that they do have a “right to be let to die.”  The problem at this point is that people who label themselves as “Death with Dignity” advocates have piggybacked onto this legitimate right and wedded it to something else, namely a “right to be made dead.”  By hiding behind a sweet sounding name, Euthanasia (which literally means “good death”), what is being claimed is a right to positive assistance in bringing about death.  This means that what appears on the surface to be a mere personal freedom is really about placing an obligation to kill on another person.  This obviously contradicts one’s obligation to protect life.  This self-contradictory aspect of the “right to be made dead” shows why it is not a true right.  It also helps to reveal what this is really about.

This movement has very little to do with medical technology or terminal illnesses.  What is really being sought is acknowledgment of a right to commit suicide.  Given the will, there are very few people who could stop someone that wanted to kill themselves, so why would we need legislation for a right to commit suicide?  The answer is all about money and power.  First, in the states where it is legal, insurance companies must pay out when someone commits suicide.  This means that previously what was a deterrent, namely the financial well-being of a family, is taken out of the equation.  In fact the family may end up better off financially when their loved one is dead.  One can easily see that there could be familial encouragement to end it all based on a monetary windfall.

Second, this is ultimately about some people having the power to determine who lives and who dies.  If we recognize a “right to be dead” then there is a corresponding “duty to make dead.”  Who is the one who must exercise this duty and when should it be exercised?  Already we can see how the person and the proxies could be compromised, but what if they are not coming around to what is obvious to doctors and other “experts”?  While no one likes slippery slope arguments, this is precisely what has happened in places where a “right to die” has been recognized like the Netherlands.  The emphasis is no longer on the right to die, but the obligation to take the life that has been deemed unworthy of life.

What makes this particularly evil is that it plays into people’s emotions.  No one wants to be a burden to their loved ones, especially when there seems to be a painless way to avoid that.  As usual though, it is not enough to have our hearts in the right place; we must get our heads their too.  Demanding clarity when it comes to rights, especially the “right to die,” is a good place to start the journey from our hearts to our heads.

Dying with Dignity?

End of Life, Human Dignity

Americans have always been a very practical people.  Proof of this can be seen by examining the number of how-to books that make their way onto the bestseller lists.  One how-to book that is particularly noteworthy, entitled Final Exit, climbed to the top of the New York in September of 1991.  Derek Humphry’s bestseller was unique in that it was a practical guide on “self-deliverance and assisted suicide for the dying.”  Given the book’s popularity, it is not surprising that the demand for assisted suicide has been on the rise in our country.  Physician Assisted Suicide is considered one of the most effective remedies for restraining death.  There are a number of arguments that have been brought forth to defend this practice.  The reasoning ranges over a number of fields including: legal, philosophical, medical, practical, and economic arguments.  With the possibility of the State of California joining Oregon and Washington as states where assisted suicide is legal, it is important that the Church come to the defense of truth.

To begin it is necessary to define what one means when they speak of assisted suicide.  Dr. Timothy Quill, one of the champions of the cause of assisted suicide defines it as “the act of making a means of suicide available to a patient who is otherwise physically incapable of suicide, and who subsequently acts on his or her own.”  Although Dr. Quill and many proponents of assisted suicide differentiate it from euthanasia, the Church for her part views both though the same lens.  Each is an act of the intentional killing of an innocent human person for reasons of mercy.

At the heart of each of the arguments is the notion of the principle of autonomy.  Simply put this principle says that if a person gives free and informed consent then they ought to be in control of their own life and manner of death.

The legal arguments are founded upon this principle of autonomy.  Current American jurisprudence seems to recognize assisted suicide as a liberty interest.  To date, the Supreme Court refused to recognize assisted suicide as a fundamental right.  However in Vacco v. Quill (1997) and Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), the Court ruled that because it was a liberty interest it ought to be left it up to the states to decide.  Currently there are three US states (Oregon, Washington and Montana) in which assisted suicide is legal.

These arguments clearly confuse freedom with license.  In man, his freedom is the most “exceptional sign of his being made in the image of God” (Gaudium et Spes, 17).  However, this freedom does not extend to control over life and death.  That is not freedom but license.  “We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of” (CCC2280).

Assisted-Suicide sign

Although the legal argument sits upon the philosophical principle of personal autonomy, there is another philosophical reason that is often put forth.  This viewpoint involves a functional definition of personhood in which a person has value only insofar as they can be useful to society.  This represents a reduced view of human dignity that is finds its basis in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, who defined dignity as “the public worth of a man, which is a value set on him by the commonwealth.”

The Church for her part places human dignity upon a threefold foundation with a permanent character that cannot be taken away.  Regardless of the extent to which a person suffers diminished spiritual and physical capacities, or even if he commits the most heinous sin, he still retains his human dignity.  This dignity is “manifested in all its radiance when the person’s origin and destiny are considered: created by God in his image and likeness as well as redeemed by the most precious blood of Christ, the person is called to be a ‘child in the Son’ and a living temple of the Spirit, destined for the eternal life of blessed communion with God” (Christifidelis Laici, 37).

In reflecting upon this threefold foundation we find an additional characteristic other than its permanence.  Human dignity is also something which is to be achieved and realized in “communion with God.”  This notion of dignity shows that even when ‘quality of life’ diminishes or perhaps hasn’t been ‘achieved,’ ­dignity can actually increase because of the response of the sick to their suffering.

The economic arguments are perhaps the most straightforward.  Supporters of assisted suicide argue that the economic resources that are spent treating a seriously ill person could be put to better use by the family or society as a whole.  This viewpoint is flawed in that it puts economic resources ahead of the life of a person.  We ought to recognize this and be willing to accept any economic burden that would accompany allowing a person to die in a manner that is commensurate with their inherent dignity.  Mercy consists not in aiding to kill a person, but in shouldering the burden of journeying to death with them.  This often includes not only an emotional burden, but an economic one as well.

The medical arguments usually involve an argument that appeals to the just principle of “treating like patients alike.”  If terminally ill patients with free and informed consent are able to refuse medical treatment that will prolong their deaths, then those who are suffering but are not dependent upon medical treatment to live, ought to be able to hasten death through assisted suicide.

This argument fails to distinguish between refusing an extraordinary measure and being allowed to die and acting with the direct intent of causing death in the patient.  The decision to refuse treatment may be based upon the excessive burden that the treatment places upon the person and not represent a direct choice to die.

From 1990 through 1998, Dr. Jack Kevorkian assisted in the deaths of over 130 people.  While he had in mind the goal of reliving the suffering of the afflicted, his motivation was of a more practical nature.  He argued that “if the patient opts for euthanasia…he or she can save anywhere from five to ten lives.  Now the death becomes definitely positive.”  His argument was that by donating their bodily organs, their death contributed to the good of society as a whole.  He is not alone in arguing for assisted suicide for “practical” reasons.

This is a misapplication of the principle of totality.  In its simplest form, the principle of totality holds that that under certain circumstances it is morally permissible to sacrifice the good of a part for the sake of the whole.  However there is an “essential difference between a physical organism and a moral organism.”  The organs of the body exist solely for the sake of the body while each human person does not exist for the sake of the whole of humanity.  Instead each human person has intrinsic worth and thus cannot be coercively sacrificed for the sake of the whole (Pope Pius XII, “Speech to Leaders and Members of the Italian Association of Cornea Donors and Italian Association for the Blind”).

We see then just how important the distinction between a physical organism and a moral organism is in determining the application of this principle.  A physical organism is one in which there is a unity on the level of essence.  Thus the relationship of part to whole exists if the part by its very nature has no finality outside the whole.  A moral organism however is a group of individuals that are bound together in some unity of action.  Each member of the group has a value that is intrinsically bound up with what (or more accurately who) they are rather than what they contribute to the community.  To kill another person for the sake of harvesting their organs is always morally wrong, regardless of the good that may come from it.

In conclusion, although many argue in favor of assisted suicide using legal, philosophical, medical, practical and economic reasoning, these arguments ultimately are flawed.  It is always contrary to the dignity of the person to directly intend their death by either an act of commission or omission.  Furthermore, we find that in allowing this to occur it only further promotes a culture of death, not just in the killing of the person, but in what it does to those who willingly participate.  As Archbishop Charles Chaput said, “in helping the terminally ill kill themselves we’re colluding not only in their dehumanization but our own.”