A recent campaign ad that Democrats have been running shows a Republican congressman interrupting a man in his bedroom watching porn threatening to make it illegal. I would not suggest that you subject yourself to the ad because it is disgusting, but it is at least worth mentioning it because it is a sign of just how decadent our culture has become. The problem isn’t just that the Democrats are unfaltering promoters of perversion, but also the fact that Republicans’ response was a denial that they wanted to restrict access to pornography to adults.
If there is one thing that both sides agree on, it is the fact that tolerance is a positive good rather than a necessary evil. In order to live in society and get along with everyone, we need to tolerate certain things. True enough, provided that it doesn’t become a masquerade for neutrality. And in truth, it has become just that. Some of the more Scholastically minded among us will even say that St Thomas supports this position. It is useful to go directly to the Angelic Doctor to shine some light on the issue of tolerance especially because it touches close to the issue at hand.
St. Thomas on Tolerance
In ST II-II q. 10, a. 11, St Thomas says “…those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii.4): ‘If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.’” His point is that the governing authority will tolerate certain things because outlawing them will create more disorder than the order that will come about by leaving them in place. Citing Augustine’s tract on order, he says that some societies will tolerate prostitutes because it will lead to greater evils than outlawing it altogether.
In his Treatise on Law, Aquinas explains further that “The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue, not suddenly, but gradually. Wherefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils…” Laws in a certain sense then ought to be catered to the character of the populace and bear a certain proportionality. To demand too high a level of virtue creates a certain impossibility of living up to it and increases criminality.
It would seem then that St. Thomas would look at our sexual libertine culture and advocate for tolerating pornography because outlawing it would go far beyond our collective virtue. The problem with this is that it is only reading half of what he said. You don’t just look at the level of virtue, but also “the greater evils” that will come about when you make demands beyond the average virtue level. It wasn’t too long ago in the “Wild West” that greed, rage and a lust for revenge led to murder rates that were more than twice the most violent cities of today. Does that mean they should not have had laws against murder because it was beyond the virtue of the average person? Because law is an ordinance of reason for the common good of the society, tolerance must always refer back to the common good.
The Primary Question for Tolerance
The question of virtue of the citizenry is secondary. What is primary is enumerating the “greater evils” that are to be brought about by choosing to outlaw a given evil. There are a plethora of evils attached to it: related to the common good there is the harm done to marriage and the family, and the fact that it is linked to sexual aggression . It also constitutes a growing public health crisis because of its addictive nature and its neuroplastic effects on the brain. There is a great paper summarizing all the scientific findings of the damage porn does to society and individuals here. What exactly are the evils that we are avoiding in tolerating it and how do they pass the proportionality test?
Tolerating evil never works for very long. Social evils always move from tolerance to acceptance to promotion. It is far easier to head it off while it is in the tolerance stage than to wait until it gets to the later stages. God has baked this principle into our social reality so that we must make a stand on our convictions. That is why tolerance, according to Chesteron, “ is the virtue of the man without convictions.” If we are convicted that pornography is wrong, then we cannot merely tolerate it but must take a stand both personally and politically. Abusing the principles of St Thomas will only lead to more self-abuse. We must lobby to outlaw it.
It was, St. Paul said, through one man’s sin of pride that death entered the world (c.f. Romans 5:12). It was through another man’s envy that death was realized. Cain killed Abel out of envy. This pattern, pride followed by envy, is the same path followed by Lucifer. First pride in defining how he would be like God, then through envy he attacks mankind (c.f. Wisdom 2:23-24). It is one of the Seven Deadly Sins and is perhaps the deadliest of these vices because of the way in which it addicts us to misery.
Envy is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas (who cites St. John Chrysostom), is “sadness at another’s good” (De Malo, q.10 art.1). And herein lies the reason for its deadliness. Properly speaking, sadness is oriented towards evil and should only be experienced in its presence. For the envious, it is good that causes it. This is because the man with the vice of envy experiences someone else’s good as a threat to himself. More specifically the good of the other person is thought to detract from his own excellence. And since he experiences sorrow, sorrow that can only be mitigated by removing the evil cause, they will for the person’s excellence to no longer below to him. They don’t really care if they receive the excellence, they only want the other person not to have it. Victor Hugo, in his poem, Envy and Avarice, captures the envious heart. When God offers envy anything he wants with the only condition that his neighbor will get double, he says “I would be blinded of one eye!”.
The Evil Eye
What Hugo is subtly pointing out is how envy has its punishment built in. The misery the envious experience never really lets up as long as envy lives in their heart. Their sadness never subsides while the vice is still present. In this way some have called it the “just vice.”
The blindness that comes from only one eye is also particularly descriptive because, although envy is in the will, it stems from the inability to see correctly. The envious see everything in terms of competition. Their self-worth is predicated upon being better than someone else. Their self-love is only possible when they hate their neighbor since envy renders them unable to “will the good of the other.”
As a culture addicted to self-esteem, we are particularly vulnerable to envy. This is why when someone does or achieves something good, there are always people who go searching out, usually through old social media posts, evidence that the person is deeply flawed. Apologizing to the envy mob only has the effect of inflaming them further. There can be no forgiveness for wrongs, real or perceived, when it is the good that the person has done that is experienced as the evil. Cancel culture is not just about controlling thoughts, but also, and maybe primarily, about indulging envy.
The Second Greatest Commandment, according to Our Lord, is to “love your neighbor, as yourself” (Mark 12:31), but the envious find this command impossible because they do not grasp what the love of self means. This connection between love and self and love of neighbor often causes us to confuse envy with jealousy. Although they are often used synonymously, jealousy means that you love something that you possess, but fear that that it might be taken away. Envy has no such desire to possess, only to see the other not have it. Jealousy regards sadness at the prospect of losing something good that you already have while envy is sadness in reaction to someone else’s good.
The envious also are rendered incapable of fulfilling the First Commandment as well. The hatred of neighbor necessarily spills over to God who is “the Giver of all good gifts” (James 1:23-24). He ultimately bears the blame for unequally distributed His gifts and excellencies among His creatures. Envy makes us like the younger brother in the story of the Prodigal Son.
Like all vices, envy is baked into our fallen nature and can only be removed by intentionally acting against it. This, of course requires that we are able to identify it in our pattern of thoughts. Envy is tricky because it hides in the dark. Unlike the other vices, no one wants to admit to being so petty. As Rebecca Konyndyk puts it in her book Glittering Vices, envy shuns open warfare mostly because of the feeling of inferiority—to declare one’s envy is to admit one’s inferiority. And so, it normally is exercised through sins of the tongue such as detraction, slander and calumny. We use all of these to keep others from holding the person in such high esteem. It also manifests itself through belittling and “roasting” the other person.
De-programming Envy
Just as Sloth is the vice by which we fail to love God, envy is the vice though which we fail to love our neighbor. So, one of the opposing virtues is charity. Properly understood, charity is loving another person for God’s sake. By loving the excellence of the other because it ultimately comes from God, we develop the habit of rejoicing in the good of others.
In practice it consists in the virtue of kindness which is a fruit of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Gal 5:22). Kindness flows from a burning desire to do good for one’s neighbor in a specific and concrete way. As an example, St. Martin de Porres who often was the subject of severe ridicule because of his mixed-race complexion, would run after someone when they made fun of him in order to do some kindness for them.
St. Thomas also mentions that because envy regards two objects—namely the sadness and the prosperity of a good person, it has two contrary virtues. First there is pity by which one grieves, both affectively and effectively, the misfortune of a good person. Likewise, zealous anger is the opposing virtue by which one is saddened at the prosperity of the wicked.
In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, St. Thomas makes the observation that when Aristotle reckons that “art imitates nature,” he means that man, because he is an intellectual creature, can make things that help him fulfill his nature. For example, a beaver builds a dam by instinct, while man uses his reason to fashion a house. But it doesn’t just pertain to servile arts like building a house, but fine arts like making a movie or writing a book. But because man is also fallen, he can also use those same arts to distort and do harm to his nature. In this way we might say that, in addition to imitating nature, “art forms nature.”
Examples abound on how this uniquely human capacity is abused, but there is one way that has a profound effect in our age. The aforementioned storytelling arts use the inherent power of storytelling to activate wonder and convey important truths about what it means to be human. One way in which this art abuses our nature has been covered previously regarding “Drag Queen Story Hour.” While this is still somewhat rare, thee is a more common abuse of story that may not even be on our radar at first—it wasn’t on mine until a friend of mine pointed it out.
Tolerating Plot Holes
We have all seen movies in which there are both subtle and gigantic plot holes. Sometimes they are too much and we turn off the movie, but most of the time we simply tolerate them for the sake of moving the plot along. We might think that the producers of the movies are simply lazy in not tying up loose ends, but in truth we should expect them when the story presents a falsehood about human life. The problem is that if we watch enough movies, then we eventually learn to overlook them. We become, in a very real sense, conditioned to overlook them—not just in the movies but in the rest of life as well. Point of evidence is the current Covid crisis which is riddled with plot holes that the majority of people of good will simply accept.
More on this particular example in a moment, but there is something further here that needs to be pointed out. We accept the plot holes for the sake of the plot and to move the story along. But if we look at it from the perspective of the producer, he has a plot in mind and includes the plot holes in order to make his story fit together. In a certain sense then we can say that the plot holes actually reveal the plot and the intention of the producer.
This principle is important because it is applies to the incongruous in real life as well. We will usually have one of two tendencies; to overlook the plot hole completely or to point out that it makes no sense and then, like the fist tendency, simply move on. The point though is that it makes perfect sense because it moves the story along. In other words, if we pay close attention to the incongruities rather than dismissing or mocking them, the plot that the artist is advancing will come into relief.
Focusing on the plot holes themselves then will enable us to see through the agenda of those who insert them into reality. These holes may look different in the various arenas of public life, but the principle is always the same. If we consider three examples from the fields of morality, science and politics then we can learn how to see the plot holes for what they really are.
Plot Holes in the Moral Realm
Any number of examples could have been chosen to demonstrate moral plot holes, but a recent one from Pope Francis is particularly helpful here. In a documentary that aired in October, the Holy Father was quoted as saying that “we have to create a civil union law.” While not a tacit acceptance of gay marriage (few things, unfortunately, are tacit with Pope Francis), the comment caused an uproar because he was suggesting that the civil realm should create space for gay couples.
Let us assume that the Holy Father’s “plot” is promotion of the Gospel and true human thriving in this world so as to be residents of the next. From within that context we would say marriage is a fundamental human good that helps to fulfill human nature. But not any “union” between two people will do, but only one that is in accord with nature. In short, as Catholics, we know that only monogamous marriage between a man and a woman leads to authentic happiness. Any other domestic arrangement leads away from this. The laws and the practices of the Church herself are reflective of this awareness. The Church teaches what she does about marriage because she knows that it is a good thing for those involved to act according to nature.
To suggest that this is just a “Church law” or only binding on Catholics with no effect in the civil realm creates a giant plot hole. No law should be made to protect or promote something that we know will ultimately lead to unhappiness. By suggesting that there should be some civil law, the Holy Father is really expressing that he doesn’t believe that marriage is a true human good.
Pope Francis in choosing the name Francis has seen his role as one who would reform the Church. He has been open about this from the beginning of his pontificate. Applying our principle of looking along the plot hole (at this and many of his other ones), we can discern what that reform consists in. The Holy Father is attempting to reform the Church, not according the Holy Spirit, but the spirit of the age. The plot holes reveal the plot.
Plot Holes in the Scientific Realm
Plot holes in the scientific realm are usually more difficult to discern for the layman, but usually become apparent once you check assumptions. When a scientific theory is full of unsubstantiated claims that are labeled as “assumptions” the plot of the Scientists are unmistakable.
A good example of this is what we is commonly referred to as the Big Bang Theory. This theory claims that the universe began as a dense ball of primordial matter that exploded and over billions of years organized into the universe that we observe today. This cosmology is accepted as scientific fact, but once we pull back the curtain we find that it rests on many untested and untestable assumptions. There is a growing gap between observation and theory and in order to advance the plot, several plot holes needed to be introduced. According to Big Bang Cosmologists, ~95% of the universe is composed of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. The problem is that these hypothetical entities have never been observed and they can’t be measured. Instead they are theoretical constructs that hold the Big Bang Universe and its accompanying theory together. You can read more about these two things elsewhere, but the point is that in order to use the theory to explain what we observe in the universe, physicists had to make up an unobservable “force”. As one physicist observed,
Big bang theory relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities – things that we have never observed. Inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent. Without them, there would be fatal contradictions between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory…the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors.
Eric Lerner, “Bucking the Big Bang”, New Scientist
The point is that we hold as scientific fact a theory that only explains 5% of what we observe in the universe.
Viewed as plot holes, these assumptions reveal that Big Bang Cosmology is not about the science but about scientism and the ability to explain natural phenomena using only natural causes. It is an attempt to discredit the Genesis account of creation and theology and create an atheology that is completely devoid of God. It is essentially the theory of Evolution on a cosmic scale. The plot holes reveal the plot.
Plot Holes in the Political Realm
As is becoming increasingly obvious, the political realm is not devoid of plot holes either. In fact one could say that the plot holes in this arena of life will be the way in which 2020 is best remembered. Covid-19 itself is not a plot hole, but the way in which it has been managed has revealed the plot holes in reality. If we examine them carefully then we can come to see the plot more clearly.
We will discuss the vaccine some time in the near future, but the manner in which masks, social distancing and closures have been implemented have represented serious plot holes because of their lack of consistency and scientific justification. I already discussed this with relation to masks, but it also applies to social distancing. This has never been tried before and it is based on a simulation. Yes, you read that right, not an experiment, but a simulation. Drs. Jay Richards and William Briggs cover this in their book Price of Panicin detail, but in short the CDC went with recommendations from this paper in which found that social distancing would “yield local defenses against a highly virulent strain” in the absence of effective treatment. The “science” behind it was simple; you create a model to simulate an environment in which closing schools and implementing social distance measures lower the rate of infection and then you test to see if the rate is in fact lower. Besides proving that you are a good programmer, this also, surprisingly proved that social distancing worked. The fact that it is a simulated environment and not a real one should have no bearing on our decisions, right? This is, after all, Science. No matter anyway because we now have effective treatment and thus no more need for social distancing, right?
Once we view these inconsistencies as plot holes related to the plot, we can see that there are powers that be that have chosen not to waste a good crisis and to implement their grand plot—The Great Reset—which we will discuss in the coming weeks. The plot holes reveal the plot.
In conclusion, we might be willing to tolerate plot holes in our movies, but we should never overlook them in real life. If we do, we may find that we are caught up in someone else’s story for how the world should be. The plot holes reveal the plot.
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.
The Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen thought that the demise of Western Culture, specifically American culture, began on the morning of August 6,,1945. That was when the United States dropped the first of two nuclear bombs on Japan at Hiroshima. It was the moment that “blotted out boundaries. There was no longer a boundary between the military and the civilian, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, and the living and the dead. For even the living who escaped the bomb were already half dead. So, we broke down boundaries and limits and from that time on the world has said we want no one limiting me! We want no limits, no boundaries.” As usual, the first televangelist was also a prophet. Since that fateful day, the boundaries between right and wrong, natural and unnatural, good and evil have all broken down. This is because, lost amidst the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was traditional morality and a firm belief in God’s Providence.
By all accounts even down to our own day, dropping the atomic bomb was the only viable option. Continuing to fire-bomb cities like Tokyo was going to kill far more Japanese citizens than the Bomb would ever do and, even more likely, would harden Japanese resolve, leading to a long drawn out war. A full ground assault would lead to thousands, if not millions, of deaths on both sides. In order to save American lives then it was necessary to drop the Bomb as both a show of force and a deterrence to any further Japanese aggression. Many Americans, including the one writing this article would likely never have been born had the Bomb not been dropped. Thousands of men were headed to Japan with the sure knowledge that they would not return. To most of them, Harry Truman is a hero who made the best possible decision.
Another man whose existence is linked to “Truman’s Terrible Choice” is George Weigel. In a web article for First Things last week, he defended Truman saying that he “it was the correct choice” given the options. Weigel’s logic is paradigmatic for many Catholics and follows from the loss of a traditional morality in favor of, what St. John Paul II condemned in Veritas Splendor –Consequentialism. In Weigel’s defense, he mentions that consequentialism is wrong in the article, but he still goes on to employ its logic. Nevertheless, he is defending the indefensible.
The Two Moral Camps
The tradition understanding of morality has always included the notion that there are intrinsically evil acts. These acts, no matter the circumstances or the intention of the person, can never be ordered towards the good. Some examples would be the deliberate killing of an innocent person, lying, and adultery. Among these acts would be the direct targeting and indiscriminate bombing of civilians during a war. This would include the aforementioned “fire-bombing” of German and Japanese cities as well as the dropping of the Bomb on the two Japanese cities. When no distinction is made between military and civilian targets then the dropping of any powerful bomb, atomic or otherwise, is always an intrinsically evil act and is akin to mass murder or terrorism. One can clearly see under this moral paradigm that there could never be any justification for dropping the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Consequentialism, on the other hand, evaluates all moral actions based upon the consequences. It requires a form a moral calculus in which you decide that if there is more good than evil in the consequences of an act then the act is morally permissible. Consequentialism, as St. John Paul II puts it, “draw[s] the criteria of the rightness of a given way of acting solely from a calculation of foreseeable consequences deriving from a given choice…[and] maintain[s] that it is never possible to formulate an absolute prohibition of particular kinds of behavior” (Veritatis Splendor, 75). It is, in essence a form of moral relativism, in that leaves all our actions relative to circumstances and the moral calculations of the individual. With Consequentialism as the guide, the decision to drop the Bomb would depend upon a moral calculation in which the good of American and Japanese lives are weighed against the loss of innocent Japanese lives.
Consequentialism and Providence
Embedded within Consequentialism is a rejection of Providence. Not only does the person assume divine status in thinking they can foresee the actual consequences of their actions, but it also assumes that God could ever leave us in a situation when the Good could not be done. This is the flaw in Weigel’s logic when he says that Truman chose the best option. No situation falls outside of God’s Providence and therefore no situation leaves us without an option to choose good. Truman could have chosen otherwise, and his choice could have been in accord with the good. Perhaps the decision would have been to send the troops in on the ground and allow the men to courageously fight for goodness and truth even to the giving up of their lives. Giving your life in noble defense of other people is always a good. Or perhaps it was to accept the non-absolute terms for Japanese surrender. The point though is that God had allowed the circumstances to be as they were and, incapable of causing us to sin, would always include a way to choose the Good.
Bishop Sheen thought August 6,1945 was the turning point for America because it created a new moral environment. Large swaths of the population owe their existence to the consequentialist logic of Truman and others. America herself, in order to avoid facing the music for such a heinous action, adopted Consequentialism as the new moral order. Gone, thanks to the Freemasonic court-packing of Roosevelt and Truman, was legal reasoning based on natural law. Gone too is the idea of intrinsically evil acts. Try explaining to someone about abortion being intrinsically evil and they will get caught up in the consequences of brining an unwanted child into the world. Or, relevant to today’s political climate, tell them why they cannot support a candidate who promotes and defends intrinsically evil actions. You will instead get some moral ledger that pits immigration against abortion.
When Truman decided to drop the Bomb he opened a moral Pandora’s Box in which true moral reasoning was shed in favor of Consequentialism. Now people with no sense of morality are the ones performing the moral calculus leading to all kinds of evils that have put our society in jeopardy of collapse. The only way forward is to reconnect Americans to the moral tradition of the Founders.
There are certain oxymorons in life that are almost universally dismissed. One such example is “war is an instrument of peace.” Even Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.” He may have believed that until it came time to address the great evils being committed upon Americans by the Barbary Pirates when he declared war for the first time in United States history. It seems that when push comes to shove, even the most ardent Pacifist must lay down his intellectual arms and pick up his physical ones and admit that the oxymoron is perhaps true.
In order to see how the oxymoron that war can be an instrument of peace could be true, we must first ask exactly what we mean by peace. Peace, according to St. Augustine, is the “tranquility of order.” He goes further and says that “order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place” (City of God, Book XIX, Ch. 13). In short, peace is a side effect, or a consequence of the just ordering of relations between people and nations. It is not, as many pacifists would maintain, a lack of conflict but a byproduct of justice. War then can only be an instrument of peace when it is entered into for just reasons and fought in a just manner. The Church has always been so insistent upon maintaining its Just War Doctrine for this reason.
War as an Instrument of Justice
War, if it is to be an instrument of peace then, can only do so when it is an instrument of justice. Some would argue however that the use of violence is never a just response. But, to characterize war as violence stacks the deck against it and is a subtle form of question begging. In We Hold These Truths, Fr. John Courtney Murray makes a useful distinction between force and violence that enables us to avoid being trapped by a mere turn of phrase. “Force,” he says, “is the measure of power necessary and sufficient to uphold…law and politics…As an instrument force is morally neutral in itself.” Force can be applied in a violent manner that is intended to hurt, maim or kill. But force can also be justified (e.g. applied justly), mainly of four principal grounds: (1) to protect the innocent (2) to recover something unjustly taken (3) to defend against a wrongful attack and (4) to punish evil. A moral obligation exists then to use force only to the extent necessary to accomplish these four aims. Not to act against the will of an evildoer is to “nourish and strengthen them” according to Augustine. History bears out far too many examples of the traps of appeasement to ignore the fact that force is sometimes necessary to avoid the multiplication of evils and injustices.
All of what has been said seems to coincide with reality as we experience it. Doing the good for a person or persons means that you must stop those who intend harm to those persons, even to the point of using physical force against the aggressor. There can be no doubt that in a world of fallen men and women, force is necessary to redress wrongs. Pacifism then can only be based on some utopic vision of reality in which evils do not really happen. This utopia usually finds it supposed justification in the teachings of Jesus so that no discussion of pacifism would be complete without examining the teachings of Our Lord.
Christian Pacifism
The Christian Pacifist usually turns to the Sermon on the Mount to justify their position. Our Lord famously told His disciples, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on [your] right cheek, turn the other one to him as well” (Mt 5:38-39). The pacifist would have us believe that this call to non-violence is absolute and applies to all men in all circumstances. The problem with this stance however is that when Our Lord Himself was struck on the cheek, rather than turning the other cheek, questioned why He was struck (c.f. John 18:22).
Our Lord’s response does not include physical force and so we must also examine His insistence that “All that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (Matthew 26:52). To “take the sword,” according to the Angelic Doctor is “to arm oneself in order to take the life of anyone, without the command or permission of superior or lawful authority.’ On the other hand, to have recourse to the sword (as a private person) by the authority of the sovereign or judge, or (as a public person) through zeal for justice, and by the authority, so to speak, of God, is not to ‘take the sword,’ but to use it as commissioned by another, wherefore it does not deserve punishment” (ST II-II, q.40 a.1 ad.1).
To grasp the full meaning of Our Lord’s words we can turn to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans where he says:
“Beloved, do not look for revenge but leave room for the wrath; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ Rather, ‘if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.’ Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good. Let every person be subordinate to the higher authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been established by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority opposes what God has appointed, and those who oppose it will bring judgment upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear to good conduct, but to evil.Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Then do what is good and you will receive approval from it, for it is a servant of God for your good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for it does not bear the sword without purpose; it is the servant of God to inflict wrath on the evildoer.”
Romans 12:19-13:3
The Apostle to the Gentiles is showing exactly how Our Lord’s words are to be applied. Individuals have no authority to use the sword as an instrument of justice (except in self-defense). The Civil Authority, as God’s instrument (c.f. John 19:11), however, is tasked with maintaining justice, even by the sword “for it does not bear the sword without purpose.” The Lord then counsels us not to respond with force when the injustice is committed against ourselves (and only ourselves), but by no means lifts the obligation to forcefully oppose aggressors when the injustice involves others.
Pacifism then finds no justification either in the moral sense or the evangelical counsels. Civil authority must act against aggressors and evildoers both at home and abroad even to the point of using force. Pacifists rarely, if ever, oppose the application of police force. Because of this contradiction, CS Lewis in his essay Why I am Not a Pacifist called into question whether the motivations of the Pacifist might be due “to the secret influence of any passion.” Not that he thinks Pacifists cowards but that he thinks they are blinded by fear.
For let us make no mistake. All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love. Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. It threatens every temporal evil—every evil except dishonor and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it. On the other side, though it may not be your fault, it is certainly a fact that Pacifism threatens you with almost nothing.
What parent hasn’t told their child “don’t be a tattletale”? What child hasn’t gone to great lengths, including getting in trouble themselves, to avoid being a “snitch”? What adult has turned the other way to avoid becoming a narc or a whistleblower? Whether a child or an adult, a teen or a parent, it seems that we never quite know how to avoid pledging our allegiance to what might aptly be called the Canary Code of Honor. For Catholics, especially those committed to living a moral life, this represents a serious challenge that, unfortunately, we do not give enough thought to. How can we avoid being a “snitch” while still doing the right thing? Thankfully, St. Thomas Aquinas has already done much of the intellectual and moral legwork on this question and gives us a set of rules we can live by.
In one of his Quodlibetal questions, St. Thomas addresses the issue of correcting an erring brother. In his usual cogent manner, the Angelic Doctor takes two seemingly conflicting Scriptural commandments and helps to reconcile them. On the one hand, Our Lord says, “if thy brother shall offend against thee, go, and rebuke him between thee and him alone” (Mt 18:15). On the other hand, St. Paul tells Timothy that “them that sin reprove before all: that the rest also may have fear” (1 Tim 5:20). To reconcile them, St. Thomas begins by reminding us that the order of charity gives more weight to the common good than the good of individual reputation or conscience. Therefore, a public sin that is, one that is manifestly known and draws other people into it (through scandal and the like) takes a certain precedence over the private sin. In general then “if your brother sins against you”, that is, it is private (Mt 18:15) then it should be corrected privately. If it is public then you should rebuke publicly following 1Tim 5:20 “Rebuke the sinner before all.”
As a side note, someone might go to the individual in private to rebuke them for a public sin first. This is because it is always better for the person who committed the public sin to correct themselves in public rather than to be corrected. Nevertheless, if the person obstinately refuses to acknowledge their wrongdoing then it remains for another person to correct them.
When snitching pertains to a public sin, then it is manifestly appropriate that a man turn the offender over to some authority figure. In fact, St. Thomas says it is morally obligatory. But when it is a private sin then the snitching becomes problematic.
Snitches get…
Snitching is almost always done, not for the improvement of the offender, but in order to punish the person, get revenge upon them, belittle them or win the favor of someone in authority. When it is done for these reasons, St. Thomas says that snitching would constitute a grave sin. But he says it is also a grave sin not to follow Our Lord’s prescription for fraternal correction.
It is not that denunciation has no place within the realm of fraternal correction, but its place is not primary. It requires that there first be fraternal admonition. This admonition might come from another individual with whom the offender is more likely to receive the correction well. As St. Thomas says, “in all these cases charity should be preserved, and what seems best and most expedient should be done.” It is only when the person does not receive the correction, according to Our Lord, that denunciation to an authority figure may occur.
Forming the Potential Snitch
A young person’s abhorrence to snitching is well founded then, even if for the wrong reason. Understanding how fraternal correction works then is vitally important, especially because Aquinas thinks that a failure to properly observe the manner in which fraternal correction occurs is a grave sin. There is an art to fraternal correction and it is something that we rarely teach young people how to do. They think that the only choice is between minding their own business or becoming a snitch. Fraternal correction is an act of charity and thus it binds the corrector and the correctee more closely together.
Rather than correcting the potential corrector as a tattletale, it is a formative moment to teach them how to properly correct another person whenever they come to tell on one of their peers. In larger families and Catholic schools children often seek acceptance from the adults by snitching on their siblings and peers. It is then an obligation of parents and formators to teach the children how fraternal correction works. Any adults who encourage, or at least do not correct snitching without fraternal correction are likely to earn a giant millstone for themselves.
If we are to finally undo the Canary Code of Honor then we need to learn the art of fraternal correction.
Albert Einstein once quipped that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. While Einstein may not have been considering the political realm when he said this, modern day Socialists would be wise to heed his proverb. Despite destroying millions of lives, Marx’s disciples single-mindedly insist that the problem is not in the principle, but in the application. The latest attempt is through a more moderate version that is commonly referred to as Democratic Socialism. By wedding it to the widely accepted principle of democracy, the Socialists hope to soften the blow. To this point, even in highly capitalistic countries they have been very successful hiding it in plain sight. It is therefore imperative that we recognize it and work to combat its harmful effects.
In its first go-round, Socialism was wedded to totalitarianism. Whether it be Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, or Kim’s North Korea, Socialists dictators made an offer that their people could not refuse. Millions of deaths later, Socialists knew that they must adopt a gentler and more gradual approach. This approach, still motivated by an exaggerated egalitarianism, would only slowly abolish private property and create economic parody and solidarity among citizens.
A Softer Approach?
Rather than controlling the
means of production directly, the new socialists instead control the income from
these private means of production, gathering it together through taxes. Men no longer get to keep the fruit of their
labor, but instead are allowed to only keep some percentage of it. That percentage is completely at the
discretion of the State. In a very real
sense, it is the State that owns 100% of the man’s labor but gives him only a
certain amount. Skipping the step of
controlling the means of production this form of “Democratic Socialism” takes
advantage of capitalism as a means of maximizing State income.
Once the taxes are collected, the money is then transferred from the haves to the have-nots, usually filtered through the pockets of some of the have-mores, in the form of various state sponsored welfare programs. So accustomed to this form of wealth redistribution, we do not even recognize it for what it is. The State has a right to collect taxes to cover the costs of operations like military defense, police powers and certain public utilities. What the State does not have a right to do is a form of “legalized” stealing in which it takes from the rich and gives to the poor. Stealing is still stealing whether a plumber or a governor does it. It is this type of regime that Augustine had in mind in City of God when he said:
“Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.”
Socialism and Well-Meaning Christians
The Church has long opposed Socialism in any form precisely because it is state-sanctioned thievery. In his Encyclical on Socialism, Quod Apostolici Muneris, Pope Pius XI condemned it in these terms. “The Church, with much greater wisdom and good sense, recognizes the inequality among men, who are born with different powers of body and mind, inequality in actual possession, also, and holds that the right of property and of ownership, which springs from nature itself, must not be touched and stands inviolate. For she knows that stealing and robbery were forbidden in so special a manner by God…that He would not allow man even to desire what belonged to another” (QAM, 9). Later in his pontificate he spoke more directly about the evil of Socialism when he condemned it using no uncertain terms:
“We make this pronouncement: Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, Socialism, if it remains truly Socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth…no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true Socialist.”
Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 117, 120
Despite the repeated condemnations of Pius XI’s successors, many Catholics still support Socialism. Such support usually stems from a soft heart, but it also tends to reveal a soft head. Lifting up the poor while simultaneously keeping them, or even making them less self-reliant is not good for them. A handout should always be a last resort and even then only in a case of emergency. “Man does not live on bread alone” but he will tend to choke on bread, at least spiritually, that is merely given to him. Instead it is good for him to work for the bread he earns because it increases his virtue and thus makes him more free. All things being equal, a man is always better off for having worked for his bread than for having received it for nothing.
This is the why the Church
also rejects Socialism as contrary to the dignity of man. Socialism in all its forms always labors
under an incentive problem. By forcing
income equality the productive men lose their incentive to work which causes
shortages and great harm to the common good.
Men become equal in misery, rather than moving towards equality in
character, one of the only ways in which men can actually be equal.
What the well-meaning Catholic
socialist is actually looking for is solidarity with the poor. This cannot be done on a political level but
must be implemented on a personal level.
The person in material need also is in need, perhaps even more so, of
receiving personal love. By removing
that personal element and putting everyone under the care (and control) of Big
Daddy solidarity can never be achieved.
Often this is what calls them to fall in love with the idea of socialism
and neglecting to see how it fails in practice.
Pope Paul VI cautioned Catholics against being enraptured by the
ideological lure of Socialism when he remarked that “[T]oo often Christians
attracted by Socialism tend to idealize it in terms which, apart from anything
else, are very general: a will for justice, solidarity and equality. They
refuse to recognize the limitations of the historical socialist movements,
which remain conditioned by the ideologies from which they originated” (Octogesima
Adveniens, 31).
If they are truly wanting to
help the poor, then as Catholics they already have the Church, the same Church
that does “not neglect the care of the poor or omit to provide for their
necessities; but, rather, drawing them to her with a mother’s embrace, and
knowing that they bear the person of Christ Himself, who regards the smallest
gift to the poor as a benefit conferred on Himself, holds them in great honor.
She does all she can to help them; she provides homes and hospitals where they
may be received, nourished, and cared for all the world over and watches over
these. She is constantly pressing on the rich that most grave precept to give
what remains to the poor; and she holds over their heads the divine sentence
that unless they succor the needy they will be repaid by eternal torments” (Pope
Pius XI, Quod Apostolici Muneris, 9).
All that is good in Socialism is already in the Church without all the
evil side-effects. “Those who work
solely toward such ends have, therefore, no reason to become socialists” (Pope
Pius XII, Quadragesimo Anno, 115).
A study recently released by the US Census Bureau found that in the past two decades, the number of couples that cohabitate had nearly tripled from 6 million to 17 million. The study found that the increase was due to the fact that “cohabitation has become increasingly accepted by a broad swath of social and demographic groups.” Most people view this as a sign of “progress”, no longer bound to the Victorian restraints imposed by marriage. It is most certainly progress, but it is likely not progress in the direction of anything other than cultural decay and collapse. The institution of marriage is vital to the life of every society such that without it, the society is sure to crumble.
All of us sort of intuit why this might be the case but having plummeted into the morass created by the Sexual Revolution, we may not be able to articulate why this is the case. Nevertheless, if we are to turn back to a society built upon marriage, then we ought to grasp the logic as to why this is so. Thankfully, the great Counter-revolutionary to the Sexual Revolution, Pope St. John Paul II, has already done the intellectual heavy lifting for us in his book Love and Responsibility. Written just prior to the “Salacious Sixties”, the then Fr. Wojtyla provided an intellectual basis for why the institution of marriage matters. We would do well to examine his argument in order to apply the tonic to our decadent culture.
The future Pope set out to examine how erotic love develops and matures between members of the opposite sex. In order to mature, the strong feelings that govern the relationships must always be subordinate to the true value of the person as a person. When we fall in love with the feelings that the other person stimulates in us, rather than the person who stimulates those feelings, then love can never mature. In fact, rather than being the basis for love, it becomes its exact opposite—use. Once this foundation is laid, Fr. Wojtyla then seeks to set up the conditions by which love can truly mature, and one of which is the Institution of Marriage.
Marriage as an Institution
As the word institution suggests, Marriage is something that is established or instituted in accord with the concept of justice. Marriage justifies, that is makes just, sexual relations between two people. It does this by ordering them to their proper ends. In other words, Marriage ensures that sexual relations between a man and a woman are governed both by commutative justice and social justice.
With respect to commutative justice, that is, the justice that governs the relationship between two people as equals, Marriage protects conjugal love from the threat of use. There is a vast difference between a concubine or a mistress and a wife—the former implies a relationship of use while the latter one of love. Likewise, love is always attached to the value of the person as a whole and not just their sexual value. Therefore, because the value of the person never changes, love must last forever. This is why Marriage, as an expression of this love, is naturally indissoluble. By committing one’s life to loving the other person, Marriage justifies sexual relations between the spouses.
This is also why sexual relations between deeply committed people, even if they are engaged say, is always wrong. “Pre-ceremonial” sex ignores the fact that a Wedding is no mere convention or ceremony, but an entering into the institution of Marriage. A new reality comes into being when vows are exchanged and it is this new reality that justifies sexual intimacy between the spouses. Prior to the wedding there was no permanence, afterwards there is. The permanence of the relationship rests upon the free choice of the spouses. And because sexual relations always carry with them the possibility of becoming permanently parents, there must be a permanent commitment which justifies their sexual expression. It is just that a child be conceived from within a marriage because only the institution of marriage forms the proper foundation for the institution of the family.
There might be a tendency to think that love between two people is a completely private affair between “two consenting adults”, but, according to John Paul II, the couple soon “realize that without this [social] acceptance their love lacks something very important. They will begin to feel that it must ripen sufficiently to be revealed to society.” There is a need to both keep private the sexual relations deriving from love and on the other hand a need for there to be a social recognition of this love that comes only through marriage.
Why Marriage Matters for Society
This felt need directs them to fulfill the requirements of social justice. This may not be immediately obvious, especially when we live in such an individualistic society, but it becomes clearer when we recognize that society itself is built upon the foundation of the family. The institution of marriage is necessary to signal a mature union exists between two people, a mature union that is based upon a permanent love. Thus, society can be built upon that foundation.
One need not imagine too hard what a society would look like when its foundations were unstable or constantly being swapped out, especially given our current plight. It looks like a society in which cohabitation numbers are tripling and marriage rates are falling. It looks like a society that is committing cultural suicide. There cannot be a society without stable families and there cannot be stable families without permanent marriages. A sane society would enact legislation that protects families and legislates justly regarding the family by recognizing the rights and duties of marriage since the family is an institution based on marriage.
Instead, the inmates are running the asylum. We feed a “divorce industry” with lawyers, social workers, and judges to name a few whose economic sustenance comes from the breakdown of marriage. We make divorce “no-fault” and make single parenting “easy” with day-care, public schools, welfare and WIC (why isn’t there a FIC by the way?). The family is then replaced by an elaborate bureaucratic machine that seeks to control the formation of children so that they grow up to see this as “normal”. Meanwhile we all accept this as an accident rather than as a planned attack to seize the power of the family. The sexual revolution was never about liberation but about control and the totalitarians will win unless we begin to think and act like our saintly Counter-revolutionary is instructing us.
In an address given during his return to Germany in 2011, Pope Benedict XVI called upon the legislators who had gathered not to neglect what he called the “ecology of man.” The ecology of man, that is, the realization that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will” is at the heart of environmental ecology. Although this was a recurring theme of the Pope, but his repeated call fell mainly on deaf ears because the care of the environment, like nearly all social issues, has been politicized. There is little interest in solving the problem, only using it to exert political control over other people. But for those who are interested in solving the problem, the Church has offered a true path forward with her emphasis on human ecology.
Although this used to go without saying, any discussion of the environment must first point out that man is different from all of the other visible creatures in the environment. He is not just one creature among many, but he is nature’s steward. Both sides of the debate recognize this fact, even if they loathe to admit it. Any discussion of environmental policy is predicated on the fact that only man is responsible for the environment. It would be absurd to speak of curbing man’s actions if he did not have the freedom to do so. In laying the responsibility for the environment at the feet of men, you are, at least implicitly, saying that he is different than the other animals and that he alone can offer a solution. This admission matters because it implies that man, as governor of creation, also transcends it.
Avoiding the Extremes
As awesome as it is then, we cannot worship nature as something divine. We reverence creation because it reveals the Creator, but it is not divine. It is, like all material things, passing away. We, made of matter and spirit, are above it, pilgrims as it were, just passing through. But just because it isn’t divine doesn’t mean that we can use it as we see fit. Nature is made up of natures, all of which must be respected, if they are going to actually serve mankind.
Like all issues that become political footballs, the environment is prey to the either/or fallacy. Either it must be divinized or it must be raped. Politics has no room for qualifications and the blame must always rest squarely on the other side. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church summarizes what might be called a “Catholic Environmentalism” when it says:
“A correct understanding of the environment prevents the utilitarian reduction of nature to a mere object to be manipulated and exploited. At the same time, it must not absolutize nature and place it above the dignity of the human person himself. In this latter case, one can go so far as to divinize nature or the earth, as can readily be seen in certain ecological movements that seek to gain an internationally guaranteed institutional status for their beliefs.”
CSD, 463
Fixing the Problem
But even with a correct understanding of the environment, we cannot fix the environmental problems without first practicing the “human ecology” proposed by Pope Benedict. Until we acknowledge that certain types of activities fulfill our nature and others don’t, the problem of the ecology of the environment will never be solved. These activities are known as virtues and it begins with the virtue of prudence. Prudence is the habit of governing our actions such that we only use things in a manner in which we truly thrive. Justice is the habit of taking responsibility for the effects our actions have on other people and not just being motivated by self-interest. Temperance is the habit of living with sufficiency and not hoarding resources because we can. Fortitude is the habit of remaining committed to the right use of the environment in the face of wide scale abuse where each person is trying to hoard as much as possible.
The environmental movement lacks any real teeth because they systematically ignore, what Pope Benedict called, “the inner pollution” of which the environmental pollution is just a consequence. They speak of what we ought to do, but still exalt license as if it was true freedom. You cannot promote license, especially in the sexual realm, while simultaneously demanding that people act temperately in their use of the environment. If you will (ab)use other people then you will most certainly abuse the environment. It will never gain any moral authority until it acknowledges a moral law. Without a true respect for human freedom and the conditions in which it thrives, it will have to resort to the hammer of power to beat all non-compliants into submission.
It is the inner pollution of overconsumption that causes untold damage to the environment. But until this is framed as fundamentally a moral problem, it will never get better. As John Paul II put it in his Message for the World Day of Peace in 1990:
“Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its life style. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these cause. As I have already stated, the seriousness of the ecological issue lays bare the depth of man’s moral crisis. If an appreciation of the value of the human person and of human life is lacking, we will also lose interest in others and in the earth itself. Simplicity, moderation and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become a part of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a few.”
Environmental ecology then is a fruitless endeavor without first emphasizing a moral ecology. The crisis in the environment is first and foremost a catastrophic crisis in the moral environment of mankind. Until we solve that problem, we should only expect the environmental crisis to get worse. A Catholic Environmentalism then would be one that emphasizing the proper use of the environment by inculcating the necessary virtues.
In his book Love and Responsibility, the future Pope John Paul II lamented the demise of virtue, and in particular, the virtue of chastity. A spirit of resentment has emerged in the modern psyche towards high moral standards and anyone who practices them. What was once admirable, even if very few people could master it, is now met with scorn and rationalization. Chastity is viewed as repression and psychologically harmful, especially in young people. But in truth, without chastity there can never be any true love. That is why John Paul II thought modernity needed a “rehabilitation of chastity” and set out a program in Love and Responsibility for accomplishing it.
An Elusive Definition of Chastity?
Part of the reason that such a rehabilitation is necessary is because chastity is rarely defined in positive terms. St. Thomas Aquinas defined chastity as a sub-virtue of temperance, the virtue that controls the concupiscible appetite. He points out that chastity “takes its name from the fact that reason ‘chastises’ concupiscence, which, like a child, needs curbing” (ST II-II, q.151, a.1). Of course, modern sensibilities being what they are, any whiff of restraint, is seen as an assault against freedom. If chastity is to be revived then we must expand our view of it as “a purely negative virtue. Chastity, in this view, is one long ‘no’” (L&R, p.170). What Fr. Wojtyla hoped to accomplish then is to see chastity as “above all the ‘yes’ of which certain ‘no’s’ are the consequence” (ibid).
Chastity’s alleged violation of freedom really seems like an assault on love. But this is only because our view of love, especially between the sexes, is far too narrow. When the love between a man and a woman is viewed as primarily based on the subjective emotional and sexual experiences of the individuals then chastity will always be something negative. This is not love, but use. The two people use each other in order to “feel” like they are in love. They do not love the other person but they love the feeling of being in love. And they will be “in love” with the other person only so long as they are able to cause the emotional response.
As opposed to its counterfeit, love is something objective because it is based not upon on an emotional and sexual response that the other caused, but on the objective value of the other person. Love must always be directed towards the person and the value that they have as persons. As good and as powerful as the sexual value of a person is, it does not exhaust their value. Love between the sexes incorporates that sexual value into the total value of the person as a person.
When use is substituted for love, then chastity “feels” like it is holding love back and keeping it from blossoming. In truth, chastity is an indispensable ingredient for love because “its function is to free love from the utilitarian attitude” (p.169). Chastity is not a ‘No’ to sexual pleasure but a ‘No’ to treating the other person as an object of sexual gratification. It is a steady and habitual refusal to use the other person. It is a habitual readiness to affirm the full value of the other person. Returning to JPII’s words, “only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. For chastity frees their association, including their marital intercourse, from that tendency to use a person” (L&R, p. 171).
Pleasure Freed by Chastity
The traditional definition of chastity, true as it is, does not exhaust its full meaning. Chastity does not just moderate our sexual desire, but “liberates love from the attitude of use.” It is then both a ‘No’ and a ‘Yes’—no to use, yes to love. No longer under the sway of unbridled emotion, sexual desire is liberated to roam free and be directed towards the full value of the person. Only the chaste man and woman experience true pleasure of sexual desire because it is governed by reason and directed towards its natural end.
This is the great lie of those who would have us believe that chastity is mere repression. Sinners always love company and seek a way to rationalize their own vices. On the surface, and at least initially, it is easier to yield to sexual desire. But pleasure is always fleeting and when chosen as an end always operates under the law of diminishing returns. But John Paul II encourages his readers to persevere because virtue takes time and suffering because of our fallen nature. Once it matures pleasure is restored to its natural place and, surprising to our untrained minds, actually increases. The “in-between” time in which chastity feels like repression is certainly difficult, but once it grows, like a fully mature tree, it provides the sweet fruit of pleasure. This reality only comes about however when chastity is seen as worthwhile.
Fully rehabilitated chastity enables us to see that it is, like every decision that we make, both a no and a yes. It is a no to a utilitarian relationship and a yes to the full blossoming of both spousal love and friendship.
America,
GK Chesterton once said, is the only country that was founded upon a
creed. This founding creed, while
uniquely American in its articulation, was based, not on anything unique about
America, but on what was common to all mankind.
Jefferson captured this creed succinctly when he demanded of King George
III that he recognize certain self-evident truths, namely, “that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Ever since then liberty has become an
American buzzword, often cited but hardly ever defined and so making it prone
to abuse. Such a foundation must be firm
however or else the house that has been built upon it will collapse under its
own weight. The Church has long
recognized that a proper understanding of liberty was vital for the life of any
society. It was in this spirit that Pope
Leo XIII devoted an entire Encyclical, aptly entitled Libertas to explaining
it.
In
order to properly grasp the notion of liberty we must first discuss some related
terms, the first of which is freedom. The
modern idea of freedom is that it means a man can do what he wants. This makes freedom into an end rather than a
means since the emphasis is merely on willing and not on the thing that is
willed. So, while we may have the physical
power to choose what we want, freedom is only truly itself when it is treated as
the means of choosing what is good.
Freedom is therefore a moral power.
Liberty
and Ought
As
soon as we enter the moral realm, we enter the world of ought. Freedom is related then to responsibility. This is a second important factor, especially
in an age cluttered by rights language.
We only have rights because we have responsibilities. We only have responsibilities because we have
freedom that is oriented towards choosing those responsibilities. And we only have responsibilities because
there are objectively good things that we must choose. Freedom is necessarily wedded to law as well.
Leo
XIII summarizes the connection between freedom, responsibility and law in the already
mentioned encyclical, Libertas (7)
“In man’s free will, therefore, or in the moral necessity of our voluntary acts being in accordance with reason, lies the very root of the necessity of law. Nothing more foolish can be uttered or conceived than the notion that, because man is free by nature, he is therefore exempt from law. Were this the case, it would follow that to become free we must be deprived of reason; whereas the truth is that we are bound to submit to law precisely because we are free by our very nature. For, law is the guide of man’s actions; it turns him toward good by its rewards, and deters him from evil by its punishments.”
Summarizing we can say that although a man is master of his own actions because he has the power to choose between many alternatives, he is only free when he chooses what is good. If freedom has to do with our internal power, then liberty has to do with the external conditions related to the exercise of that internal power. Liberty clears the way for each man to fulfill his responsibility. Because liberty is connected to freedom which is connected to responsibility which is connected to what is truly good, “liberty is to be regarded as legitimate in so far only as it affords a greater facility for doing good, but no farther” (Leo XIII, Libertas 42).
Liberty
should be limited only to that which is necessary for one to fulfill his
responsibility. To go any further than
that cause liberty to evolve into license.
Those who go beyond responsibility “substitute for true liberty what is
sheer and most foolish license” and therefore “follow in the footsteps of
Lucifer, and adopt as their own his rebellious cry: ‘I will not serve’.” The devil is the author of license and he uses
it to drag people into hell.
A
Few Examples
A
couple of examples that Leo XIII uses will help illustrate the point. Liberty of conscience must always be
protected and promoted because each man has a responsibility to follow the will
of God. He must have every obstacle
removed from his path in fulfilling this duty.
A man can never be forced to do what is evil. Liberty of conscience then must always and
everywhere be protected to the point where it is treated as the supreme
individual liberty. This liberty becomes
especially important in our own day and age when there is a progressive
movement towards State absolutism. Man
must always have the liberty to disobey evil precepts. This liberty is usually the first one that is
removed in the progression towards a regime that suppresses all true liberty.
A
second liberty that he discusses is free speech. Although often treated in an absolute manner,
it cannot be indifferent to truth and falsehood. Man has a responsibility to both know the
truth and communicate only what is true.
Therefore there must a liberty that protects this responsibility. As Leo puts it, “Men have a right freely and
prudently to propagate throughout the State what things soever are true and
honorable, so that as many as possible may possess them; but lying opinions,
than which no mental plague is greater, and vices which corrupt the heart and
moral life should be diligently repressed by public authority, lest they
insidiously work the ruin of the State” (Libertas, 23). There is no right to speak falsehood nor to speak
(or display) that which corrupts morals.
If this were better understood then we would not have the pornography
problem that is protected by free speech.
As has been written here on many occasions, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America remains a vital resource for understanding the American mindset. What makes Tocqueville so valuable is that he was not necessarily an advocate of democracy. He saw in it great possibilities, but also was very much aware of the dangerous pitfalls that loomed in the background especially as the society around it rejected both religion and morality. In that way it has an almost prophetic quality about it, especially when it comes to the despotic and totalitarian temptations that all members of a democratic society ought to fear. Particularly prescient and especially relevant to today is a passage in which he cautions against totalitarianism that is smuggled in through a Nanny State:
“Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”
Democracy in America Vol. II, Sect IV Ch. VI
Although this ought to be obvious, Tocqueville’s criticism rests upon an abuse of authority. What makes this type of abuse so pernicious is that it is so subtle that it is easy to miss at first because it is smuggled in as a form of paternal authority. As the name suggests, paternal authority serves a legitimate and vital function because it secures the survival and development of an immature person. But this type of authority has a pedagogical aim such that it assures its own disappearance. The goal is to discipline the person such that self-discipline comes about; govern them so that self-government is easy. Only when that happens can the person truly be free. Paternal authority then provides security so that freedom develops. Once the full flourishing occurs, this authority has outlived its usefulness and fades away.
Freedom and Security
The subtlety then comes in the relationship between security and freedom. The proper use of paternal authority is that it is ordered towards freedom while providing security. In its proper form there is no tradeoff between the two. Once the person has reached maturity and able to properly govern their own freedom, paternal security is no longer necessary. Able to properly discipline themselves the children have the liberty to secure for themselves what they need to thrive. In having true freedom, they have security, a security that minimally depends upon others. This is not to advocate for a rugged individualism, but to see security in its proper light. There are still aspects such as policing and military protection for example that will require society, but belonging to the common good, they never take away liberty but expand it.
Tocqueville’s point is that one of the sure signs that authority has outlived its usefulness, or has become an outright abuse, is that it takes away freedom. And in so doing it creates and encourages a “perpetual childhood.” Authority becomes “absolute and minute” because it becomes a form of control. It does all of this in the name of security and the people willingly trade their freedom, because, lacking the necessary virtue to govern themselves, they must have security.
If you wanted to create a populace that willingly made this tradeoff, you would start by attacking the legitimate exercise of paternal authority. Paint the paterfamilias as a dufus and ensure that he acts irresponsibly. Break up the school of freedom the family by making divorce easy. Separate children from their parents as much as and as early as possible. Teach them “values”, mostly economic and political, and not virtues. Mock virtue as repression and substitute license for true liberty. Once license replaces liberty, there appears to be no tradeoff between security and liberty (which is really license) because those in power still, to use Tocqueville’s terms, “facilitate their pleasures.”
All of this might have a libertarian ring to it, but that it to miss the fact that freedom is wedded to virtue. Libertarians tend to treat freedom as an end rather than a means. They demand liberty to do what pleases them provided they do not infringe upon others. This too becomes license and the trap is laid in reverse. Lacking the virtue necessary for self-control, they must look elsewhere for security. We cannot turn a blind eye to vice nor can we enthrone it as a “right”. There may be times when we tolerate it, but it can never seen as a true exercise of freedom.
Tocqueville the Prophet
Tocqueville’s words are particularly relevant today because they illumine the path we are currently on towards totalitarianism. In the midst of a plague, the government has taken away the natural rights of its citizens all in the name of security. Notice that the “liberties of vice” are still available as “essential businesses”, a literal bread and ciruses approach in which Liquor stores, recreational marijuana dispensaries, unlimited and free access to Pornhub, and so forth. Heck, even the occasional encounter facilitated by Tinder is, according to Health Czar Anthony Fauci, an option “if you want to take the risk.” But you can’t take the risk to go to Mass, the one place where both security and freedom grow.
By creating an atmosphere of fear, we have been sold the bill of security. We are living on the cusp of tyranny, even if we believe it to be a “benevolent” tyranny. Those are the worst kind because they admit of no limits. As CS Lewis put it, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
We would be wise to listen to both Lewis’ words and Tocqueville’s. Trading freedom for security is the surest path to tyranny and results in the loss of both freedom and security.
Our country was founded upon a
rather strange amalgamation of principles.
A perusal of the writings of the Founders will uncover both references
to Catholic Natural Law and principles of the Enlightenments. One can imagine
that there are some pretty stark contradictions. One such contradiction is found in the
question of why we need government at all.
In the midst of defending the need for a government that includes checks
and balances in Federalist
Paper no. 51, James Madison makes what seems like at first to be a very
Catholic statement saying that government is “the greatest of all reflections
on human nature.” Rather than remaining
on that train of thought, Madison diverts to another track claiming that “If
men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Understanding both of his statements will
help us go a long way in understanding why our country seems to be plagued by
moral decay.
If Men Were Angels…
Obviously one of the important
questions that the Founders sought to address was how authority was to be exercised
by the State. Trying to emerge from the
shadow of Divine Right Theory, the Founders thought authority came from the
individual. Men would form a society
like the State by bartering freedom for security. The individuals would bestow authority upon a
Governor in order to ensure that his rights would be secured against encroachments
from other men who had all entered the society via a social contract.
When Madison says that
government is the “greatest reflection upon human nature”, he has this view of
human nature in mind—man as the individual who enters society via the social
contract. This principle of the
Enlightenment treats government then as a necessary evil that must be tolerated
because man is fallen. In his own words,
“anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the
weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.” If men were not fallen, like the angels, then
government would not be necessary. So
commonplace is this idea today, that hardly anyone questions whether Madison
has greatly misunderstood human nature.
Madison’s anthropological
error comes into relief if we challenge his theological assertion that “if men
were angels, no government would be necessary.”
Angels do, in fact, live within a hierarchy, a hierarchical structure
that includes authority. Scripture
provides us with an example in Chapter 10 of the Book of Daniel. Daniel calls upon the help of Gabriel, but
the angel does not immediately respond because the Guardian Angel of the
Kingdom of Persia would not allow him to act.
After Michael intervenes, the lower angel is allowed to help Daniel (Dn
10:11-21). What this reveals is that
angels, even unfallen ones, do have a government, one that is based upon a
clear authoritative structure.
The Greatest of All Reflections on Human Nature
So, if men were angels then
government might be necessary rather than being a necessary evil. Contra Locke, Rousseau and their intellectual
progeny, including the Founders, man is not a solitary being, but is naturally a
social creature. In order to fulfill his
nature, man has need of other men. This
is not just a matter of convenience but part of his natural instinct. There are two natural societies in which man’s
needs are supplied, the Family and the State.
Because men naturally form
these two societies, they must have an authoritative structure. As Pope Leo XIII put it, “no society can hold
together unless some one be over all, directing all to strive earnestly for the
common good, every body politic must have a ruling authority, and this
authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has,
consequently, God for its Author. Hence, it follows that all public power must
proceed from God. For God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world.
Everything, without exception, must be subject to Him, and must serve him, so
that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single
source, namely, God, the sovereign Ruler of all. ‘There is no power but from
God.’” (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 3).
St. Thomas says that the act
of authority would be applied in four ways.
First, the ruler must direct the members of society towards what they
should do to contribute to and achieve the common good. Second, the ruler should supply for
difficulties such as protection against an enemy. Third, the ruler should correct morals via
punishment and (four) he should coerce the members to virtuous acts.
Now it becomes obvious that
the first two would apply whether or not men were fallen or not. Virtuous men might agree about some common
good, but because it is possible to achieve a good in multiple ways, they disagree
as to means. Without a ruler, that is
one without authority, there would be no one to make the final decision. Because men, even in a state of innocence
would not be equal with respect to virtue, it is the most virtuous who would govern.
St. Thomas describes this
virtuous ruler in the Summa:
“But a man is the master of a free subject, by directing him either towards his proper welfare, or to the common good. Such a kind of mastership would have existed in the state of innocence between man and man, for two reasons. First, because man is naturally a social being, and so in the state of innocence he would have led a social life. Now a social life cannot exist among a number of people unless under the presidency of one to look after the common good; for many, as such, seek many things, whereas one attends only to one…Secondly, if one man surpassed another in knowledge and virtue, this would not have been fitting unless these gifts conduced to the benefit of others…Wherefore Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xix, 14): ‘Just men command not by the love of domineering, but by the service of counsel”: and (De Civ. Dei xix, 15): ‘The natural order of things requires this; and thus did God make man.’”
(ST I q.96, a.4)
Madison, because he thinks
government a necessary evil, would have us tolerate evil in our rulers. But when we see the State as something
natural, we begin to identify its purpose of making men better. It is necessary for men to fulfill their
nature by becoming more virtuous. The
virtuous ruler will create virtuous subjects.
St. Thomas thinks we can, and must, do better. The transition may be rocky, but if our society
is to turn around and become morally sound, we must not settle for moral
degenerates in our leaders. With Primary
Season upon us, especially with a total lack of emphasis on the character of
our leaders, this is an important message.
In the days leading up to now
St. John Henry Newman’s beatification in 2010, NPR’s All Things Considered turned its
consideration towards the question as to whether the Cardinal may in fact have
been gay. Never one to miss the
opportunity to promote the LGBT agenda, Fr. James Martin retweeted the article
on the eve of Newman’s canonization saying, “This doesn’t imply that the man
who will become a saint tomorrow ever broke his promise of celibacy. And we may
never know for sure. But his relationship with Ambrose St. John is worthy of
attention. It isn’t a slur to suggest that Newman may have been gay.” Although no one in the Church hierarchy is
likely to correct Fr. Martin, it is both a slur and manifestly false to suggest
that the saint may have been gay. A
comment such as this is not only disingenuous, but reveals the lavender glasses
that color everything that Fr. Martin says and reveals his animus for true
Catholic teaching. In the 2010 NPR
piece, Fr. Martin was interviewed and offered that, “It is church teaching that a gay
person can be holy, and a gay person can be a saint. And it’s only a matter of time before the
church recognizes one publicly.”
This reveals a serious flaw in his thinking and shows why he is
ultimately unfit to minister to those people who struggle with same sex
attraction.
The Saints and Heroic Virtue
The second step in the process of canonization is to be
declared Venerable. This declaration, which, in Newman’s case, occurred in 1991, declares that
the man exercised all of the virtues, both theological and natural to a heroic
degree. The point of such an examination
is to show how deeply grace had penetrated the man’s life enabling him to practice
the moral virtues with ease and the theological virtues eminently. Among these natural virtues, chastity plays a
key role meaning that, in Newman’s case, the Church has declared that he
practiced chastity to a heroic degree.
And herein lies the problem with Fr. Martin’s hypothesis, both regarding
the new saint and any canonized saint in the future: you cannot exercise
chastity to a heroic degree and also be gay.
This may seem rather harsh, until we examine the nature of
virtue in general. The role of virtue in
the moral life is to habitually order our faculties towards their proper
end. These powers of the soul “train” the
lower faculties to respond in accord with right reason. The man who struggles with disordered anger,
or what we would call the vice of anger, by developing the virtue of meekness
not only is able to keep himself from angry outbursts, but actually so governs
his feelings of anger that it is only felt when it is reasonable to do so. A similar thing can be said about all of our
other vices or disordered inclinations including Same-Sex Attraction. Just as meekness roots out any disordered
anger, chastity roots out all disordered manifestations of our sexual faculties
and orders them towards their proper ends.
The man who is truly chaste would no longer experience SSA.
Notice that I did not perform any of the usual moral hairsplitting
that many people make regarding this topic between homosexual activity and the
vice of SSA. While this may have some
value in assessing personal culpability, it has no place when it comes to the
virtue of chastity. To employ such a
distinction, such as Fr. Martin does in this case only serves to muddy the
moral waters making chastity harder, not easier. It all stems from an error in thinking that chastity
and celibacy are the same thing. But
they are most certainly distinct. Celibacy
has to do with restraining the exterior actions. Chastity has to do with properly ordering
interior inclinations. A man may be
celibate without being chaste, but an unmarried man cannot be chaste without also
being celibate. Fr. Martin seems to
suggest that St. John Henry Newman fell into the former category—celibate without
being chaste. To suggest that a canonized
saint wasn’t chaste is a slur, especially given that the Church has declared
him to be a man of heroic chastity.
Deep down, Fr. Martin knows all this. This is his motivation for trying to change
the designation of SSA from disordered to differently ordered. If it is merely that there is a different
ordering, then the chaste person could in fact experience SSA. But if it is disordered then it will be rooted
out as the person grows in chastity.
There is no reason why a person who struggles with SSA (or to use Fr. Martin’s
designation of gay) couldn’t become a Saint someday, but it will only
happen after they have removed that vice (and all the others) from their lives. In fact, there may already be some Saint that
had this difficulty at some point, but to suggest that we might someday have a
gay saint is like saying that we already have a fornicating Saint in St.
Augustine. St. Augustine is a Saint
because he became chaste and rooted out all the sexual vices he had in his
soul.
Blinded by the Lavender Light
All
of this reveals why Fr. Martin is ill-suited to minister to those who have
SSA. All he can see is gay. In examining the life of John Henry Newman,
it is quite obvious that he deeply loved Fr. Ambrose St. John. But it is only someone who sees all things in
a lavender light that would mistake the love of friendship with erotic love. The aforementioned St. Augustine, on losing a
friend said:
I was amazed that other mortals went on living when he was dead whom I had loved as though he would never die, and still more amazed that I could go on living myself when he was dead – I, who had been like another self to him. It was well said that a friend is half one’s own soul. I felt that my soul and his had been but one soul in two bodies, and I shrank from life with loathing because I could not bear to be only half alive; and perhaps I was so afraid of death because I did not want the whole of him to die, whom I had love so dearly.
This seems very similar to what Newman said at the loss of his friend “I have always thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s but I feel it difficult to believe that anyone’s sorrow can be greater than mine.” Would Fr. Martin have us believe that St. Augustine was gay or bisexual? Or is it, that he is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging that there is a proper, non-sexual love between same sex persons in friendship? One of the ways in which chastity is increased in the person with SSA is to acknowledge that to the extent that his love for the other person is real, it is really a disordered love of friendship. Once this is realized the person is able to develop a healthy and ordered love for the other person. What makes Fr. Martin unsuited then to help these people is that he would not admit to the true love of friendship. Otherwise he would not make such a stupid comment about St. John Henry Newman, but put him forward as an example of how those with SSA might purify their love for a person of the same sex through authentic friendship.
If our sole criterion for judging
the seriousness of particular sins is the number of times it is mentioned in
Sacred Scripture, then most certainly sins of the tongue are among the most
dangerous. St. James describes the
danger in rather stark terms: “The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our
members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire
course of our lives on fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna” (James 3:6). Of course, he is reiterating what God gave to
Moses in the Eighth Commandment which calls out our post-edenic speech
impediment. But in our own age, because of a marked preference for verbosity over
veracity, we ought to re-examine his warning lest the gravity of the tongue
drag us into Gehenna.
Man has always struggled with
simply following rules—not in the sense that he doesn’t follow them, but that
he chooses how he is going to follow them.
This is both the gift and burden of freedom. We can use these rules as boundaries or we
can use them runways for freedom. We can
find out how to stay within the strict letter of the law or we can learn how to
use them to truly thrive. The choice is
up to us, but the Church always leans towards the side of freedom. She gives us not just rules, but also
reasons. She teaches ethics so that we
can develop ethos.
On
Telling the Truth
This is especially true when
it comes to truth telling. Moralists have
argued for centuries as to what constitutes a lie. Even the Catechism has had to change its
definition since it was first released in 1992.
The point is not that rules are unnecessary—there can be no gray without
black and white—but that unless you understand why telling the truth is so
important, you will always be trapped in a casuistic web. Truth telling matters because the truth
matters. The truth matters because it is
God Who through His Provident care has set reality as it really is. It is He Who has willed, directly or
permissively, things to be the way they are.
To distort that is to usurp God as God and to alter reality such that it
is the way I want it to be. There is no color
coding of lies, white or otherwise, because lying is first and foremost an
offense against God’s Fatherhood.
Most people know a lie when
they tell one, but sins of the tongue encompass so much more than just lying. It is the gray areas that often and
unwittingly cause the most problems. There
is gossiping, excuse making, calumny, slander, flattery, and detraction; all of
which are just as, if not more, common than just straight up lying. This is because there seems to be no clear
rules governing them. But once we look
at the telos, or purpose, of our capacity for speech, we find a set of guiding principles
emerging.
Among all the visible
creatures, speech is the most distinctively human powers. Other animals may speak, but none can truly
communicate. Our speech allows us to
make visible what is otherwise invisible.
Speech allows us to communicate not just facts or theories but our
interior. It gives us the power to tell
others exactly is going on inside of us.
So important is this fact, that Our Lord also mentions it in a
discussion with the Pharisees. “From
within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts…” (Mk 7:21).
Truth
and Communion
But speech is not just for us
to download our thoughts, but it is given to us for communion. Made in the image of God, the Triune God that
is in perfect communion through the Word, our speech is meant to be a power in
which we give what is most intimate, our thoughts. But falsehood cannot bear the weight of
communion, so that true communion can only happen when there is communication in
truth. It is this last statement that
animates the two guiding principles for the use of our tongue: truth and
communion.
Truth is paramount for the
reasons already mentioned, but not every situation calls for truth
telling. Some situations call for truth
withholding. Truth withholding is really
about truth protecting, that is, protecting the truth from those who do not
need to know it (detraction) or those who will exploit it for evil. Even in those cases it is never permissible
to lie, even if you
must exercise a mental reservation or suffer for remaining silent. But we often struggle with deciding whether
someone needs to know and for this we can rely on the principle of communion. Will what I am about to tell lead to a
communion of persons or destroy it? If I
were to tell my neighbor that their babysitter is a drunk then that would be
protective of the common good. If I were
to tell the babysitter that my neighbor wears a pink tutu then it would not.
Before closing there is one further
point that need to be made related to speech and rash judgment. Earlier I compared speech to downloading our
thoughts. Speech can also be a means by
which we govern our thoughts. When we speak
it has the effect of solidifying our thoughts because there is now someone else
who knows what I know. But when we keep
the thoughts to ourselves, it has the effect of causing us to examine them more
carefully and gives us time to offer a corrective. Speaking our thoughts sets them in stone. Silence leads to true thoughts.
Herein lies the promise of
freedom when we learn to not just avoid lying, but use our speech well. It leads us out of the captivity of our minds
and into the glorious freedom of seeing and loving the truth.
The former Chief Exorcist of
Rome, of pious memory, Fr. Gabriele Amorth is well known in Catholic circles
for his books on the demonic. He is well
known outside of Catholic circles for his repeated criticism of the Harry
Potter series. Speaking mainly from the
experience of casting out thousands of demons, he once said, “behind Harry
Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil.” This was met by mockery outside the Church
and deaf ears within. Many Catholics,
clergy included, see “nothing wrong with Harry Potter” and thus allow and
encourage children to read the series, see the movies, visit amusement parks
and play video games. Fr. Amorth is not
the only exorcist who has warned against the series and even Pope Benedict
cautioned against it during his time as Prefect of the Congregation of the
Faith. Deaf ears can often lead to blind
eyes and thus it is imperative that we have a coherent explanation and not
merely scare tactics of why Harry Potter is dangerous.
To begin, we must concede that
for a parent to offer an “it is harmless” defense of anything is not good
parenting. Even if there is such thing
as a “harmless” story (as opposed to helpful or harmful), it is questionable
parenting to use that as a criteria for what you expose your children to. Junk food for the body might be permitted,
junk food for the mind ought not to be.
But in truth it is an attempt to feign neutrality when in fact there is
really no such thing as a neutral story.
Inundated by television and movies, which condition us to accept views
of the world uncritically, we can easily forget how powerful a story is to
convey a world view. We tend to equate
entertainment and goodness.
Why
Stories Matter
Stories are, to borrow a
phrase from JRR Tolkien, a sub-creation.
The author creates a world of his own imagining and then animates that
world. But it is not a creation ex-nihilio,
but a sub-creation. To be
intelligible it must rest upon reality as it really is. A good story should also
be entertaining, but to be good it must wrap a narrative around a particular
aspect of reality so as to let the light of truth shine upon it. A bad
story may also be entertaining, especially if we are uncritical of what we are
reading or seeing. In fact, it often is
in order to mask the ugliness of the story.
Ultimately what makes it a bad story is that it distorts reality. It puts forth a false idea of truth and
goodness, redefining them in subtle ways.
Stories have such a powerful
effect on children because of their unbridled capacity for wonder. Wonder gives them a much more expansive view
of reality which makes them particularly apt to see the message attached to the
narrative. They don’t just read a book
or watch a movie, they insert themselves into the world created by the author
and move about. This is why a whole
generation of now adults grew up playing Star Wars and why another generation
is growing up playing Harry Potter. If
you don’t want your children pretending to be magicians, using magic for good
or ill, then you would not want them to read these books. Children will play in the stories they hear
and read.
There is also a bit of a mixed
message that is being sent. Magic,
sorcery and divination are all presented as intrinsically evil by the Church
(c.f. CCC 2117) but presented as something that can be used for good by the
Harry Potter books. Since “intrinsically
evil” implies one can never use it for good, this sends a rather mixed message. In short, on the one hand we have a story
where the hero uses it and on the other we have stories in Scripture where it
is strongly condemned regardless of how it is used. Deuteronomy 18:9-12 describes magic as an
abomination before God and tells how a believer should respond in the face of
it. One need not wonder what would
happen if Harry met St. Paul given the latter’s interaction with the magician
in Acts 13:6-12. The point though is
that a child will not naturally allow a contradiction to exist and thus will
reject one story and accept the other.
One can hardly imagine that, without proper guidance and formation, the
child will almost always choose the more entertaining story.
What
is Magic, anyway?
A fuller understanding of magic itself will help us better grasp the inherent danger; a danger that is growing daily as our culture is re-paganized. There are about 20,000 books on Amazon that describe different Wiccan spells so we are talking about more than just mere sleight of hand or some fringe movement if we merely follow the market. Magic is not a sub-creation created in the mind of the author, but something that exists in the real world. Magic is about harnessing superhuman power and using it to overcome our natural limitations. So, when we speak about magic what we are really talking about is angelic power. Angels by their nature can act upon material creation simply by willing it. They can manipulate pre-existing matter in any matter that they wish. This is exactly what those schooled in magic and the occult are trying to do.
The problem is that evil
angels, demons that is, are willing to share this power with human beings. Not in order to help them but to entrap
them. They give them superhuman powers
through spells and the like in exchange for control of them. By grasping at a power beyond them, they
submit their own human strength to the demons.
The demons are only too happy to comply because it makes them “like God”
because it is a cheap imitation of God’s power of miracles. Ultimately it is an attack on God and the
humans are simply pawns who end up bearing the brunt of it.
The Harry Potter books never
say where the magic comes from, but it comes from the place that all magic
comes from hell. It can seemingly be
repurposed for good, or else it would lack appeal, but ultimately this good is
a mere smokescreen for the evil that lurks behind its power. This repurposing of magic for the good is the
theme behind another fantasy story, one that acts like the magic elephant in
the room anytime Harry Potter is discussed–TheLord of the Rings.
Magic is a key element in the
Lord of the Rings as well, and yet, most would say these would be categorized
as good stories. To grasp how it is
different from Harry Potter we must return to what was said earlier about the
source of magic. If magic, at its core
is angelic power, then there is nothing wrong with angels using it. It is their natural power. Those who naturally use magic in the story,
namely the Elves and Gandalf, are not human.
Gandalf is not a man but an angelic being called a Maiar who had taken
human form. He and the Elves are, in
Tolkien’s sub-creation, angels. It is natural
for them to use “magic” and thus they are not seizing something that does not
belong to them, but applying their given powers in pursuit of the good. The story makes clear that all those lesser
creatures who ultimately try to harness that power, even if for good use,
ultimately come to ruin. It is a story
ultimately against magic and not for it.
And in that way it is vastly different than Harry Potter which celebrates
its use by men and women.
Thanks to a noninvasive prenatal
testing procedure called NIPD, a test which can predict Down Syndrome with 99%
accuracy, the number of children born with Down Syndrome worldwide has greatly
been reduced. This is not because they
can repair the defective condition, but because it fashions the DNA into a
bullseye, systematically marking them for death. Between 2/3 and 4/5 of children with Down Syndrome are
aborted, reducing the overall rate by 30%. In other countries such as Denmark and Sweden
nearly 100% of the children are aborted.
This, of course, is an example in which pre-natal testing has been used
under nefarious circumstances, but not all of them are bad. In fact, as more and more data pours in from
the work on the Human Genome Project we should expect the ability to make more
accurate pre-natal diagnoses on any number of conditions to increase. With knowledge always comes power, but this
power can be seductive unless we are guided by solid moral principles.
What makes navigating the
moral waters upon which pre-natal testing floats particularly perilous is the
fact that most of the tests themselves do not carry any moral weight. There are some, like amniocentesis, which present
significant dangers for both mother and child.
These tests should be avoided unless there are serious medical reasons for
doing so. But tests like NIPD and
ultrasounds are practically harmless to both mother and child and become part
and parcel of the standard of care. The
moral issue comes in with the intention of the parents of the unborn
child. In other words, what are they
going to do with the information?
Why You Want to Know Matters
If they desire to know so that
they can abort the child then it becomes morally problematic, even if they
don’t actually follow through with it.
Knowing that this might be a real temptation, then they shouldn’t have
the test. On the flip side, a couple may
want to perform the test so that they are better prepared medically and
emotionally for parenting a child with serious medical needs then the test can
be safely (morally speaking) performed.
There continue to be many advances made to in utero diagnosis and
surgical interventions that these tests can often be life-saving. Just this week the Cleveland Clinic announced
that they had performed successful in utero surgery to repair Spina
Bifida. This obviously was made possible
through pre-natal testing.
Summarizing, The Ethical
and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (1994) presents
these principles succinctly: “Prenatal
diagnosis is permitted when the procedure does not threaten the life or
physical integrity of the unborn child or the mother, and does not subject them
to disproportionate risks; when the diagnosis can provide information to guide
preventive care for the mother or pre- or postnatal care for the child; and
when the parents, or at least the mother, give free and informed consent. Prenatal diagnosis is not permitted when
undertaken with the intention of aborting an unborn child with a serious
defect” (50).
With abortion off the table,
what are the guidelines we can use if the unthinkable happens and a child is
diagnosed with a medical problem. The
Church speaks of avoiding “disproportionate risks”. This assumes a sort of calculus on the part
of the parents by which they weigh the seriousness of the disease against the
risk of surgery. This might include
experimental procedures. Provided that
there is an acceptable amount of risk involved and the surgery is done for
therapeutic, rather than experimental reasons, then it would be morally
permissible to do so. As the Instruction on Respect for Human
Life in its Origin, Donum Vitae, puts it, “[N]o objective, even though noble in itself,
such as a foreseeable advantage to science, to other human beings or to
society, can in any way justify experimentation on living human embryos or
fetuses, whether viable or not, either inside or outside the mother’s womb” (DV
I, 4).
Not
only is abortion not an option, but also those procedures which are not
inherently therapeutic. Procedures designed to influence the genetic
inheritance of a child, which are not therapeutic, are morally wrong. “Certain attempts to influence chromosomic or genetic inheritance are
not therapeutic but are aimed at producing human beings selected according to
sex or other predetermined qualities. These manipulations are contrary to the
personal dignity of the human being and his or her integrity and identity.
Therefore in no way can they be justified on the grounds of possible beneficial
consequences for future humanity. Every person must be respected for himself:
in this consists the dignity and right of every human being from his or her
beginning” (DV, I, 6).
Genetic Counseling
Genetic counseling before a
couple actually conceives is growing in use and popularity. The man and the woman each submit to genetic
screening that gives a genetic profile enabling them to predict how likely it
is that they have a child with a serious genetic defect. Like the pre-natal testing discussed previously
there is nothing inherently wrong with doing it. What matters is what you are going to do with
the information that is gleaned from it.
For example, suppose a couple finds one or both of them are carriers for
some genetic condition such as cystic fibrosis or Tay Sachs, both of which pose
serious risks to viability and lifespan of the child. They may come to learn that there is a 50%
chance that their child develops the condition.
Is this a good enough reason to forego having children and adopt instead?
This is one of those cases
where the Church does not say one way or the other, although we can certainly
apply Catholic principles to come up with a set of guidelines. First, we must never forget that the goal of
parenting is to raise children for heaven.
The most severely mentally handicapped child will only be so temporarily
if they are baptized. I say this not to
over-spiritualize the issue, but to put it in perspective. As a father of a special needs child this
thought has brought me much comfort and has stifled my fears. Having a child with something wrong with them
is among the worst things a parent can deal with, but it is not the worst. Having your child go to hell would be the
worst. Knowing that you raised your
child and got them to heaven means that you have done all God asked of
you. “Well done my good and faithful
servant.”
This may not be a reason then
to avoid having any children, but it might be counted as a so-called “serious”
reason to postpone, even indefinitely, having more children. If a couple has a child with many medical
needs and knowing that they are at an increased likelihood to have another like
them, they may legitimately decide to not have any more children, provided the
means they use to avoid pregnancy are morally licit.
A
couple of months back there was an anti-vaping meme that circulating in social
media that encouraged teens to masturbate rather than to vape: “Pleasuring
yourself with Vape? Try masturbation
instead. Masturbating alone or with a
friend is a great safe alternative to vaping.”
Vaping may be bad, especially
for teens, but the solution of masturbation is not a real moral alternative
either. The meme creators reasoned that
when pleasure is the goal, it is better to choose masturbation because it is a
relatively harmless activity when done in private (or even with a
“friend”). Unfortunately, anyone who contests
this is puritanically shouting into the hyper-libidinous wind that keeps our
culture sailing along. Nevertheless, one
could, and more importantly should, argue that masturbation is far more harmful
to the person than vaping and therefore something that should also be avoided.
Because
we are oversexed any conversation on this topic will naturally require some
backing up of sorts. Our culture may be
obsessed with sex, but so are the apparent puritans who are always moralizing
about it. We will back up in order to
first understand why sex is such a big deal.
Sex
and Desire
Our
human desires all seem to point to some personal need that we have. Hunger and thirst point to the need to eat
and drink for example. While quelling
the hunger pains and slaking the thirst may bring us pleasure, that cannot be
enough to decide what and how we should eat and drink. We must always keep the purpose of the desire
and its fulfillment in mind. The
pleasure is meant to be a motor that moves us towards something that is good
for us. In other words, those things we
choose to eat and drink must actually meet the needs of nutrition and hydration. Those that do not, we label as
perverted. Eating plastic coated with
strawberry jelly and drinking antifreeze both might bring us pleasure, but
ultimately they fail to meet the need or purpose of the desire. In short, there are right and wrong things to
eat, even if some of the wrong things are pleasurable. Every desire must be submitted to our reason
that judges right and wrong according to the purpose of the desire.
Sexual
desire is similar to hunger and thirst in that it is an innate human desire,
but it differs because it is more complex.
It is more complex not just because it points to the “need” to
reproduce, but because it also points to two other important distinctly human
aspects. First, sexual desire points to
sexual fulfillment. By sexual
fulfillment I don’t mean an orgasm, but to our fulfillment of what it means to
be made as men and women. Our sexual
desire points to our personal fulfillment in women becoming wives and mothers
and men becoming husbands and fathers. I
don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of people finding fulfillment in other
ways, but just to emphasize that we are talking about sexual fulfillment,
that is, what the meaning or telos of being made as a man or woman is. Even the most ardent LGBT activist admits
this truth when they preach gender identity.
In any regard, because our sexual fulfillment is so vital to our personal
identity, it is our strongest desire.
The
vehemence of the desire is the second aspect.
Not only is its tie to personal identity the reason for its strength but
the fact that it is the biological motor by which we come out of ourselves. It is a social desire in that it finds its
true fulfillment in uniting with another person. But its relative strength also means that it
is the one which is mostly likely to become perverted, making it prone to abuse
and rationalizing Therefore, it is also the one, in our fallen state, that we
need the most need of instruction by which reason might govern its use.
It
would be hard to dispute the fact that it is other-directed. Even the person masturbating invokes their
imagination to call to mind another person.
Sexual pleasure is not just a passive response to being touched, but an
intentional pleasure caused by another person to whom one is attracted to. It can never be like scratching an itch where
one only receives relief from some tension, but a desire directed towards
another person. Kinsey and Freud might
have duped us moderns into thinking is was just some physiological response
that causes the arousal of the person, but we all know that it is the bodily
contact in conjunction with the presence (real or imagined) of another person
that one finds attractive. The object of
our attraction and our arousal must be a subject.
What’s
the Harm?
This
other-directedness of sexual desire seems obvious so that we can see why we
might label masturbation as wrong. But
it seems to be little more than a “guilty pleasure” causing no real harm. The harm may be hidden, or, more accurately,
we might say we are blinded to it, but it is a real harm nonetheless. The harm comes into view when we call to mind
that human beings are creatures of habit, or virtues and vice. No act occurs in a vacuum but always moves us
towards virtue or vice. Because sexual
desire is so strong, there is perhaps no field of human activity where the law
of habit is more obvious.
Masturbation
by its very nature is a self-directing of sexual desire. The aim is not to unite to another person,
but to gain pleasure. The turning to the
self is no mere guilty pleasure but forms a habit of thinking and acting in
that way. It isn’t just a self-indulgent
act, but makes someone selfish. The
person becomes habituated to seeking their own pleasure first and their partner’s
pleasure becomes only a calculated concern.
They want their pleasure only so that they will come back around.
Because
sexual arousal is an intentional act, the person develops the habit of mind
that makes arousal by a real person increasingly difficult. A real person does not always do what the
other person wants in the way that they want.
Masturbation becomes in a very real sense a gateway perversion to
ever-greater perversions. Nearly all
sexual deviants began with masturbation.
This is not to say that everyone who masturbates will become a depraved
sexual predator, but that it sets a person on that path because of what we will
call the law of diminishing pleasure.
As
we have said, pleasure is like the motor that moves the human engine towards
truly good things. But when pleasure
becomes the finish line and not the motor, it always diminishes. One then has to find new and more exciting
ways in order to increase pleasure or re-direct the pleasure back to its
intended end. The point is that the
chaste man derives far more pleasure from the marital embrace than the “stud”
who traverses from woman to woman, just as the temperate man enjoys a scotch
more than a drunk or the temperate woman enjoys a fine steak more than a
glutton. When we moderate our pleasures to
only the right use of those things that cause the pleasure, pleasure always
increases.
Returning
back to the anti-vape campaign mentioned at the beginning, we can now see why masturbation
is a horrible alternative. Indulging the
strongest of our desires may reduce the desire for a lesser one, but it only further
ensnares the teenager in a loop of pleasure seeking.
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.
