Category Archives: Politics

Masking and the New Religion

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

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

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

The New Priesthood

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

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

The Statistician Speaks

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

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

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

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

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

The New Sacrament

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

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

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

The Church and Democracy

American Founding, Politics, , , , ,

When Woodrow Wilson lead America into World War I, his battle cry was that America needed to “make the world safe for democracy.”  Resting upon the unquestionable assumption that democracy is not only the best, but ultimately the only form of government, democratic principles have come to animate the Western mind.  It has a habit of doing that because it seeks to impose equality by force of the mob.  In a previous post we discussed why this might be not only unjust, but ultimately dangerous.  In this post we would like to pick up on that theme by examining the Church’s teaching on democracy, a teaching that like all things Catholic, takes a “both/and” nuanced approach that also keeps the world safe from democracy, or at least safe from the threat of absolutism that looms over it.

The Church’s political philosophy rests not only upon the teaching of St. Augustine in The City of God, but also St. Thomas Aquinas in his De Regno as well as his Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics.  St. Thomas, despite favoring monarchy was not opposed to democracy because he thought that “all should take some share in the government: for this form of constitution ensures peace among the people, commends itself to all, and is most enduring.”  Nevertheless the “best form of polity, being partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e. government by the people, in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people, and the people have the right to choose their rulers” (ST I-II q.105, a.1).

Democracy in the Ideal Government

This ideal, mixed regime that included democracy was based upon a vastly different conception of democracy than we are used to.  “Government by the people” in St. Thomas’ mind is based on how leaders are chosen and not on how they govern.  Once chosen, the leaders are not representatives of the people but instead real leaders.  A leader assumes responsibility and it not a mere spokesman of the people or a party. 

Modern sensibilities reject all other forms of government for two reasons.  First, because each man is “equal”, each must have an equal say in governing and selecting representatives.  Secondly, because authority comes from below, from the individual himself, and not from God, each man can only cede his authority over to some chosen representative.  When these two things are accepted as “givens” then democracy becomes the only just form of government.  Thus, the mission to “make the world safe for democracy” becomes a demand of social justice.

The Church on the other hand, because she views authority as coming from above, thinks any of the three regimes mentioned by St. Thomas is acceptable if justice is maintained.  As St. Pius X said, “Justice being preserved, it is not forbidden to the people to choose for themselves the form of government which best corresponds with their character or with the institutions and customs handed down by their forefathers….Therefore, when he said that justice could be found in any of the three aforesaid forms of government, he was teaching that in this respect Democracy does not enjoy a special privilege” (Our Apostolic Mandate).

The Demon Hidden in Democracy

Francis Fukuyama thought that the rise of democracy marked the “end of history”.  Democracy, viewed as the end of history, is really the beginning of absolutism.  When democracy takes upon itself the mantle of only legitimate regime, it becomes susceptible to becoming tyrannical.  Nearly all of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century had democratic roots and this is because it has no mechanism that checks the will of the people.  A system of “horizontal pressure” develops in which the majority drowns out the minority.  Unless one is conditioned to self-government, that is virtuous, he can become irrational and passion-driven.  Through appeals to the passions and through propaganda, the people become easily manipulated by those in power, all while maintaining the guise of freedom and equality. 

The key then becomes checking democracy against the moral law.  Absent appeals to the natural law, a corrupted democracy becomes the worst of all regimes.  A tyranny of 1 or of few is far better than a tyranny of many.  It was in this spirit that Pope Pius XII examined Democracy as a means of lasting peace.

In his Christmas message of 1944, Pope Pius XII cautioned against blind acceptance of democracy as the only acceptable form of government.  He pointed out that it is only a cause of peace when it is well-ordered to justice.  This ordering to justice can only happen in what he calls “a sound Democracy” which is “ based on the immutable principles of the natural law and revealed truth, will resolutely turn its back on such corruption as gives to the state legislature in unchecked and unlimited power, and moreover, makes of the democratic regime, notwithstanding an outward show to the contrary, purely and simply a form of absolutism.”

The susceptibility of democracy to descend into Ochlocracy is also hastened when it tries to enforce political equality.  Because of the natural inequality in mankind, not everyone should be involved in the political process.  Extending the right to vote based solely upon citizenship is a dangerous proposition.  Most people are not politically engaged enough to make educated votes and thus they are more likely to become a mob rather than an electorate.  Late night TV hosts may find it funny to ask the average Joe questions about various candidates and laugh at their answers, but these people are also the same ones whose votes count as much as the person who learns of different candidates and seeks the common good.  This is one reason among many why a democracy is not the best means for protecting freedom and maintaining natural equality.

On Liberty of Conscience

American Founding, Church and State, Church Authority, Faith and Reason, God's Will, Magisterium, Martyrdom, Politics, Saints, , , , , , ,

The character of evil, in imitation of its greatest champion, is such that it is ever on the prowl looking to devour the freedom of each man.  One of the means by which such freedom is protected is liberty of conscience.  This natural right of conscience protects each man from having to act in such a way that he is forced to participate in something that he knows to be evil.  As the prevailing culture moves further and further from its Christian roots, the protection by law of the rights of conscience becomes increasingly important.  Therefore, it is worth examining more thoroughly in order bring into relief why it is so vital.

The Character of Conscience

First, we must clear up some of the popular misconceptions about conscience.  It is not a thing like the proverbial angel on the shoulder, but a mode of judgement.  More specifically it is a judgment of practical reason that is linked to the power of man to do what is right and shun what is evil within the concrete circumstances of human life.  Since it is a power of practical reason, it depends upon a knowledge of the principles that lead to genuine human thriving even if it is only concerned with applying those principles.  It is then the power of man to link truth with goodness. 

Conscience, even if it issues commands to the will, is not an act of the will.  Therefore, we must always keep conscience from becoming synonymous with self-will.  Most people treat conscience as if it were freedom to do whatever they want rather than being beholden to the truth.  It carries about with it a certain obstinacy of “sticking to your guns” no matter what.  Therefore, authority is quick to use its power to command actions in conformity with cultural norms.  This is nothing more than Power attempting to replace conscience. 

Conscience protection is the Catholic’s last line of defense against the growing power of the State.  The next step is to cross over into the field of martyrdom.  So we must fight vehemently to keep it in place.  The necessary principles for this defense were laid out quite articulately over a century ago by St. John Henry Newman.  In a letter to the Duke of Norfolk, the saint gives us a defense of the Supremacy of Conscience that fits with a true and Catholic understanding of conscience and its inviolability.

Conscience and Character

Newman notes that all men are by nature bound to observe the natural law.  Our apprehension of this Divine Law occurs within the realm of conscience.  Even “though it may suffer refraction in passing into the intellectual medium of each, it is not therefore so affected as to lose its character of being the Divine Law, but still has, as such, the prerogative of commanding obedience.”  Steeped within Catholic tradition, Newman views conscience as the voice of God and not merely the creation of man.  It may be more or less heard correctly by each man, but it still remains what he calls the “aboriginal Vicar of Christ.”

Based upon the fact that conscience is properly viewed as the voice of God, the Fourth Lateran Council said: “He who acts against his conscience loses his soul.”  To act against conscience is to act against God.  Despite the fact that God has implanted this voice of conscience commanding us to do good and avoid evil, the ear of the intellect needs to be trained and given its “due formation.”  This formation must come through reason enlightened by Divine Faith because the latter was given to purify the former.  To fail to form the conscience properly constitutes a great evil, perhaps one of the greatest because it chooses to deny conscience its rightful dignity.

A man has a right to something because he has a corresponding duty.  The right of conscience flows from his obligation to obey it.  But this obligation does not flow from a need to be true to oneself, but to obey God.  As Newman puts it, if conscience is the voice of the Moral Governor then the rights of conscience are really the rights of the Creator and the duties toward Him.  “Conscience,” Newman says, “has rights because it has duties”. This ultimately is what makes freedom of conscience so important and why we must protect it at all costs.  St. Thomas More is the model in this regard.  He was a martyr because he obeyed the dictates of God mediated through His conscience.

As religious liberty goes into decline, conscience protection becomes more and more important.  Pope Leo XIII called it true liberty, the liberty of the sons of God that shows that “the dignity of man and is stronger than all violence or wrong.” (Libertas, 30).  When all the power of the State bears down upon a single man and he still refuses to join in evil, it shows that man is bigger than the State and shows that he is made for God. Leo XIII calls it “the kind of liberty the Apostles claimed for themselves with intrepid constancy, which the apologists of Christianity confirmed by their writings, and which the martyrs in vast numbers consecrated by their blood. And deservedly so; for this Christian liberty bears witness to the absolute and most just dominion of God over man, and to the chief and supreme duty of man toward God” (Libertas, 30).

Relativism, the Supreme Court and Descartes

Abortion, Apologetics, Church, Culture, Defending the Faith, Politics, Relativism, , , ,

GK Chesterton once said that America was the only country built upon a creed.   He thought the American Founders had united the country around certain self-evident truths.  The founding credo has been replaced by a more modern one that is aptly captured by the Supreme Court in their 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood vs Casey.  Writing for the majority in defense of abortion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”  Freedom to choose trumps even reality itself, and relativism in all its forms was enshrined as dogma.  The only self-evident truth is that there is no objective truth.  Such an exaltation of freedom gives society no foundation upon which men and women may be united.  All that is left to bind the people is force, either through the coercion of political correctness or “the compulsion of the State”.

Quite obviously it is not enough to merely identify the problem.  We must do something about it.  But unless we are going to meet force with force, the only way to correct the problem is to correct the bad ideas that caused it.  Some errors are like weeds. It is not enough to merely pluck the leaves of consequences, but we must attack the roots of the ideas that caused the consequences.  Relativism is the weed that threatens society so that if we are to give society room to flower, then we must tear out its roots.

The Three Words

Three words was all it took to start the avalanche that would overthrow the Christian World Order.  Unwilling to face the Scientistic Zeitgeist head on by restating the higher metaphysical truths of reality, Rene Descartes decided to play the skeptic’s game.  Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am”, set the tenor for modern thought and paved the way for the coronation of Relativism.

Good intentions never cover for bad ideas, even if those ideas are “clear and distinct”.  Descartes sought to defend philosophy against the full frontal attack of empirical science.  When you have physics, why do you need metaphysics?  But rather than fixing the problem, he created a crisis in knowledge.  All this because he rejected Scholastic realism, that is, the epistemological position that all knowledge comes in and through the senses.  We come to form ideas based on the perceptions we receive from our encounter with reality.  Our ideas are true only insofar as they conform to reality.  In short, our ideas are means by which we come to knowledge of the highest and lowest things.

Rather than being measured by reality, Descartes thought man was the measure of reality.  Knowledge of reality is an impossibility.  Instead we can only have knowledge of our own ideas.  And not just any ideas, but only those are clear and distinct, the first of which was that he is thinking.  In his own words, “I think therefore I am…In this first knowledge doubtless, there is nothing that gives me assurance of its truth except the clear and distinct perception of what I affirm…and accordingly it seems to me that I may now take as a general rule, that all that is very clearly and distinctly apprehended (conceived) is true” (Descartes,First Meditation).

The Scholastics thought that existence was self-evident and could not be proven.  Our senses drew data only from those things that existed.  This could not be doubted and this was the starting point for all knowledge.  Descartes, rather than starting with the senses, began with the one thing he could not doubt, namely his own thought.  And this formed the basis for his discovering the truth; having a clear and distinct idea.  But because ideas are subjective, truth is no longer objective.  Truth reveals not the outside world, but the state of the mind of the thinker. 

Connecting the Dots

It may not yet be clear how Descartes connects to Casey until we trace out the consequences of Descartes’ thoughts.  We encounter reality in and through our senses and then form ideas about it.  Those ideas are called true which correspond to reality as it really is. Truth, then, is the correspondence of reality and idea.  For Descartes and his intellectual progeny (Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hume and so on), truth consists only in having clear ideas.  Rather than measuring ideas against reality, they are measured by the mind itself and judged true if they are “clear and distinct”.  True comes to mean “true for me” and “true for you.”  All ideas are equally true, so long as they are sincerely held.  This leads to a contradiction because if every opinion is equally true, then the following opinion is also equally true, namely that not every opinion is equally true.

We have grown accustomed to the cognitive dissonance and navigate it the best we can.  We learn to “tolerate” different opinions about reality.  The problem though is that if each of us is living in a world he has constructed on his own, then there is no means by which a society can be formed.  There may be small pockets of “like-minded” people but no real unity.  The seemingly esoteric philosophical problem becomes the source of a gigantic social problem. 

That is why the solution must also be a social one.  There must be a reintroduction of Medieval Philosophy.  We must go back to just before the train went off the rails and set it back on the tracks.  It starts by properly training the young to think clearly about reality as it really is.  We cannot, like Descartes, pick up the scraps of truth on the hems of the Zeitgeist and expect to build anything solid.  Ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences.  We must go back to St. Thomas and learn from him truly how to think.  We must teach our children to go back to St. Thomas.  Catholic schools need to be true houses of intellectual formation and not merely alternatives to the public schools.  St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Abusing Wonder

beauty, Conscience, Culture, Family, Politics, , ,

There is a national movement that is being played out in libraries, schools and bookstores in which drag queens read come and read to children.  The Drag Queen Story Hour is touring the country and drawing publicity wherever they go.  “Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is just what it sounds like—drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores” according to its website.  Aimed at 4-7 year old children, these events are little more than child abuse however for reasons that ought to be readily apparent.

There probably has been “story time” for as long as there have been stories, which means almost always.  From time immemorial children have loved it because it feeds their soul.  Childhood is a time of wonder, a time where a child’s natural desire for truth, beauty and goodness are fed.  Stories are one of the means by which wonder is sparked and truth is found.  It makes use of the power of wonder to set them on the path of truth.  The architects of Drag Queen Story Hour also know about the power of childhood wonder, but they abuse it.  They abuse it by making the story-teller the focus rather than the story.  And in this way we can accurately say that these events are truly child abuse.

Why This is Really Abuse

This seems like hyperbolic rhetoric until we examine it a little further.  It was called child abuse, not just because it abuses their sense of wonder, but child abuse because it abuses childhood.  Man has natural desires that need to be fed.  The highest of these desires is for knowledge of the truth.  It is not the strongest, that privilege belongs to sexual desire, but it is the highest and is tied to our ultimate fulfillment.  Wonder is the fuel that sets man on the journey for truth.  Thanks to a child’s natural development, sexual desire is curbed for almost the first decade and a half of their life.  This creates room for them to develop their capacity for wonder and to find its ultimate fulfillment in Truth.  For full development of the child they must be allowed space for creative play, learning and discovery.  Story time is meant to fill the gaps where experience is lacking. 

To manipulate this natural course of development is the very definition of abuse.  Children are not naturally sexual beings nor are they particularly curious about sex.  We know this because of their natural hormonal development (sex hormones remain steady and relatively low for the first 10-12 years of life), but also because they exhibit a natural (and healthy) sense of shame.  These story times are meant not to sexualize children, at least not directly, but to remove their otherwise healthy sense of shame.  Once they do develop sexually, the protection of shame will be gone and the child will be particularly apt to participate in sexual activity.  But also, by removing their sense of shame, and this is the really important part, they also lose their natural protection against sexual intrusions.  A child with no sense of shame will not tell another adult they have been violated because they think it is normal.  This early sexualization is not really about them at all, but to make them into victims who offer no resistance.  To see this as anything other than an attempt to normalize pedophilia is to ignore the facts.

But it also has a second purpose that is closely related to the first.  The “revolution” in the Sexual Revolution is not for unbridled sexual activity.  The revolution is that it is the means by which a new world order can be imposed from above.  The old order, marked by Christian morality and founded upon the family, has to be overthrown.  It will be replaced by slavery to vice and founded upon the fiat of Big Daddy.  People who are addicted to vice are easy to control because they will regularly give away their freedom for a hit.  The Sexual Revolution is a direct attack on both Christian morality and the family.  And the Drag Queen Story Hour is yet another example. 

The New World Order

It is an obvious attack on Christian morality by breaking down the walls that have kept people free.  According to its website “in spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real” (emphasis added).  Notice the subtle use of revolutionary language first of all.  But the problem is that dress up can never be “real” because we are not the masters of reality.  Reality is something outside of us and only those who conform themselves to it, can truly operate freely within it.  Children are given wonder to discover reality, not to make up their own.  To abuse that is to make the next generation the revolutionary foot soldiers. The restrictions are there to keep us free.  Christian morality has, for the past two millennia, given the guiderails to reality.  Remove those guiderails and all that is left is power to keep order.

Story time replaces the family.  Parents have always told their children stories, even when they couldn’t read.  It was the primary pedagogical tool in the parents’ teaching toolbox.  It was the means by which true values were passed from one generation to the next.  All of this happened within the confines of the home, enabling wonder to run free and safe, while questions abound.  Parents would answer the questions and give their children not just stories but truth.  But now story time must be done outside the home so that indoctrination can occur.  A distinctly parental activity becomes a public one.  One more chink in the armor of the family. 

“It takes a village to raise a child” may not actually be true, but it will be made true unless we put a stop to this nonsense.  Children are being abused and are being set up for further abuse.  We are raising the lost generation unless we act counter to this movement.  The Sexual Revolution is winning and if we do nothing to stop it, then we will all be living in a new world order.

Christ the King and Theocracy

Church and State, Church Authority, Defending the Faith, Politics, ,

In the opening lines of his letter to the Roman Christians, St. Paul reveals to them how the wrath of God is being revealed in the decadent Roman society in which they are immersed.  It is not through powerful astronomical events, famines or plagues (although it could be) but instead God “gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error…They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.  Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them “(Romans 1:26-32).  Sometimes the punishment for sin is, put simply, the sin itself.

Only the man who willingly choses to wear blinders would miss the obvious parallels to our own day.  The punishments listed by St. Paul match up perfectly with the primary social ills that plague us today.  The fact that these act as punishment for sin might explain why so many are enslaved and very little headway is made towards eradicating their widespread practice through moral reasoning.  These are the grounds upon which the so-called “culture wars” are fought.  Thus it is especially important to pay attention to the root sin that causes it all.  St. Paul says that the Gentiles were being punished “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God” (Romans 1:28).

At the heart of culture, is cult.  Liturgy both forms and redeems culture.  This seems to have been forgotten, but it was something that Pope Pius XI was keenly aware of.  In his 1925 encyclical Quas Primas, the Pope acknowledged that “the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring and the manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations” (Pope Pius XI, Quas Primas, 1).  By instituting a solemn feast, the Pope was calling down from heaven particular graces upon the Church in order to help her fulfill her mission in today’s world.

Christ the King and the Mission of the Church

And what exactly is that mission?  To keep clear the path for the reign of Christ.  But this mission is often eclipsed by an irrational fear of creating a “theocracy”.  A theocracy is exactly what must be created.  Or, perhaps to use a word less charged with meaning, a confessional state.  The delegation of the authority, because it is given to fallen, yet presumably redeemed men, will be diffused between Church and State, but there should be absolutely no opposition between the two.  Christ is both king of Church and State because all power in heaven and on earth was given Him (c.f. Mt. 28:18).  It is His power that the Church wields, and it is that same authority by which the State draws its legitimacy.

That Christ must rule even the State has been forgotten so immersed have we become in the error of “Separation of Church and State”.  Unaware of the waters we are swimming in, Pius XI thought it helpful to develop the “logic” of Christ’s Kingship.

Within an ethos of individualism, we often think of Christ as ruling individual men.  While that is true, it does not go far enough.  Man is by nature a social animal and thus you cannot rule over individual men while not also ruling over those individual men when they come together in society.  One might concede this to be true and then say “that is why we have the Church.”  Again, true, but again, not far enough.  While his spiritual reign has a certain primacy, His reign is also temporal.

Likewise, when we speak of the Kingship of Christ, we often refer to Him ruling over the hearts of mankind.  It impossible to rule over the hearts of men without ruling over their worldly affairs.  We are not disembodied angels, but men, body and soul composites.  Finally, while the consummation of His reign will not reach fruition until the end of time, all of time should see it growth in that direction.  Once the Feast was moved to the end of the Liturgical Year, rather than in October as Pius XI first promulgated it, there was a tendency to associate His Kingship with the end of the world.  This led to a lowering of the bar so that the goal became for Christ only to rule over the hearts of men.

What Separation of Church and State Has Wrought

It is the separation of Church and State that has led to society’s forgetting God.  In other words, the separation of Church and State is a denial of Christ’s Kingship.  The only way to win the culture war then is to restore the rightful King to His throne.  Again, there should be a separation of powers, but they must be pulling in the same direction.  In this model the State becomes a means to the salvation of mankind as it removes every temporal impediment within its sphere of influence.  By recognizing His Kingship, a Kinship that is His by right as Redeemer, He acts upon those temporal things that positively aid men’s salvation and sanctifies them.  By sharing in His temporal Kingship, the temporal leaders earn a grace of state that empowers them to rule more justly.

The Church, with Christ as King, rules the spiritual realm, answering only to Christ Himself.  The civil authority is subject to the Church but only insofar as the Church issues judgment upon those temporal things that could hinder the progress in the supernatural realm. This is the basis of what was called the “indirect power of the pope” by which the Church can intervene in temporal affairs in order to safeguard the interests of the divine life.

In short, recognition of Christ’s kingship means that Church and State have a unified goal—the salvation of men.  When a wall of separation is erected, the State, because it has rejected the True King and is governed solely by men, will always attempt to keep the Church out.  It does this by offering salvation to its citizens through utopic solutions.  Short of that it will offer them “bread and circuses” to but a wall of separation between their bodies and spirits.

Pius XI was not the only Pontiff to recognize this problem.  In his Encyclical on the Constitution of Christian States, Leo XIII said “The authority of God is passed over in silence, just as if there were no God; or as if He cared nothing for human society; or as if men, whether in their individual capacity or bound together in social relations, owed nothing to God; or as if there could be a government of which the whole origin and power and authority did not reside in God Himself… it follows that the State does not consider itself bound by any kind of duty toward God ”(Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 24-25).  And his solution?  “The people have heard quite enough about what are called the ‘rights of man’. Let them hear about the rights of God for once” (Pope Leo XIII Tamesti Future).  The Feast of Christ the King is the constant reminder of that exhortation.

The End of the Death Penalty?

Church and State, Church Authority, Defending the Faith, Politics, Pope Francis, ,

Today the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had approved a change to the Catechism of the Catholic Church regarding the use of the death penalty.  The specific paragraph in the Catechism, no. 2267, had included an important qualifier admitting that the State may validly have recourse to its use: “the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty.”  The modified version has removed this important qualifier and now says the death penalty is “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide.”  While this may seem like a relatively small change, at least doctrinally speaking, it is more important than one might think.

The Snowball Effect

First, it means that the preceding paragraph (no. 2266) also will need to be modified.  Legitimate public authority no longer has the right and duty to inflict proportionate punishment to the offense.  I have written about this in greater detail earlier this year, but to summarize, by saying that there are no crimes deserving of death, you ultimately invite injustice through arbitrary punishment.  As I put it back in March, “To say that a mass murderer deserves the same punishment (life imprisonment) as say a rapist is to ultimately destroy the principle of proportionality.  That a mass murderer gets only life imprisonment would suggest that a rapist who, “at least didn’t kill someone” should get less.  This leads to a sort of arbitrariness in punishment, including excess or even no punishment at all.”

This one change creates a snowball effect that can only become an avalanche of change.  The Church’s divinely inspired teachings can be likened to a seamless garment so that if you tug at the smallest string of doctrine the entire thing unravels.  Necessarily the Church’s teaching will then have to change regarding the rights and duties of the State, followed by the rights and duties of the individual and so on.  Before long we are left with a pile of string.

More importantly, the change also signals to the Faithful that the Pope is wrong.  Mind you, I am not saying this particular Pope is wrong (yet) but the Vicar of Christ is, in a very real way, one voice throughout the centuries.  Numerous Popes have taught that there are valid applications of Capital Punishment (including Pius V and his Catechism of the Council of Trent, Pius XII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and all the Popes who, as head of the Papal States, exercised their right and duty in executing criminals as a means of retributive justice), even if they exercised prudential judgment as to when it should be applied.  Now we begin to see why this is about more than just the death penalty.  Either all of these Popes taught error or this particular Pope is now teaching error by abolishing the death penalty.

In what now appears to have been a prophetic utterance, the future Pope Benedict XVI, as Prefect for the Congregation of Divine Faith under St. John Paul II, once said:

“[I]f a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment… he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities… to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible… to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about… applying the death penalty…”

Given this and the fact that the new version appears to be literally wiping out tradition (recall the paragraph in question makes reference to “the traditional teaching of the Church”), we should be inclined to side with the litany of saints and previous Popes who thought that Capital Punishment could be a just, and therefore licit, means of punishment.  In short, by calling the death penalty “inadmissible” the Pope is contradicting Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture.  Rarely used? Fine, that is a prudential matter.  Absolutely immoral or inadmissible?  This is too far, contradicting Tradition and leads to injustice.

It IS all about the Dignity of the Person

The Scriptural justification is particularly relevant in this case because it directly contradicts the wording of the new No. 2267.  While setting up His covenant with Noah, God says “Anyone who sheds the blood of a human being, by a human being shall that one’s blood be shed. For in the image of God have human beings been made” (Gn 9:6).  Obviously it is problematic (at best) to say that God has commanded something that the Pope is now calling immoral.  But that is not really the biggest problem with the now “inadmissible” nature of the death penalty.

Vatican spokesman Greg Burke when speaking of the new wording said “the key point is really human dignity.”  But dignity is a two-edged sword of sorts.  Notice that the Lord tells Noah that it is because murder is an affront to man’s dignity as made in the image of God that men should have recourse to the death penalty.  In other words, rather than being an attack on the dignity of the person, the death penalty affirms it.  It affirms the dignity of the victim.  You cannot speak of the dignity of the offender while at the same time ignoring the dignity of the victim.  Eventually you do violence to the notion of human dignity until it becomes a term devoid of any real content.  To say that a human person is so valuable that the only proportionate punishment for killing him is to forfeit your own life (the most valuable thing you own) is a great testament to the dignity of the human person.

Perhaps not as obvious is the fact that the death penalty also affirms the dignity of the offender as well.  Edward Feser goes into more detail on this in his book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, but his point is rather salient.  Capital punishment treats the offender not as a victim of his own rage, but as a free moral agent (i.e. made in the image of God).

Mr. Burke is right, the key point is human dignity, but not in the way he meant it.  To fully take the death penalty off the table ends up degrading the value of human life.  It is false then to deem the death penalty inadmissible in all cases and contrary to the Gospel—the power to take the life of a criminal comes from above (c.f. Jn 19:11).  Anyone who says otherwise is contradicting Sacred Scripture and Tradition.

The American Athanasius

Creed, Culture, Defending the Faith, Freedom, Natural Law, Paganism, Politics, ,

Throughout her 2000 year history, the Church has confronted a number of great heresies that put Our Lord’s promise that she would not fail to the test.  The greatest of these may have been the first, Arianism.  It challenged the divinity of Christ, labeling Him as the greatest of all divinely inspired creatures.  The Arians taught that “He was”, as Hillaire Belloc put it, “granted, one might say (paradoxically) all the divine attributes but divinity itself.”  At its height, almost ¾ of the world’s bishops were Arian along with most of the army.  So widespread had the heresy become that there were many “rank and file” Christians who were Arians and didn’t even know it.  Swimming within the Arian waters, they were presumably orthodox even though they were, in truth, heterodox.  It was really the grace-filled insistence, mingled with plenty of personal suffering, of one man, St. Athanasius, that kept us all from becoming Arians (and not knowing it).  But rather than offering an account of how he did this, instead he is put before us as an example to be followed.  Many of us, wholly unawares, are swimming within the waters of a different heretical tank.  It is the heresy of Americanism.

This term, Americanism, may be vaguely familiar to some of us, but for the most part it is as foreign as the term Arian was to our 4th Century counterparts.  Although appearing under different guises such as Gallicanism, it is essentially a subordination of the spirit of Catholicism in favor of a nationalistic one.  In an 1899 letter to James Cardinal Gibbons called Testem Benevolentiae, Pope Leo XIII warned his American colleague of the danger confronting both the American Church and, because of its rising prominence, the Church universal.  It is, as one papal biographer of Leo XIII put it, “A spirit of independence which passed too easily from the political to the religious sphere.”

The Errors of Americanism

Pope Leo XIII attached four specific errors to Americanism.  First, all external guidance is set aside as superfluous so that all that is needed is the interior lights of the Holy Spirit.  It is the American ideal of rugged individualism, freedom of conscience, and a rejection of any authority that animates this error.  Second there is a higher regard for natural virtues than for supernatural virtues as if the latter are somehow passive and therefore defective.  This comes from the practicality of the American spirit that shuns philosophy in favor of the empirical and a do it yourself mentality.  Third there is a rejection of religious vows as somehow incompatible with the spirit of Christian liberty.  There is a certain irony here given how important religious communities like the Jesuits and Franciscans were in the beginnings of our country.  Finally, and perhaps the underlying principle of the entire heresy is that the Church should shape her teachings in accord with the spirit of the age.  To gain those who differ from us we should omit certain points of teachings so as to make the faith more palatable.

At the time the letter was written the US Bishops agreed that these would be a great problem if they were present in the American Church, but denied that they could be found and dismissed them.  This point is obviously historically debatable, especially given that Americanist tendencies can be found from the beginning in the actions and writings of the first bishop in the United States John Carroll who was a cousin of Charles Carroll (of Carrollton as he reminded the British in signing the Declaration of Independence) and was mostly American before he was Catholic.  But what cannot be debated in an age of “personally opposed but…” Catholicism Leo XIII was definitely prescient.

One of the reasons that Arianism had such great appeal was that at heart it was simply a clever attempt to save paganism by making Christianity more palatable.  For a pagan, a religion in which a creature was endowed with god-like qualities is easier to swallow than the truth that the Creator became man and suffered to redeem wayward mankind.  And so it is with Americanist Catholics who cleverly seek to focus only on those things that are easy for Americans to swallow.  As she grows older, America’s palate becomes increasingly limited.  For the Catholic the highest law is God’s law mediated through the Church.  For the American it is the Constitution mediated through the Supreme Court without any reference to a Higher Authority.  How long can these two things can co-exist without significant concessions by the Catholic?  Regardless of the timeframe there will come a moment of crisis for both the individual and the Church.  Simply agreeing to disagree and focus only on what unites us is not a solution.  The problem with this of course is that there is no reason then to convert to the fullness of the truth that is found only within the confines of the Barque of  Peter.  Why convert when you are simply promised more of the same?

Patriotism and the Catholic American

Why would I offer this reflection on July 4th of all days on the greatest of all secular holidays?  Could I be any more un-patriotic than to offer a criticism such as this on today, of all days?  To ask the question is to admit the problem.  We are not patriotic to the American ideal.  That is to treat America as a religion, which is at the heart of the problem.  To be sure we love America because it is our home, but it is our home only because we share it with people that we love.  We are patriotic because we follow Our Lord’s commandment to love our neighbor.  Those people who we share a home with are those that God has placed closest to us in order that His commandment might take flesh.  And there can be no greater love than to offer to them the Truth that has been handed on to us by preaching and living it unapologetically.

We find ourselves in a society that is coming apart at the seams and it is because what unites us is not greater than what divides us.  No matter how well the Founding Fathers framed the Constitution (and they did frame well) it was never strong enough to keep us united forever.  There is only one thing in this world that can keep a people united and it is the Church.  Only a reformation of Christendom can save this country and that begins with the Church being more Catholic not less.  For a Catholic resident in a non-Catholic country it is an act of true patriotism to want to convert his country—what we need is an American Athanasius.

 

The Newest Teen Idol

Anthropology, Atheism, Church and State, Politics, , , , ,

To mark his 200th birthday, the self-styled “young person’s guide to saving the world,” Teen Vogue,wrote an article on Karl Marx—“the Anti-Capitalist Scholar.”  The article is worth reading, not necessarily because it is a work of serious scholarship, but because it represents a perfect example of the propaganda that many young people are fed regarding Marxism.  Avoiding the inconvenient truth that his ideology led to deaths in the neighborhood of 150 million people (according to The Black Book of Communism) and focusing instead on the abuses of capitalism that it allegedly rectifies, Marx is presented and an underappreciated genius.  This marks the latest in a long line of attempts to paint the intellectual founder of Communism and his theories in a positive light.  Of course this is a favorite tactic of Lenin himself who thought that targeting the minds of the young and teaching them to love Marx, hate any authority and  label anyone whose ideas differ from theirs as haters (notice how “bosses”, “rich people” and even Donald Trump end up in their sights) they could be won over to Communism.  The rest of the general public, living in a post-Cold War world, remains wholly ignorant to the tenets of Marxism, let alone its inherent dangers.

In his scathing condemnation of Communism (he calls it a “satanic scourge”), Divini Redemptoris, Pope Pius XI said that Communism spread so rapidly because “too few have been able to grasp the nature of Communism. The majority instead succumb to its deception, skillfully concealed by the most extravagant promises…Thus the Communist ideal wins over many of the better minded members of the community. These in turn become the apostles of the movement among the younger intelligentsia who are still too immature to recognize the intrinsic errors of the system” (Divini Redemptoris, 15).  His assessment of Communism remains to this day one of the best overall and succinct descriptions of the goals and errors of Marxism.  It should appear on every Catholic’s reading list, especially those who view Marxism as something relegated to the dustbin of history.  It is still very much alive in places like Cuba and North Korea and in its cultural form in many countries (including our own).

Marxism and Conflict

Rather than focusing in this essay on each of these errors, there is one particular aspect that draws our attention.  In the last paragraph of the Teen Vogue article, the author says “While you may not necessarily identify as a Marxist, socialist, or communist, you can still use Karl Marx’s ideas to use history and class struggles to better understand how the current sociopolitical climate in America came to be.”  This plea for open-mindedness towards Marxism is really a thinly veiled attempt to promote it.  It rests on an important assumption attached to Marx’s philosophy that paves the way for the whole package—his dialectical and historical materialism.

Marx’s interpretation of history is simple; it is a process that is driven inevitably forward by the law of dialectics.  In this vision of history, all social change comes about through class conflicts produced by economic causes.  As Marx put it, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1 ).  This growth occurs according to the pattern of the dialectic.  Thesis generates its own antithesis and from this conflict a synthesis emerges.  This synthesis becomes the new thesis and the process continues until it reaches its end—the Communist society.  For Marx, the rise of Capitalism had reduced society to only two classes, the Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.  What he proposed was a single world-wide revolution that abolishes the Bourgeoisie and puts an end to class conflict forever under the “dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

To organize the young around the view that all of history is oppression is the key to the spread of the Marxist revolution (or any revolution for that matter).  This is also at the heart of the challenge by cultural Marxism that we face.  The dialectic of oppression is the predominant social vernacular of our day.  The rich oppress the poor, men oppress women, white men oppress black men, religious majority oppress the sexual libertines and on and on.  We must see this for what it is—something the Holy Father warned about, “The preachers of Communism are also proficient in exploiting racial antagonisms and political divisions and oppositions” (DR, 15).

Marx’s vision of history is not historical but religious instead.  He offers no evidence to support his claim that all of history is conflict and accepts no explanation to the contrary.  In fact, if we look at history then there are plenty of examples of cooperative societies (including the family and apprentice/master relationships) that were not in perpetual conflict.  The Christian High Middle Ages were not a period of economic conflict either.  Historian Christopher Dawson has shown conclusively that history has been moved not by economic factors, but religious ones.  Of course there is some truth to the fact that when the cooperative elements broke down, conflict ensued.  But still that can hardly be the lens through which we view all history.

One could refute Marx based on his unproven assumption, but there is a more important anthropological assumption that needs to be challenged.  For Marx the goal is the perfection of society and thus each individual exists for the sake of the whole.  Each man becomes a cog in the machine of society and thus is expendable, leaving him without any true rights.  In the Christian conception of man, society exists for the individual; not in the liberalist sense of individualism couched in a social contract, but because each man only finds his individual perfection by contributing to the whole.   Man is social by nature because He is made in the image of God, Who, as a communion of Person, is social by nature too.

Conflict and Complementarity

This is ultimately why the conflict theory of history doesn’t fly.  Society is formed by men who are all made in God’s image, thus giving them a certain equality.  But this equality does not mean we are destined for a classless society.  The message is not one of conflict but complementarity in which each man and woman finds and is satisfied with their own station in life.  They are fulfilled only by finding this station and living out of it.  This place is predetermined only in the sense that it is part of God’s providential plan and not based upon the preconceived ideas of other men and women.  Richer and poorer depend equally upon each other for their own personal fulfillment.  Men and women, black and white, likewise are the same.  When done well without social agitation from cultural Marxists, this can become a reality.

Perhaps this sounds more utopian than Marxism itself.  This vision will not put an end to oppression because the problem is not in the social structure but in the human heart.  “The poor you will always have with you” because there will always be Original Sin and its accompanying oppression.  But it is not a social revolution that will put an end to that but a revolution of each man against himself.  But this revolution will never come about unless we live out of the truth.  The exterior must support the interior.  The revolutionary language of oppression will never bring about this revolution but only further alienates us from each other and from ourselves.  It’s time we pull the mask off Marxism and call it when we see it.

On Social Justice

Moralilty, Politics, Virtue, ,

Over the last couple of years, the protest movement has gathered so much steam that there seems to be an organized protest over nearly everything.  One California company has even gone as far as to offer their employees paid time off to participate in protests as a form of social justice.  The fact that these “social justice” protests result in destruction of property, violence and any number of offenses against justice shows that these protest movements are actually counter-productive at best.  They are based on a cart before the horse principle in which the participants and organizers (assuming at least some good will on their part) assume that once “just” social structures are in place, then the people will act justly.  Until this happens, they may need to “make a mess,” to borrow a phrase from the liberal manifesto Rules for Radicals to grab people’s attention, but that should eventually settle down.  But the cart of social justice can only be pulled by the horses of just individuals.  That the protestors are unjust while screaming for justice shows just how convoluted our thinking about justice has become and how necessary it is to develop a more complete understanding of justice.

Justice is the firm and habitual disposition to give to each person his or her rightful due.  Or, put more succinctly, justice is the habit of giving to each what is owed to them.  In short, to “owe” another person means that we are giving, or more accurately restoring, to them something that they already own.  Those more classically schooled will recognize in the “firm and habitual disposition” the definition of a virtue.  Justice is one of the four virtues (along with prudence, temperance and fortitude) on which all the other virtues depend.

The Interiority of Justice

It merits a reminder as well that because justice is a virtue, this means that it is primarily something interior to the person and not exterior.  Just as the person who habitually lies is a liar, so too the person who habitually acts justly is just.  The “environment” helps us to be more or less just, but it is the individual man who is just.  When a critical mass of individuals are just, a social justice follows.  Men without the virtue of justice, no matter how just the social structure, will always tend to destroy that structure.  That is precisely what we see in the protest movement—injustice committed in the name of justice.  While this might be a glaring example, the same can happen when the leaders are not just men either.

As the definition suggests, justice is meant to govern relationships and so to speak of “social justice” is a bit of a tautology.  This is why it remains a fuzzy concept for many of us and often just ends up being a mask for a political movement.  The Church has always viewed it as the cooperation of just men who form, maintain, or re-form social institutions that serve the common good.  Justice rules (i.e. social justice) a community when three fundamental structures of communal life are in proper order—individuals one to another (commutative), society to individuals (distributive) and individual to society (legal justice).  In his book on Justice, Josef Pieper has a helpful diagram to keep these straight.

 

The first form of justice is called commutative justice.  Commutative justice is usually what we think of when we speak of justice.  It governs the relationship between two people and assumes a certain level of equality between the two.  Being equals, they must equally bear the burden of any social exchange.  A person needs a pair of shoes from a cobbler and exchanges a just price, say $10, for the shoes.  Anything less than that then the buyer would be guilty of an offense against commutative justice.  Anything more and it would be the cobbler who violates commutative justice (As an aside, I will post on the Church’s teaching on just price, so for now just assume that $10 is a just price). It is also commutative justice governs the duty of restitution.   If a person steals from another, then they violate commutative justice and the guilty party must make some restitution to restore to the victim that which is owed.

Because many people think only in terms of commutative justice, many injustices occur because groups of men have obligations towards individuals.  In truth, while commutative justice is based on a principle of equality, men are not equal in all ways.  This is why the Church also speaks of distributive justice.  Distributive justice is not based on equality, but based on proportion, according to need, merit, circumstance, etc.  What properly belongs to man through distributive justice is a proportionate share in what is common to everyone, that is, to each man must be given a proportionate (not equal) share of the common good.

A classic example helps us to see how these first two forms of justice work.  Suppose there are two brothers, ages 2 and 16, and they approach their parents because they want candy.  There is only a single bag of M&Ms left and so the parents must divide the bag between the two.  Rather than counting the M&Ms and splitting them evenly, the parents give the 16 year old  2/3 of the bag and the 2 year old, 1/3.  They give unequal distribution because of their ages and amount of candy they should eat.  This is distributive justice.

Just as in the example the parents, who govern the good of the family, chose the allotment of M&Ms, it is the custodian of the common good in society then that determines the proper proportion.  For society as a whole this would be the State, or more properly understood, an individual that has the power to determine the allotment.  So, it is not the State that is just or unjust, but individuals holding power within the State that act justly or unjustly.  This simply reiterates the point about when the emphasis is on just structures and not just men, justice is almost never achieved.

Social Justice

Social justice is often equated with distributive justice because it is viewed mainly as a problem of distribution and the focus mainly remains on this dimension.  However, those who desire social justice ought to focus more on the relationship between the individual and society that St. Thomas calls legal justice. In short it is the individual, not focusing so much on his rights, but on his duties to society that creates social justice.  It is, to borrow from JFK’s famous speech, to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”  If each man were to focus on contributing to the common good and not just his own private goods then social justice would reign.

What all of this brings to the forefront is that the protest movements as they are practiced now are truly protesting against social justice.  In attempting to raise the awareness of injustices, they do harm to the common good.  Anyone who reads Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, can’t help but be struck by his thoughtful reflection upon what is just.  It was only because he had spent time thinking about justice that he was able to envision what it would look like.  He and his fellow co-founders of the Civil Rights Movement refused to counter injustice with more injustice.  Instead they kept their eyes focused on the common good (the focal point of his I Have a Dream speech) and how a more just society could be formed.  Destroying property, trampling on the good of the free speech of others, and destroying public order all creates less social justice not more, no matter how many days of paid leave they are given to protest.

Which Will You Have, Barabbas or Jesus?

Politics, Relativism, The Life of Jesus, ,

As part of the celebration around Jewish Passover each year, one prisoner was granted amnesty each year.  During the Roman trial of Our Lord, Pilate in recognition of that tradition, put forward two candidates for the Passover Amnesty—Barabbas and Jesus of Nazareth.  While Barabbas was a relatively obscure revolutionary in his day, there is perhaps no “minor” character in all the Gospels that plays a more pivotal role than he.  He is also significant because he incarnates some of the traps that Christians can fall into when it comes to Our Lord.

The Political Trap

The first trap is to view everything through a political filter.  Pontius Pilate was like many Americans in our own day, only able to see through a political lens.  Pope Benedict XVI points out in his book on Holy Week that Barabbas was an infamous rebel whom Pontius Pilate feared.  Once Pilate realized that Jesus was not only innocent, but was also politically harmless, he sought a political solution to the problem.  He thought the trial could be ended and he could still have favor with the Jews by offering Jesus as a candidate for the Passover amnesty.  He assumed that the people would choose the innocent Jesus rather than the dangerous Barabbas.  This is why we see him repeatedly lobbying for Jesus’ innocence.  The problem with this of course was once Our Lord was put forward as a candidate for amnesty, guilt was assumed and Our Lord already condemned.

Frank Sheed reported that Pilate already had three major conflicts with the Jews prior to the incident with Jesus.  Two of these had been settled within Judea itself, with Pilate winning one and having to yield to the Jews in the other.  The third conflict had been sent to the Emperor Tiberius himself.  Pilate sought to avoid an appeal to Caesar at all costs.  His patron in Rome, Sejanus, had recently been executed in Rome.  That is why he sought two loopholes in order to avoid making a decision; sending Jesus to Herod the Tetrarch and by making an appeal to the crowd.  When these both fail, he chooses the politically expedient solution without any regard to innocence and truth—“I am personally opposed, but…”

Freedom is first and foremost a theological reality, that is “an exceptional sign of the divine image in man” (Gaudium et Spes, 17) and not a political one.  Our Lord may have been in chains, but “no one takes My life, I lay it down of my own accord.”  He was the freest man who ever walked the face of the earth.  Barabbas may have shed his chains and Pilate may have thought himself master of all in Jerusalem but both were chained to the whim of the crowd.  They both remind us that we are only truly free in one sense—we are always free to do that which is good.  But each time we run with the herd, that capacity within us shrinks to the point where we forget we have it.  Eventually we wonder “what is Truth?” Sooner or later we eventually run out of room to compromise and must either unconditionally surrender our freedom or declare “non possumus.”

The Theological Trap

The second trap is theological in character.  The name Barabbas literally means “Son of the Father.”  Matthew in his Gospel calls him a “notorious prisoner” (Mt 27:16), which is probably an indication that he was a leader of a political uprising.  In this way, the people are presented with two very different messianic figures, both “Sons of the Father”, who are accused of the same offense—rebellion against Roman rule.  It is clear which one Pilate prefers.  He prefers the nonviolent one whose “kingdom is not of this world” rather than the violent Barabbas.  The crowd and the Jewish authorities however, want a different kind of Messiah.   They do not want one that works through love and truth but instead one who promises political power based upon violent revolt.  They do not want the one who picks up His cross, but the one who would crucify.

John refers to Barabbas as a “robber.”  This term (lēstēs in Greek) was often a term used to describe those who stirred up rebellion and is the same term that Jesus uses to contrast the behavior of the Good Shepherd.     It is clear that John has in mind a concrete example of the people choosing a false shepherd in choosing Barabbas.

That we should not set up for ourselves false shepherds seems obvious but there is a subtle way that we do this that is not always easy to catch.  I once went to a book signing where the author who writes historical fiction spoke about the Founding Fathers.  She talked about how she loved Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin growing up until she found out they owned slaves and grew to completely loathe them.  She then went on to say how she now thought Alexander Hamilton was the greatest of all the Founding Fathers because of his abolitionism.  I was struck how she was unwilling to overlook Jefferson and Franklin’s moral failings and see the good that they did, but overlooked Hamilton’s many moral failings.

The point is not that support of slavery is a minor or major moral failing, but that there is a tendency to demonize or canonize a person based on how their position gibes with our own (or usually the politically correct one).  Jefferson and Franklin had serious moral failings, support of slavery among them, but they also had good ones too, the fruit of which we are still drawing today. Hamilton’s character was such that he saw slavery as the evil that it is, but his other moral failings (including great pride leading directly to his death) should render us slow to praise him as the greatest of the American Founders. Similarly Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy combined to helpd the civil rights cause more than any two men in US history, but both were serial adulterers.  The point is that we already have a Messiah, and none of those men are Him.  The minute we try to set up fallen men as the Messiah, we feel we must defend them and justify any flaws. There will always be a gravity towards crowning the latest hero as the Messiah. However when Christ remains the Messiah, we can see how these men were instrumental (or not) in bringing other men into His Kingdom. Only there does true greatness lay.

The Peace Trap

Finally, Barabbas reminds us that peace only comes where there is justice.  Pilate knew very well that justice demanded that Jesus be released and that Barabbas remain imprisoned. But he feared an uprising, a loss of peace.  In the end, it was a band aid as Jerusalem would eventually be destroyed.  Barabbas reminds us that we cannot peace by making a lie into a system (Jeremiah 6:14).

Peace, St. Thomas says, is the tranquility of order.  This means peace can only come about when our lives and our society are properly ordered.  This is not about “social justice” of which there will be none until we have this proper ordering.  First and foremost it means giving God His due.  Any society that does not put God first is absolutely doomed to fail.  Do we really believe this?  Rather than trying to blame the secularists for this, why don’t we as Catholics take responsibility for this and stop trying to smuggle Catholicism into society. We are mostly cowards worrying about hurt feelings rather than burning souls (our own included—“woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel”).

Barabbas or Jesus, which will you choose?

Tocqueville and the Bathroom Bill

Human Dignity, Politics

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

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

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

Tocqueville

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abortion in the Hard Cases

Abortion, Politics

Over the last few years, there has been a flurry of activity at the individual state level to declare personhood at conception.  In every case, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, the measures have been voted down.  One of the reasons why voters turned it down was that it would force women to carry to term unwanted pregnancies including those that became pregnant as a result of rape or incest.  This exception is often brought up as a reason for keeping abortion legal.  In fact many who consider themselves Pro-Life will often argue for provisions in laws that keep abortion legal in these cases.  Because this argument is put forth so often, it is instructive to evaluate the merit of the argument to determine whether abortion should be allowable in these, rare, but real cases when pregnancy occurs.

It is important to mention at the outset that those women who become pregnant as a result of rape or incest are victims of the morally reprehensible actions of others.  There is no question as to whether they have suffered a great evil.  Our response must always be one of compassion.  Still, the question is whether as a result of the evil they have suffered, it gives moral justification to commit further evil by taking the life of the unborn child.  Furthermore, as was mentioned above, it is rare that someone becomes pregnant as a result of rape or incest.  Some studies have shown that it occurs in as few as one in a thousand cases and accounts for approximately 2 percent of all abortions.  This is not to minimize the suffering and trauma associated with these cases but to put the frequency in context.  One case of rape or incest is too many.

One further clarification is necessary.  These so-called hard cases should not be relevant to the case for abortion on demand despite the fact that they are often invoked to defend that position.  Supporters of abortion on demand state that a woman has a right to have an abortion for any reason she prefers during the entire nine months of pregnancy and not just rape and incest.  Therefore to argue for abortion on demand from the hard cases is analogous to arguing for the elimination of all traffic laws from the fact that in rare emergencies one might need to violate them. This is important because laws are not made based upon exception.  Laws are meant to conform to normal behavior and nearly every law admits to exceptions.  Nevertheless as it shall be shown, these situations do not constitute valid exceptions to the absolute norm that abortion is always a grave evil.

Finally, it is important to mention as well that because a sexual assault like rape or incest is an act of aggression and cannot be ordered to the unitive and procreative meanings of the sexual act, “a woman who has been raped should be able to defend herself against a potential conception from the sexual assault” (USCCB, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, 36). This means that she can have recourse to any contraceptive measure provided it is not abortifacient in nature.

With these necessary clarifications in place we can begin to look at the justification that is often offered to defend abortion in these so-called hard cases.  There are a number of arguments put forth why abortion is morally justifiable which are summarized succinctly by Bioethicist Andrew Varga.

It is argued that in these tragic cases the great value of the mental health of a woman who becomes pregnant as a result of rape or incest can best be safe-guarded by abortion. It is also said that a pregnancy caused by rape or incest is the result of a grave injustice and that the victim should not be obliged to carry the fetus to viability. This would keep reminding her for nine months of the violence committed against her and would just increase her mental anguish. It is reasoned that the value of the woman’s mental health is greater than the value of the fetus. In addition, it is maintained that the fetus is an aggressor against the woman’s integrity and personal life; it is only just and morally defensible to repel an aggressor even by killing him if that is the only way to defend personal and human values. It is concluded, then, that abortion is justified in these cases (The Main Issues in Bioethics, pp. 67-68).

 

The underlying principle at play here is that evil may never be done so that good may come about.  Any argument related to these hard cases would amount to a utilitarian ethic.  Certainly the trauma that is associated with being a victim of rape or incest may cause great mental and emotional distress.  The child in the womb may serve as a reminder to the mother of the trauma in which she has undergone.  Nevertheless this cannot justify the taking of the life of the child in the womb.

14horton-600

Each of these arguments begs the question that the child in the womb in fact is a person with an inherent dignity from the moment of conception.  Therefore it has a right to life that ought to be protected from the moment of conception.  The manner in which the child has been brought into being ought not to have any effect on its moral status.  The child may have been conceived as a result of a sexual assault or as a result of a loving union of husband and wife. The result of each of these methods is the same.  A new and complete human person has been brought into being with the full dignity of any human person.  Therefore because the children are the same regardless of the manner in which they were brought into being, the moral status ought to be identical.

Despite the fact that the child is the result of an act of aggression, the child himself is not the aggressor.  It is the perpetrator of the assault who is the aggressor. The unborn entity is just as much an innocent victim as its mother. Therefore, abortion cannot be justified on the basis that the unborn is an aggressor.

In arguing that abortion is justified because of the emotional and mental anguish that the child’s presence places on the mother also presents us with a slippery slope.  From this, one might extend the right to take the life of another person any time that they cause emotional and mental anguish upon the same principle.  For example, suppose a husband were to become disabled later in life and the disability would cause great emotional and mental stress on his wife as his caregiver.  Applying the same principle, the wife would be morally justified in taking the life of her husband.  Although this may seem absurd, it is simply an application of the same principle that a mother uses in justifying the killing of her child that was conceived as a result of a sexual assault.

In conclusion, it should go without saying that the pro-life advocate should not simply stop at protecting the life of the child in the womb.  Much help also needs to be given to the victim of the assault.  Stephen Krason in his book Abortion: Politics, Morality, and the Constitution reminds us that we all have an obligation “to make it as easy as possible for her to give up her baby for adoption, if she desires. Dealing with the woman pregnant from rape, then, can be an opportunity for us—both as individuals and society—to develop true understanding and charity. Is it not better to try to develop these virtues than to countenance an ethic of destruction as the solution?”