All posts by Rob Agnelli

Through the Looking Glass

Contraception, marriage

In his highly prophetic classic Brave New World, Aldous Huxley tells of a world in which all women are forced to turn their eggs over to the state. The eggs are then placed into a manufactured environment which serves as a mother’s womb. Selected sperm is withdrawn from a sperm bank to fertilize the eggs and a new life is grown under supervision. This new process is called “decanting,” rather than birth.  While most people in the 1930s would have thought this impossible, today this possibility looms ever closer.  Much of what he described has become commonplace in our world today through the use of reproductive technologies such as IVF and artificial insemination.  It is so common that one of Time Magazine’s “100 Hundred Questions for the New Century” was whether we will still need sex to procreate.  One would think that because the Church is “pro-child” and opposes such things as artificial contraception that she too would be promoting these reproductive technologies.  This is because they aid in bringing about the great good of human life.  However, because the Church is concerned with “the dignity of the human person and his integral vocation,” she teaches that many of these techniques are morally wrong (Donum Vitae (DV), Introduction, 1).

There are a variety of these techniques available today.  The Church opposes the use of some of these means and not others.  The basic principle at play in the use of these reproductive technologies is whether a given technique assists or substitutes for the conjugal act.  If it assists the conjugal act then it is morally licit and if it replaces the conjugal act it is illicit (DV, Section II, 6).  In general the Church refers to the latter as “artificial fertilization” procedures.  Among the most common of these procedures are in vitro (literally means “in a glass”) fertilization and artificial insemination.

With this distinction made, it is instructive to look at the foundation the Church uses for making her moral judgment.  In 1987, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) released the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation—called Donum Vitae in Latin—that formally addressed the moral issues associated with these new reproductive technologies.  In it, the CDF put forth three reasons to support the Church’s position.  They are the dignity of the child, the inseparable link between the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act, and the “language of the body” (DV, II, B 4-5).

IVF Dish

All persons from the moment of conception have equal dignity because they are made by God in His own image.  This means that every relationship is one of equality between persons.  However with the use of artificial fertilization, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product.  In essence this is “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology” (DV, II, B 4c).

Furthermore, once the child is viewed as a product rather than a person, the temptation to subject him to quality control measures becomes great.  In practice it also leads to other evils that are associated with the production of “excess” human lives that are either subject to abortion (referred to benignly as “selective reduction”), frozen for later use or made subject to medical experimentation.  One study estimated that on average only 1 out of 30 children conceived outside the womb actually survive.

The personalistic norm of then Karol Cardinal Wojtyla illuminates what is at the heart of the push for reproductive technologies.  The norm in its negative form states that a person is “a kind of good which does not admit use and cannot be treated as an object of use and as such the means to an end.”  The foundation of the acceptance of these reproductive technologies then is a utilitarian ethic.  This can also play out in that many couples who struggle with infertility (or even single women and same sex couples) think that a child will make them happy and they therefore should have one at all costs.

The second reason that is put forward by the Church is the inseparability of the unitive and procreative aspects of the conjugal act.  To see why this is the case, we must look at the nature of marriage itself.  Part of the nature of marriage is that there are four fundamental goods: fidelity, permanence, openness to children and friendship between the spouses (c.f. CCC 1643-1654).  For any act then to be marital, it must be perfective of these goods in some way.  Therefore in order for the conjugal act to be truly marital there must not be a “break between the unitive significance and the procreative significance” of the marital embrace (Humanae Vitae, 10).

If the marital embrace is a participation in the goods of marriage then procreation “cannot be likened to those existing in lower forms of life” (DV, Introduction 3). What this means is that there is a fundamental difference between procreation and reproduction.  Procreation is a personal act.  “Pro-create” literally means to create for.  This means that the spouses create for God in that it is God who gives life while the spouses transmit it.   Practically speaking this means that we may not create human life in the same manner (such as in test tubes) that we manipulate animals.

The difference between procreation and reproduction is one that is very often missed because of the failure to see children as a gift and not a right (DV, II, B, 8).  Although one of the sacred duties of marriage is to “accept children lovingly from God,” this does not mean that the spouses have a right to have children by any means necessary.  They must have “respect for the fundamental criteria of the moral law” (DV, Intro).  It truly means that the spouses have a willingness to accept children should God bestow that gift on them.  Janet Smith has a great analogy that she uses to explain this.  She says that infertile couples are like soldiers who go through years of training and never actually fight in a war.  They do not have the right to start a war to fulfill their assignment.  The assignment is not so much to fight as a willingness to fight.

The final reason that the Church offers is that these reproductive technologies violate the “language of the body.”  As we will see, this notion is closely linked to the inseparability principle that was discussed above. This is a notion that is central to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.  It is essential for developing what he called an “adequate anthropology.”

Man, made in the image of God (Gn 1:26), is a body person.  This means that the body is not just something accidental or a mere house for the soul.  The body is not just part of the person but instead is the person as expressed in the physical world.  If the body is the way a person expresses himself, then in some way man must image God, who is a communion of persons pouring themselves out in an eternal exchange of self-giving love, in his body.

John Paul II puts it,

“(T)he body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It was created to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial in God, and thus be a sign of it” (John Paul II, General Audience, Feb 20,1980).

In revealing something of the mystery of God, the body in its sexual complentarity has a spousal meaning.  The spousal meaning of the body is the body’s “capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift” (John Paul II, General Audience, Jan 16,1980).  The spousal meaning of the body is expressed most especially in the conjugal union of spouses.  In order for this union to be an authentic sign of the Trinity it must be a true communion of persons (unitive) and lead to the possibility of a third person (procreative).  The child’s origin then must be directly based upon an act of bodily self-giving by the spouses and not as the result of a laboratory procedure.

Aldous Huxley may have been prophetic in seeing many of the reproductive technologies that have come about, but it was perhaps the twentieth century’s greatest prophet who saw the ethical consequences.  We would all be well advised to heed the warning of John Paul II when he said that once “the human body, considered apart from spirit and thought, comes to be used as raw material in the same way that the bodies of animals are used…we will inevitably arrive at a dreadful ethical defeat” (Letter to Families, 19).

The Church and the Lodge

Church and State, New Age, Politics

With all of the tenacity of Sherman’s March to the Sea, all traces of the Confederacy in the United States are being wiped out.  Flags are being removed from state capitol buildings, statues are being torn down and there has even been a call to rename the Dixie Classic Fair.  There is however one confederate monument that will survive the scorched earth policy.  In Judiciary Square in our nation’s capital sits a Statue of Albert Pike.  Pike is the only Confederate military officer or figure to be honored with a statue in Washington, D.C.  What makes this statue virtually untouchable? Mr. Pike was also the most influential Freemason of his time, if not in the history of the United States.  To remove the statue would be to raise the ire of the Masons, who prowl about like lions ready to devour our country.

President Roosevelt was an ardent Mason and one can easily surmise that he attempted some court-packing beginning in 1937.  Between him and President Truman (also a Mason) ten Masons were appointed between 1937-1949 (you can see a list of other famous Freemasons here).  What this led to was a mere figure of speech by Thomas Jefferson, namely “a wall of separation between Church and State,” becoming enshrined as law.  Prior to the 1947 Everson decision there is absolutely no precedent suggesting that the Constitution ought to be interpreted as espousing a “wall” separating Church and State.  Thanks to stare decisis (which holds that a principle of law is established by the one judicial decision) and Masonic domination of the Supreme Court from 1937-1971 that allowed this decision and many others traditional Judeo-Christian values were permanently removed.  This is why Pope Leo XII in his encyclical On Freemasonry cautioned that the Masons “ultimate purpose forces itself in view—namely, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world that Christian teaching has produced.”  It is also one of the reasons why the Church has always forbade the Faithful to be members of the Masonic Lodge.

For a great number of Catholics the fact that they cannot both be Masons and a Catholic is a surprise, but it is the constant teaching of the Church.  In the 1917 Code of Canon Law (Canon 2335), Catholics who enjoyed membership in a Masonic organization or any other similar group that plotted against the Church or civil authority incurred the penalty of excommunication.  Unfortunately this wording only led to confusion since there is no single governing body for Masons throughout the world and many lodges were not actively engaged in plotting against the Church and civil authority.  Pastorally many interpreted this to mean that they could join certain lodges.  Some even received ecclesial approval from their local bishop to do so.  When the 1983 code of Canon Law was promulgated it only added to the confusion by not mentioning Freemasonry at all, saying “[A] person who joins an association which plots against the Church is to be punished with a just penalty; however, a person who promotes or directs an association of this kind is to be punished with an interdict” (CCL, 1374).  It seemed as if the prohibition against Freemasonry had been lifted.

In order to avoid any further confusion, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the prefect Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) issued its Declaration on Masonic Associations, shortly after the release of the new Canon Law.  He removed any ambiguity by issuing a four-point declaration.  First he declared that Canon 1374 has the same essential import as old Canon 2334.  The fact that the term “Masonic sect” was not mentioned is irrelevant.  Second, the canonical penalties are in no way abrogated because the Church’s negative judgment against Masonry is based on the fact that their principles are irreconcilable with Church teaching.  The main problem is not that Masons conspire against the Church (this is secondary) but the content of its teachings (of which the conspiring is its fruit).

Third, Catholics who join are in grave sin and may not receive Communion.  Finally to avoid any confusion with individual priests and bishops saying it is okay, he said that no local authority has competence to derogate from these judgments.

It is easy to overlook just how irregular the third point is.  “[T]he faithful who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.”  Normally the Church will speak of an action being objectively grave matter and leave the question of subjective guilt (e.g. “in a state of grave sin”) to the individual and his confessor.  However what he is saying is that this is so grievous an act and the teachings of the Craft so contrary to all that is Christian, that the person who joins a Lodge is immediately guilty of a grave offense.

AlbertPikestatue

If you were to ask most Masons, they would describe Freemasonry as a fraternal organization.  They would deny that it has any religious content or teaches a belief system.  Their only requirement is each member believe in God in order to join.  They would cite all of the great good they do in society, especially towards sick children (the Shriners are Masonic organization).  The general public also would be perplexed as to why if animated by a Post-Vatican II ecumenical spirit, the Church would persist in condemning such an organization.

To begin, it is disingenuous at best to say that Freemasonry is not a religion.  The letter “G” in its symbol stands for “Geometry” as the gateway to the “Grand Architect of the Universe” or “whatever your name for the Supreme Being is.” But this is not the only religious reference found in Freemasonry.  In fact many of its rites are perversions of the sacraments (i.e. “sacrileges).  They have a “baptismal” rite by which a father renews his promises and promises that the child will be under the protection of the lodge.  Likewise they mimic the Eucharist in a Holy Thursday “liturgy” in which they never mention Jesus by name and candles being snuffed out one by one (the last one representing Jesus) in a form of black mass.

The “Grand Commander,” Albert Pike wrote Morals and Dogma as a compilation of the teachings of Freemasonry that are necessary for the initiation to higher degrees of membership in the Lodge.  In many ways it serves as a “catechism” of freemasonry.  Pike himself says that the Craft is “[E]very Masonic Lodge is a temple of religion; and its teachings are instruction in religion” (p.213).  In a somewhat schizophrenic manner he earlier claimed that “Masonry is not a religion. He who makes of it a religious belief, falsifies and denaturalizes it. The Brahmin, the Jew, the Mahometan, the Catholic, the Protestant, each professing his peculiar religion, sanctioned by the laws, by time, and by climate, must needs retain it, and cannot have two religions; for the social and sacred laws adapted to the usages, manners, and prejudices of particular countries, are the work of men.  But Masonry teaches, and has preserved in their purity, the cardinal tenets of the old primitive faith, which underlie and are the foundation of all religions.” (p.161)

The point is that they avoid the claim to be a religion by portending to be the foundation of all religions upon which the man is to build his personal creed.  As foundation, it is of course superior to all others.  Some of the basic Freemason religious doctrines include that religion can hope to attract the masses only by deliberately teaching error, God deliberately leads most people away from the truth, Christ is not divine and Satan is not evil.

Pope Leo XIII labeled the masonic teachings under the religion of naturalism. Naturalism denies “any dogma of religion or truth which cannot be understood by human intelligence.” It is appealing to Christians because it uses Christian terminology.  There is no need for divine revelation because all can be known through human reason.  In fact even if there was divine revelation it could not be put into words much less into hard and fast dogma.  Masonry as a “religion of reason” is clearly antithetical to Catholicism as a revealed religion.  The symbol of the cornerstone is meant to convey that Masons have within them the “sure foundation of eternal life.”  This means they have no need for Christ or the Church.  In essence they have made an idol out of reason and set it up as their god.

Not only is Freemasonry a violation of the First Commandment, but it is also a violation of the Second as well.  As the member grows in the degrees of Freemasonry, he takes numerous oaths at each stage.  These oaths are gravely harmful because they call upon God to witness against Himself as He as revealed Himself through the Church or He is being called to witness to a farce (at best).  It is not so much the secret nature of these oaths (with the internet and some strategic googling it is hardly a secret anymore) but the oaths that is the problem.

One may be tempted to merely agree that Christians should not be Masons, but in and of themselves Masons are harmless.  Leo XIII reminds us that much of the work of the Masons remains veiled.  He cautions that although the City of God and the City of Man have been at all times at war with each other “although not always with equal ardor and assault…the partisans of evil seem to be combining together…led on or assisted by …Freemasons.”  In a prophetic manner, Leo XIII summarized their teachings as:

  • They attempt to teach a “civil” morality
  • They reject doctrine of Original Sin and fail to see man as more disposed to vice as to virtue
  • With respect to marriage it is a commercial contract that can be rightly revoked by the will of those who made it and the State has power over the matrimonial bond
  • Youth should not be taught religion but follow what they want when they come of age
  • They teach the heresy of indifferentism (the belief that all religions are the same)

Who could dispute that the Masonic influence is felt greatly today in this summary of American religious convictions?  In an age of Co-existence, the Church and the Lodge remain at irreconcilable odds.

What Is it?

Abortion, Culture of Life

In the landmark Supreme Court decision of Roe versus Wade, the majority opinion stated that we “need not answer the difficult question of when life begins.”  It seems however that this in fact is the fundamental question upon which the abortion debate hinges.  As proof that the inmates are running the asylum, the same decision concedes that “(If the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.”  For those who are in favor of abortion, they often will answer the question of when life begins by making a distinction between a human being and a person.  This distinction usually rests upon the presence of the soul in the person.  Rarely however is this premise attacked.  By using simple philosophy and modern embryology we can find where this assumption is flawed.

To begin it is important to mention that the question of the morality of abortion does not rest upon the question of when the human body is infused with a soul.  The Church has always taught that abortion is morally wrong.  She has affirmed that “the reality of the human being for the entire span of life, both before and after birth, does not allow us to posit either a change in nature or a gradation in moral value, since it possesses full anthropological and ethical status. The human embryo has, therefore, from the very beginning, the dignity proper to a person” (Dignitatis Personae, 5)

Secondly, from a philosophical point of view there is no such thing as a living being that does not have a soul.  The soul is the animating principle of all living things.  The Church has baptized Aristotle’s notion of the three types of souls that exist in a nested hierarchy: vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual.  Each of these has specific functions.  The vegetative soul is concerned with growth, nutrition and reproduction, the sensitive soul is concerned with locomotion and perception and the intellectual soul is concerned with rational thought.  These are nested in the sense that anything that has a higher degree of soul also has all of the lower degrees. All living things grow, nourish themselves, and reproduce. Animals not only do that, but also move and perceive. Finally, man does all of the above in addition to reasoning (Aristotle, De Anima¸413, a.23).

With this foundation in place, we can begin to look at the different theories of ensoulment that have been adopted throughout the course of history.  These theories fall into two broad categories.  The first is usually referred to as “delayed hominization” (or “serial ensoulment theory”) while the second is called “immediate ensoulment theory.”  As the name suggests, “immediate ensoulment” refers to the infusion of the soul at conception.

8 cell stage

The argument for “Serial ensoulment” is summarized as follows: First, because the soul is the form of the body (i.e. makes the body human), the rational soul cannot be present until there is a body present that is significantly complex and organized to receive the soul.  A mere “clump of cells” would not constitute a human body and thus could not receive a human soul.  Third, the claim is that there is no human body in the zygote. Therefore the conclusion is that until the soul is present there is no human being. It was Aristotle who first proposed this theory and called it “delayed hominization.”

He speculated that the human soul was received only after the body was properly prepared for it.  He thought that the embryo was formed from homogenous menstrual blood of the mother by the action of the semen that remained in the womb for at least forty days.  Since this matter was not sufficient enough for the infusion of a human soul, it formed a “pre-person” that had only vegetative functions with a vegetative soul.  Once it developed a heart and brain it then became an animal with an animal soul and eventually progressed into a true human being with an intellectual soul.  This is similar to what many people argue today when they call the child a “potential person.”

One could also find support based on this idea of delayed hominization for the position of someone like Peter Singer who says that a child may be killed up to 18 months old because they are not yet a person.  If we must wait until some (it would have to be arbitrary) milestone of growth is reached before the infusion of a soul then that could happen at any point during development, even outside the womb.

St. Thomas Aquinas agreed with Aristotle and many Catholic thinkers followed his thought.  Because Aquinas also had inadequate biological knowledge he thought that the body that was first formed was vegetative in nature and later underwent a substantial change with a new body in which it was animated by an animal soul.  A substantial change is one in which a whole new entity comes into existence.  It is not mere growth, but the bringing about of a new substance.  Finally there was another substantial change that occurred and the now human body was infused with an intellectual soul.  It is important to note however that for St. Thomas the infusion of the soul happens at the origin of the human body.

If we apply the principles of modern embryology we can then show where the theory of serial ensoulment is lacking.  To say that the body is not “significantly complex and organized to receive the soul” is to grossly misrepresent the nature of the being that results from syngamy.  From the moment of fertilization, the new entity carries out precise, self-directed processes.  From then on, the only thing necessary for growth and development is the same thing we need—water, food, oxygen and a healthy interaction with its natural environment.

Secondly, to say that “a formal cause is present only in a finished product,” is rather vague.  There is no such thing as a “finished product” in the truest sense.  Everything is journeying toward perfection.  However what does remain to be done in the embryo in order to reach perfection is the successive carrying out of inherent potentialities that are already present in the newly conceived person.  Because it has its own unique DNA that is different from either parent and possesses a full genetic program, from this point forward no new genetic info needed to make it into an individual human being.  It already is a human being, just at a particular stage of development.  Also, because the human body has all of the necessary genetic information and internally directed activity to lead to full development then the human soul must be present.

Although the Church has not definitively rejected the theory of delayed hominization, she teaches with relative confidence that theories of delayed hominization are in fact scientifically obsolete.  As the Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin says, “Certainly no experimental datum can be in itself sufficient to bring us to the recognition of a spiritual soul; nevertheless, the conclusions of science regarding the human embryo provide a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of this first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?”

There are some today that have speculated ensoulment does not occur until implantation because of the possibility of twinning that occurs between the time of fertilization and implantation.  However this viewpoint is implausible because the early embryos develop continuously as individuals during that time.  There is not an active potentiality to develop into twins and all of the scientific data points to the possibility of twinning as a passive potentiality.  What this means is that there is nothing in the DNA of the child itself to suggest that it will twin.  Instead it is acted upon from the outside and performs as a mode of asexual reproduction, akin to cloning.

In conclusion, with the increase in biological knowledge (and St. Thomas would have likely agreed) most Catholic thinkers abandoned the delayed ensoulment theory because they recognized that the body that is formed at conception is a human body.  This seems the most reasonable because if the newly conceived child really has a human nature and does not undergo a substantial change then he must have an intellectual soul.  Arming ourselves with both philosophy and modern scientific knowledge we can attack this hidden premise and protect human life at its most hidden and vulnerable stage.

The Immaculata and St. Maximilian

Mary, Saints

St. John Paul II once called St. Maximilian Kolbe “the patron saint of our difficult century.”  He is best known as the “Saint of Auschwitz” who offered his life in exchange for the life of another prisoner.  What many do not know about him is that, like many of the saints of the 20th Century, he was also a great Marian saint.  He tells of Our Lady appearing to him at an early age, two crowns in her hands, “one white, the other red. She asked if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that I should become a martyr.  I said that I would accept them both.” True to her word, Blessed Pope Paul VI beatified him a confessor and St. John Paul II canonized him a martyr.  From that day on, he was animated by a great desire to know Jesus through His Mother and to do “All for the Immaculata!”

In coming to know her, there was one thing he puzzled over his entire life.  This was Mary’s identification of herself as “The Immaculate Conception” when she appeared to St. Bernadette at Lourdes.  Specifically he asked why she did not simply say “I am immaculately conceived” but chose instead to call herself “The Immaculate Conception.”  He knew well the biblical importance of a name and so thought that she was saying more than just the fact that she was conceived without sin.  He thought she was revealing “something that belongs to her very nature” (Letter, Feb 28, 1933).  But he did not fully grasp what this meant until shortly before he was arrested a second time.  In fact, just a few hours before the Gestapo came to round him and four other friars up on February 17, 1941, Fr. Kolbe wrote what would be his last and definitive teaching on the Immaculata.

What Fr. Kolbe focused on was Mary’s unique relationship with the Trinity.  She is the beloved daughter of God the Father, Mother of God the Son and Spouse of the Holy Spirit Who overshadowed her in the Incarnation.  What Kolbe focused on specifically was her relationship with the Holy Spirit. Because the Immaculata is united to the Holy Spirit as His spouse, she is united to God in an incomparably more perfect way than can be said of any other creature (note that she is still a creature though).  He posited that if in human affairs the wife takes the name of her husband to show she belongs to him and is one with him then how fitting should it be that Mary take the name of her Spouse, Who is the Divine Immaculate Conception.

This is an extremely bold claim and one would be tempted to call it a heresy if not for the fact that it was the last spiritual testament of a man whom the Church calls Saint Maximilian.  For the Church not only canonizes a saint for his or her life, but also as a reliable teacher.  To be clear then, what St. Maximilian is teaching has to do as much with the Person of the Holy Spirit as it does Our Lady.

To begin to grasp this, it is first necessary to see if there is something like an Immaculate Conception in God and whether it is appropriate to call the Holy Spirit by this name.  When we speak of divine Conception we must first admit that we can only do so by way of analogy and that to understand this analogy you have to move beyond the idea of physical generation and think of conception in the manner that an artist conceives a painting.  In a spiritual sense “to conceive” has two primary meanings.  First as an intellectual act by which we form an idea.  By way of analogy, this describes the conception of the Son (as Logos) by the Father.  Secondly in the area of the will in which we say “I have conceived a deep affection for him” to describe the experience of a sentiment or passion.  Again, by way of analogy we can speak of the Holy Spirit as being “conceived” through the love of the Father and the Son (St Thomas has a fuller treatment of this in the Summa—ST I qq.44-45 for those who might want to try and tackle it ).

8_14_kolbe2

If we work with this same analogical understanding of God and call to mind that it is the mother’s love that links the father and the son, then analogously we can say there is a certain motherhood appropriated to the Holy Spirit.  This is not by way of generation but by way of love and it links the Father and the Son.  This helps us to understand something of the maternal love that we find in God in the Scriptures.  Understanding this as well, helps us to avoid the trap that many revisionist theologians fall into in which they call the Holy Spirit a “she” or speak of God as Father and Mother.  That is not at all what St. Maximilian is saying.  He is simply saying that in God there is something like the love of a mother.  It also helps us to understand what John Paul II meant when he spoke of Mary sharing in the “the motherhood in the Holy Spirit” in his Encyclical Redemptoris Mater(RM, 43). All of this leads St. Maximilian to conclude that Mary is so completely overshadowed by the Spirit that when she says “I am the Immaculate Conception” she means “I am the manifestation of the Holy Spirit.”

There is a danger at this point to think what St. Kolbe is proposing is that the Holy Spirit took flesh in Mary—another Incarnation of a Divine Person.  However he went to great lengths to reject that and coined the term “quasi-incarnation” to describe what is going on.  Certainly we all agree that if a spirit of evil is capable of “possessing” a human creature to the point of identifying the latter with itself even in a sort of personal way (this is the anti-Christ) then surely the Spirit of God can take possession of his privileged creature Mary.  It is absolutely a marvelous mystery that a human person can be so taken up into the control of God so that her will is completely united to the divine will, but one must readily admit the possibility. The evil spirit enslaves the poor creature he takes over whereas the Holy Spirit stirs up and strengthens liberty deep in the soul of the one he deigns to possess.  Mary describes herself as the “slave of the Lord” but she is the freest human person that ever lived.

Mystery or not, we can begin to understand something of this “quasi-incarnation” if we look at the Christological heresy that led to the Church giving Mary the title, Theotokos, or “God-bearer”.  The Nestorian Heresy said that there were two persons in Christ.  These two persons were united in will and action.  They were also united by inhabitation.  Nestorius said the Word dwelt in Jesus as in a temple.  This is the same way that Lumen Gentium describes Our Lady’s relationship with the Holy Spirit calling her, “Mother of the Son of God, by which account she is also the beloved daughter of the Father and the temple of the Holy Spirit” (LG, 53).  While we are all temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19-20) by virtue of our baptisms, the Immaculata was so by her very nature.

The point is that the Holy Spirit and Mary are two distinct persons, but that Mary is so fully possessed by the Holy Spirit that He acts in and through her perfectly.  This is where the title of Mary as Mediatrix comes from—her wholly unique relationship with the Holy Spirit Whose mission is one of sanctification.

Even if we are willing to concede everything said so far, why does it matter?  Aren’t these just theological ramblings that could easily lead us down into a heretical rabbit hole?  Not at all.  In truth Christians suffer greatly from not knowing the Holy Spirit.  He remains a great mystery to many of us and that greatly limits His ability to work in and through us.  After all, He is still a Person and to claim to love a Person while not really knowing Him is disingenuous at best.  What if we do not know Him because we are looking in the wrong place?  What if Catholics, in turning away from Marian devotion after the Second Vatican Council, also turned away from the Holy Spirit?  What if Protestants, in rejecting the unique role Mary plays in salvation, have also lost sight of the Holy Spirit, Whom they claim to need no mediator for?

Blessed Paul VI also recognized this danger when he wrote in his 1974 Apostolic Exhortation, Marialis Cultus:

It is sometimes said that many spiritual writings today do not sufficiently reflect the whole doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit. It is the task of specialists . . . to meditate more deeply on the working of the Holy Spirit in the history of salvation, and to ensure that Christian spiritual writings give due prominence to His life-giving action. Such a study will bring out in particular the hidden relationship between the Spirit of God and the Virgin of Nazareth, and show the influence they exert on the Church. From a more profound meditation on the truths of the Faith will flow a more vital piety. (MC, 27).

 

The point is that we do not know the Person of the Holy Spirit because we fail to see Him in the one whom He overshadows.  As we develop our relationship with Our Lady, not only does she lead us to her Son, but she does so through the Holy Spirit that dwells uniquely within her.  When we offer her the unique honor due to the Mother of God, we are worshipping the Holy Spirit.  Or as Fr. Kolbe said “[W]hen we honor the Immaculata we are, very specifically, adoring the Holy Spirit.”

St. Maximilian Kolbe, pray for us!

 

Peering into the Darkness

Scripture

In a previous post, it was mentioned how invaluable the idea of Covenant was for a true understanding of Scripture.  It serves as a unifying principle that unlocks the overall purpose of God’s revelation through Sacred Scripture.  A thorough examination of Scripture in its individual parts however presents a number of challenges.  First and foremost, there are those passages that appear to be contradictions like the Lord being “the great king over all gods” (Psalm 95:3) while maintaining the fact that “God is one” (Romans 3:30).  Complicating matters further, there are some rather dark passages where God appears to will evil.  Both of these types of Scripture are often used as ammunition against Christians in order to “debunk” the Bible.  Joseph Ratzinger devoted much of his scholarly life attempting to address this very issue.  His work culminated during his papacy with his 2010 Apostolic Exhortation, Verbum Domini where he cautions that “it would be a mistake to neglect those passages of Scripture that strike us as problematic” (Verbum Domini (VD), 42).  He provides the faithful with two very important principles that can help them navigate through these difficult passages.

First it is necessary to mention the intended audience for Scripture.  The Fathers of the Church thought Scripture could only be rightly understood from within the “heart of the Church.”  What they meant by this is that the book only makes sense in light of the gift of supernatural faith.  Faith is absolutely necessary to understand the Scriptures.  St. Augustine found the Scriptures utterly absurd until St. Ambrose stirred up faith in him by his preaching.  He came to understand once he first believed (see the beautiful passage in Confessions VI, Ch.4).  The Bible is a specialist’s book.  A man without faith has as much chance of understanding it as I do reading a nuclear engineering text.  I might grasp parts of it, but to truly understand I would need training in nuclear engineering.  Faith is the “qualification” for a proper understanding of Scripture.

This may come as a surprise to many but Scripture itself offers us an example.  The Ethiopian Eunuch is a man of good will who greatly wants to understand the Suffering Servant passages in Isaiah.  But until “someone instructs” him, he remains in the dark (Acts 8:26-40).  St. Paul tells Timothy that while “all Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” this only applies to the “one who belongs to God” (2 Tim3:16-17).  This is because the Scriptures were and still are primarily liturgical books.  This is how we came to adopt the term “New Testament” to refer to the Scriptures of the Covenant of Christ.  Again Scripture itself witnesses to this.  When the words “New Testament” appear in the text itself, it is always within a liturgical and sacrificial framework (see 2Cor 3:6, 1Tim 3:8-13, Hebrews 8, 9:15,12:24).  This is not to imply that there should be no personal reading of Scripture only that Scripture is the book that is proclaimed to the People who gather for the Sacred Liturgy (as an aside, Scott Hahn has an excellent book that follows this line of argument more deeply called Consuming the Word).

Once we concede that faith is absolutely necessary, then Pope Emeritus Benedict’s principles naturally follow.  The first hermeneutical (a fancy theological term that means “biblical interpretation”) technique is the concept of Divine Pedagogy.  What this means is that “God’s plan is manifested progressively and it is accomplished slowly, in successive stages and despite human resistance” (VD, 42).  The Judeo-Christian God is one who is actively involved in guiding mankind.  Compared to the  Koran which was allegedly dictated directly to Muhammad because it is an eternal book, the books of the Bible “bear the impression of a history that (God) has been guiding” (Benedict XVI God and the World).

In the Summa (ST II-II, q.2, a.3), St. Thomas also refers to this hermeneutic of divine pedagogy by likening the state of Israel in the OT to spiritual childhood.  God reveals aspects of Himself that are perfectly adapted to their needs and their ability to receive it.  Rather than revealing all there is to know about Himself at once, he does so by a certain gradualism that meets them where they are and then brings them along.  In so doing He meets them within the historical period in which they are living.  They are surrounded by polytheists who have gods like the sun and moon that demand human sacrifice.  He reveals Himself as the One Who created the sun and moon in the Creation account in Genesis.  He shows Abraham very explicitly that He is not a God who demands human sacrifice when He commands him not to lay a hand on Isaac.  That could not be known unless He brought Abraham to the cusp and rejected his sacrifice and revealed to him that He would provide the Lamb instead.

All of Scripture is meant to progressively reveal God, until in the “fullness of time” He fully reveals Himself in Jesus Christ.  To try and “judge” God in the Old Testament is stacking the deck.  We are using the principles of His full revelation to show that these partial revelations were wrong.  It is like a theologian criticizing the use of the clover as a teaching tool for the Trinity.  It works well for 6 and 7 year olds, but it was never intended to be a pedagogical tool for 26 year olds.  It is assumed that it is extremely limited in its application.

Pope Benedict reading the Bible

The point is that it makes no sense to call the God of the Old Testament violent or capricious.  All the gods were.  The only reason why anyone knows that gods should not be that way is because the God of Jesus Christ revealed it to them.  The way He does this however does not happen by simply giving a list of differences between Him and the other gods.  No one would believe Him.  Instead He must begin by taking what Israel knows of “gods” and show them how He is not like those gods.  But He does this through actual historical events.  He allows certain errors to persist for a time like any good teacher does because the student is not ready for all the details yet.  Once they get the student to a certain point they will reveal all to them, but this takes maturity and experience in the student.   This plan is summarized beautifully by Augustine in the City of God:

“The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible. This object was kept so clearly in view, that, even in the period when temporal rewards were promised, the one God was presented as the object of worship, that men might not acknowledge any other than the true Creator and Lord of the spirit, even in connection with the earthly blessings of this transitory life…It was best, therefore, that the soul of man, which was still weakly desiring earthly things, should be accustomed to seek from God alone even these petty temporal boons, and the earthly necessaries of this transitory life, which are contemptible in comparison with eternal blessings, in order that the desire even of these things might not draw it aside from the worship of Him, to whom we come by despising and forsaking such things.”(Book X, Ch.14)

Pope Benedict also enunciates a second important principle when he says that “[W]henever our awareness of its inspiration grows weak, we risk reading Scripture as an object of historical curiosity and not as the work of the Holy Spirit in which we can hear the Lord himself speak and recognize his presence in history” (VD, 19).  His point is that we need to not only admit the Scriptures are inspired but also to attempt to unpack this mystery.

In Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council document on Divine Revelation defines inspiration in the following way:

In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.

This leaves inspiration as a mystery by which God inspired Scripture and at the same time the human authors were still free in the process. But because it is a mystery we may understand it better if we talk about what inspiration doesn’t mean.

First of all inspiration does not mean that God was merely an assistant in the process.   He actively caused and inspired those men to write what He willed them to write. What was written in Scripture is there because God wanted it there.  Much in the same way as when we write with a pencil, we are the cause of the writing even though the pencil is the actual instrument.

Second, God did not act as a copyeditor in the process.  When St. Paul was done writing he did not go to God and ask him to review it and make any necessary corrections.

Thirdly, the human authors of Scripture were not mere scribes, passive recipients of revelation. God did not merely whisper in their ears and they merely transcribe what they heard.  God “made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted” (DV 11).

When St. Thomas addresses prophecy in the Summa (ST II-II q 171) he includes all the authors of Sacred Scripture.  He defines “inspiration” as an outside influence of the Holy Spirit which raises the mind above its ordinary level and endows it with greater intellectual vigor.  What it does is to prepare the author to receive a revelation from God.  Scripture is said to be inspired because God prepared the authors to receive a revelation from Him.

If we examine the Latin word auctor, which we translate as author, we can see that attributing authorship to God means something more than author in the literary sense that we normally use it.  Blessed John Henry Newman says that properly speaking,  auctor means “originator” or “primary cause” rather than in a strict literary sense “author.” This makes the distinction between inspiration and revelation is important because God can be the originator of Scripture without every idea therein being His.  This does not mean that he was the originator in the sense that He merely got the ball rolling but He is still intimately involved in the entire process.

What happens is that God may infuse what is to be revealed into the mind of the Sacred Author, but the Sacred Author must still use his own words to describe it.  No amount of words can fully explain an idea, but can only do so in a limited manner and from a certain perspective.  This is how man too is said to be an author—he is using his own words (conditioned by his culture, his own understanding, even his own conscience) to explain what God revealed to him.  This means we must always know this background information if we are to interpret Scripture fully.  A favorite verse of those opposed to the “Violent God” of the Old Testament is Psalm 137:9 which reads “Happy those who seize your children and smash them against a rock.”   Inspiration prepared the Sacred Author to receive the revelation that there is always a need to oppose a paganism that is opposed to God, but how the human author actually expresses this is going to be conditioned on his own understanding of what should be done to oppose paganism.  The person of faith will naturally know this because they have been given the “abbreviated Word” of Christ Himself.  The man of no faith will be left scratching his head, but if he is going to “judge” the morality of Scripture then he had better take inspiration into account.

Standing on Three Legs

Fasting, Spiritual Life, Virtue

Shortly after the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI surveyed the pastoral landscape and found a number of “grave and urgent” problems that plagued the Church.  Among these problems was a laxity that had crept into the hearts and minds of the faithful with respect to the divine precept of fasting.  St. John Paul II echoed Paul VI’s concern and called for catechesis on fasting in his 1984 Apostolic Exhortation on Penance and Reconciliation.  Fasting is one of the three main pillars of the spiritual life along with prayer and almsgiving.  For many, this third leg of the spiritual life has atrophied greatly making balance difficult.  Therefore it is helpful to examine anew why the Church calls us to fast regularly.

Our Lord was once asked by the people why the Pharisees and the disciples of John fasted and His disciples did not.  He responded that “as long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast” (Mk 2:18-22). Now that the Bridegroom has been taken away, Christians ought to be fasting and not just in Lent.  Rather than viewing themselves as a fasting people, most Christians instead identify fasting with the followers of Mohammed or Gandhi.

In the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas lists three reasons why fasting ought to be practiced: it bridles the lusts of the flesh, serves as satisfaction for sins and frees the mind for the contemplation of heavenly things.  Because these three things lead to the fulfillment of our human nature, the Angelic Doctor says that the practice of fasting belongs among the precepts of the natural law.  Despite the obligation to fast, its practice has diminished primarily because each of the goods attached to fasting has been threatened.

The first obstacle is related to the same reason that people have not fasted throughout the ages—the capital sin of gluttony.  According to the CDC 36% of all American adults are obese.  To combat this epidemic we have developed zero calorie drinks and food, gastric bypass surgery, diet pills, and diet plans that allow you to “eat as much as you want and still lose weight.”  After all, if I can get zero calories by eating, why should I feel hungry while I am fasting?

But these are mere band aids.  We fail to acknowledge the oversized elephant in today’s “super-size me” culture that prides itself on “all you can eat”.  We are a bunch of gluttons.  Back when gluttony was a sin the medicine was fasting.  The remedy remains the same today.

Dante_Purgatory_Gluttons

Because of our fallen nature we often find that our gods are our stomachs.  Through its medicinal effect fasting helps to break the chains to our senses.  In this way it combats the other capital sins of the flesh; sloth (more on this in a moment) and lust.  It serves as the foundation of the virtue of temperance.  This much needed virtue not only moderates our eating and drinking but also the particularly dangerous vice of lust.  Our Lord suggests that some demons only come out through prayer and fasting and the demon of porneia is one of them.  With the rise in pornography addiction, fasting offers both a remedy and a shield against it.  By fasting we gain greater control of our passions and emotions and by this increased in self-possession we are more able to give ourselves to God and others.  This is why St. Thomas listed calls fasting the “guardian of chastity.”

The second obstacle that the practice of fasting encounters is the loss of a sense of sin.  For many people using fasting to atone for sin is akin to using an extra blanket to protect you from the boogeyman.  Sin, like the boogeyman, does not exist and the Church simply uses the idea of sin to keep us in line.  In a 1946 radio address to members of the US National Catechetical Congress in Boston, Pope Pius XII declared that “the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin.”  Recognizing this, John Paul II thought that restoring a proper sense of sin is the first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis looming over man today.  This loss of a sense of sin has become a major evangelical obstacle.  If we do not accept the “bad news” of our sinfulness then we have no need for the “good news” of the Gospel.  The Gospel is reduced to just “news” which we already have plenty of.  Fasting helps to restore the lost sense of sin.  It serves as a reminder that our desires have gone astray.

This is why most people see fasting merely as a disciplinary regulation that is “suggested” by the Church rather than something that belongs to the natural law.  With the widespread disdain for ecclesiastical authority many simply choose to ignore what the Church has to say about fasting.

Finally, the practice of fasting has been threatened because man has lost the desire to raise his mind to the contemplation of heavenly things.  Classically understood, this is the vice of sloth or acedia.  St. Thomas defines acedia as “sadness in the face of a spiritual good.”    Oftentimes sloth is confused with laziness and then summarily dismissed because we are “busy.”  But sloth is not laziness.  Many of the busiest people are also the most slothful because they suffer from a “roaming unrest of spirit” as St. Thomas says.

Sloth seems to be ever-present in our culture and it most clearly manifests itself through its first-born daughter, curiosity.  Curiosity is the desire to know simply for the pleasure that it brings and not in order to understand the nature of things.  Our information hungry society is driven by curiosity.  The voyeurism of reality TV shows, the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and a growing addiction to smartphones all exist to feed our curiosity.  They simply serve as distractions from contemplating heavenly things.  Our minds are made to rise to heavenly things and when they do not the result is a pervasive boredom.

St. Thomas compares curiosity with the virtue of studiousness.  Studiousness serves as a check on our curiosity by studying first those things which are most important and relating what we discover to God.  It is a most necessary virtue in developing the habit of contemplation.  The studious person develops the habit of seeing all of creation through a sacramental paradigm.  Fasting helps to cultivate this virtue by reminding us  that man does not live on bread alone and excites his intellect to investigate those things that truly bring life to man.

Practically speaking, how do we fast and how often should we do it?  There are two kinds of fasts.  There is a total fast which means abstaining from all food and drink (this is linked to the Eucharist) and a partial fast which is penitential in nature.  While there is no one “right” way to observe a partial fast, the Church suggests that it consists in one normal sized meal and two small meals that are the equivalent of the first meal.  The idea is not to starve ourselves, but to stir just enough hunger so as to have to fight the temptation to break the fast.  One normally finds that they cannot stop thinking about eating when they first start this practice.  That is to be expected when we do not yet have the virtue of fasting and will diminish over time.  What also normally happens is that the bodily hunger awakens in us a certain amount of spiritual sensitivity so that we find great pleasure in both prayer and receiving the Eucharist.

As far as frequency, most spiritual masters would suggest once a week either on Friday (in union with Our Lord’s Passion) or on Saturday (with Our Lady on Holy Saturday).  One could easily however find ways to fast daily by not eating between meals, always leaving the table a little bit hungry or always eating what is placed in front of you.  Again it is not so much the how, but the spirit in which one fasts.  The intention ought to be as penance for sins and as an offering for favors from God.

While climbing Mount Purgatory, Dante encounters a group of emaciated penitents in the ring of gluttony.  Because the gluttonous abstain from the “gratification of the palate” as part of their penance, Dante sees that the “sockets of their eyes seemed rings without gems.  Whoso in the face of men reads OMO would surely there have recognized the M.”  For those who know Italian, they will recognize that OMO is a variant of the Italian word for “man”, uomo.  What the poet is suggesting is that the inner form of man is restored through fasting.  Following his lead, we too should include fasting as part of our regular spiritual diet and stand on all three spiritual legs.

On the Real King of the Jungle

Abortion

For the better part of a week now, there has been a great deal of chatter connecting what would normally be two unrelated news events.  The first is the “revelation” that Planned Parenthood has been selling parts of aborted children.  The second is the slaying of a beloved Lion named Cecil in Africa by a hunter from Minnesota.  There seems to be a great deal more moral outrage over the latter than the former.  Rather than add more fuel to that particular fire, I would like to ask a simple question, namely, why?

First off, I am willing to concede that the hunter violated some ethical code of conduct when he paid $50,000 to have a lion lured from its protected habitat merely for the sake of the kill.  If nothing else he is at least guilty of bad taste.  This ought to leave all of us at least shaking our heads even if our outrage never reaches Peta-like proportions.  But the question at issue is how we have become so focused on what ought to be a relatively minor issue while ignoring a major one like abortion.  Chesterton too puzzled over this in his essay “On Lying in Bed” saying, “[I]f there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics.”  Specifically, what is the mindset that is willing to overlook the death and dismemberment of innocent children while becoming absolutely indignant at the death of a lion?

There are three reasons why minor morals prevail in this case.  The first has to do with our conscience.  The Catechism speaks of our conscience as having the role of accuser in judging acts that we have already done (CCC1778).  While we can dull our conscience by lying and rationalizing, ultimately it cannot be entirely deadened and will actually “avenge” itself through seemingly unexplained guilt.  We see this when someone who has keeps hidden something they have done finds self-destructive ways to punish themselves.  Built into our conscience in its role as an avenger is the need for remorse.  I think that is precisely what is at play here.

We constantly want throw our consciences moral bones in hopes that it will still our otherwise restless hearts.  That is why we strive to make abortions safe, legal and rare.  Why do we need to make them rare if there is nothing wrong with them?  The only explanation is that we know they are wrong and that we hope by striving to make them rare we will quiet our consciences.  In this case, by reminding everyone just how gruesome abortion is, these Planned Parenthood videos are awakening our collective consciences.  And this is precisely why we were all so outraged when we found out what this dentist has done with the lion. If we are outraged and speak out against this “atrocity”, it might still our hearts so that we can ignore the other moral atrocities that we condone as a society.  In essence it is an attempt to throw our conscience a bone to chew on.

The second has to do with our cultural attitude towards children.  Children are essentially a luxury.  Whereas previously children may have been treated as a commodity, needed to help with the division of labor in the household and as a safety net for old age, this is no longer the case.  The economic center for the family has moved outside the household and there is Social Security and 401Ks to provide security in old age.  Now they are seen as only an un-recoupable cost and parenthood becomes an act of consumption so that people have babies because they want one.  A child becomes something for the man who has everything and women “choose” whether they really want to purchase a baby right now or not.

Cecil the Lion

To be clear I am not saying treating children as either a luxury or a commodity is a good thing, but this is the prevailing mindset that dominates the culture.  But the fact of the matter is that we tend to view everything through economic lenses and it motivates our decisions more than most would like to admit.

Closely related to this is the third reason, overpopulation.  Quite frankly there are far fewer lions than there are people.  In fact the African Lion could be extinct by 2050 according to Scientific American.  Because there are less lions than people we should value them more than we do people, or so goes the lie.

That being said, do we really have an overpopulation problem?  Let’s be clear what the real driving force behind this is first of all.  In his book called What Americans Really Want…Really, Dr. Frank Luntz reports on how politicians were losing ground in the “green revolution”.  What he found was that it was mostly a matter of language.  They were preaching conservation.  If however, they preach making things more energy efficient then people were overwhelmingly in support.  Why?  Because when you ask me to conserve I might have to make some personal sacrifices, but if you promote efficiency then I won’t have to change my habits at all and might actually pay less for using the same amount.  Quite frankly saving the African lion requires far less of a change in my habits (no more $50,000 hunting trips for me!) than the necessary sacrifice of parenting.

In the end the overpopulation agenda has very little to do with the environment itself, but truly comes down to the other green—money.  It is all about economics.  If you don’t believe me then all you need to do is look at how the whole thing started.  Benjamin Franklin gave a talk in England in which he mentioned in passing that the population of the US was growing by 3% per year.  In the audience was a preacher named Thomas Malthus, who is the Father of the Overpopulation myth.  Based on Franklin’s comment, Malthus realized that the population was doubling every 23 years.  When he contrasted with the fact that he saw the food supply growing arithmetically and population exponentially he realized people soon would outgrow the food supply.  Not only did Malthus’ prediction never come true, but the opposite thing happened.  Today we actually have a food surplus despite the fact the earth’s population is now six times what it was in 1850.  The fact that there are starving people is not caused by there being too many of them but by corruption and bad economic policies. Despite evidence to the contrary, anti-population forces still hold fast to Malthusian predictions and continue to see people solely as consumers inhibiting economic growth. People are more than consumers however, they are also producers that innovate and create wealth.

The bad economics is often based on what is called the “zero-sum-game fallacy”.  This is the idea that the economy is a pie with only so much to go around. But the economy is not a pie — economies can grow, and population growth can actually help development.  A growing population means more labor, which along with land and capital are the main factors of production.

Benedict XVI says pretty much the same thing in Caritas in Veritate. 

“The notion of rights and duties in development must also take account of the problems associated with population growth. This is a very important aspect of authentic development, since it concerns the inalienable values of life and the family. To consider population increase as the primary cause of underdevelopment is mistaken, even from an economic point of view…Suffice it to consider, on the one hand, the significant reduction in infant mortality and the rise in average life expectancy found in economically developed countries, and on the other hand, the signs of crisis observable in societies that are registering an alarming decline in their birth rate” (CV, 44)

 

The Holy Father’s point is that the rise in the population is not the result of a rising birth rate, but a reduction in infant mortality and death rates overall.  From 1960 to 2000 the population doubled—from 3 billion to 6 billion.  This is not because we were breeding like rabbits, but stopped dropping like flies.  In fact fertility was dropping throughout the period from 6 children per woman in 1960 to 2.6 by 2002.  The UN Population projection (low variant) predicts that population will increase to 7.6 billion 2040 and then back to the current 6.5 billion by 2082.  From there it drops off steadily.

The total fertility rate in Europe is 1.4 children per woman (keep in mind that replacement level is 2.1 children per woman).  The current population of 728 million will drop to 557 million by 2050.  This is a drop of similar magnitude to the Black Death in the fourteenth century.  By the end of the 21st Century with a population of 207 million plus the average age of 60 means that the decline is pretty much irreversible.

In the US it is not as dire (yet) because we still have a favorable tax and immigration system.  Families with more than two children are given generous tax breaks so they pay virtually no income tax.  These breaks will be removed by necessity in short order however.  Still we are below replacement level (1.88 in 2012).  Middle-class American women are reproducing far below replacement rate (1.6), which is very close to the fertility rate for China (1.54).  In other words, we are essentially moving towards a self-inflicted one child policy.  Any way you look at the numbers the trend is clearly dropping below replacement levels.

I close with a great quote from the master of one-liners, GK Chesterton.  “The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.”

 

Like They Do on the Discovery Channel

Homosexuality

Last year, the BBC ran a story called “Gay penguins in Kent zoo are ‘the best parents’.”   They deemed it newsworthy presumably because it is proof that since homosexual behavior and parenting occurs in nature then it is perfectly “natural” for humans to engage in it.  Hidden in this supposition though is what I call this the “Bloodhound Gang Premise” named for the 90s one-hit wonders that told us “You and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals.  So let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.”   Put less crudely, the hidden premise is that since we are no different than the animals, we can engage in the same behavior.

The problem with this however is the fact that as soon as we try to reduce man to a mere animal, we are confronted with the fact that he is not an animal but something more.  Man differs from mere animals because he knows that he is just not an animal.  He knows that he is fundamentally different.  He has a self-awareness that separates him from the rest of visible creation.  This is the meaning of Adam’s original solitude in the second creation account.  Man knows that he is different and in some ways above the animals.

Now immediately someone will jump on the comment above that we are different “in some ways”.  They will say that while we are different in that we have self-awareness, and an intellect and a will, sex is not one of the ways that we differ.  We have innate desires for sexual gratification just like the animals and just like the animals we must fulfill those desires.  However, even here, those that say this betray their position by their actions.

Bad Touch

They betray it in a number of ways, but there are two that I want to focus on.  The first is rape.  If we are no different than animals, then why is rape wrong?  Rape is wrong precisely because it is an offense against the will of the other person.  Animals don’t have a will and thus could not rape another animal.  When was the last time that you saw on the Discovery Channel a chimpanzee being tried for rape?

The second point is even more obvious because it flies in the face of this mentality.  Anyone who has frequented hiking trails has at some point found a used condom or condom wrapper on the ground.  No one assumes that it is from a deer, but knows it came from a person.  Why is this?  The answer is obvious—because only people contracept.

That is the most damning of all the evidence against this argument.  If we really are no different than the animals when it comes to sex, then how do you explain contraception?  The fact of the matter is that you can’t.  The truth is that it is a lie and like any lie, you have to cover it up with another lie by using contraception.  They want to be able to justify indulging their lusts and if it takes using nature as a rationalization, then they will do it.  Shouldn’t it be clear that acting this way merely reduces people to something less than they were made to be?  Reducing ourselves to mere animals only serves to make us less than the animals.

There is another sense in which people will try to justify homosexual behavior.  That is by saying that they can’t help it because they were made that way.  Along these same lines, there are many who have compared the fight for gay marriage with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  However, there is a key difference that cannot be ignored.  It is self-evident that within a person there are certain inclinations that ought to be acted upon and others should not.  This is true regardless of whether the cause of that inclination is genetic (e.g a “gay-gene”), environmental or a combination of the two.  Those who oppose gay marriage say that same-sex activity is one of those inclinations that should not be acted upon.  Just as laws against stealing are not directed at kleptomaniacs, but against the act of stealing, so too the opposition to same-sex marriage is not directed to homosexuals per se, but instead represents an opposition to homosexual activity.  It may be discovered that there is a “klepto gene” but that certainly would not then justify stealing.  In other words, the question of whether homosexuality is morally wrong can be argued, but to cry discrimination and compare the situation to the Civil Rights Movement begs the foundational question of whether homosexual activity is wrong or not.  All too often I find people falling into the trap of arguing the existence of a “gay gene” and end up at an impasse because you cannot prove a negative.  Instead we need to address the fundamental assumption that we ought to act upon every inclination we have, especially ones that we are genetically hard-wired towards.  Tell that to someone who struggles with alcoholism because it is in their genes.

Ultimately, they are right when they say “I was made that way.”  We are all made that way to one extent or another.  It is called original sin.  We all find ourselves with inclinations that we should not act upon.  We all find within ourselves “another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me” (Romans 7:23).  It is simply misguided compassion to say “they were made that way.”  We are not helping them but instead giving up on them and inviting them to embrace their brokenness.

This is important because there are a lot of people who struggle with same-sex attraction.  As then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said in his 1986 CDF On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons, this suffering can only be intensified by error and lightened by truth.  So many younger people when they first experience same-sex attraction assume that their fate is sealed because they were simply made like that.  They need to be told that there is help for them.

There are great groups out there such as NARTH and the Catholic Apostolate Courage who are fighting to get the truth out there in the face of those who have their own agendas.  Hollywood might portray it as a glamorous lifestyle, but it is far from it.  The scientific data paints a much different picture when comparing practicing homosexuals with heterosexuals.

My prayer then is that we will all be guided by the compassion of Christ.  His compassion is not to merely affirm but to speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15).

 

Hidden in Plain Sight

Devils, Spiritual Warfare

There is always a great temptation that in growing familiar with a thing we may begin to ponder its meaning to little.  This is most certainly the case with the Lord’s Prayer.  When it comes to this prototypical prayer that Our Lord gave to us, we should marvel at its depth.  As a testament to its inherent depth, we find saints and doctors of the Church, when reflecting on the meaning of each of the seven petitions, coming up with different conclusions.  This ought to awaken an awareness in us that this prayer is meant to be contemplated rather than merely recited.  Praying without contemplation of its meaning is mere saying.  In order to combat this tendency, I would like to offer reflection on the last two petitions, namely “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from Evil.”

Any reflection on these two petitions must first start with two fundamental assumptions.  The first regards temptations.  On a superficial level, it appears that Our Lord was implying that it was God who leads us into temptation.  But St. James in his epistle tells us: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted with evil and He Himself tempts no one” (James 1:13).  This means that it is not God Himself that tempts us, but ultimately all temptation comes from the devil.  This of course fits with Our Lord’s experience of temptation in the wilderness when the devil shows himself lord of the other two enemies of mankind (the flesh and the world) by tempting Him to turn the stones into bread and to receive all the kingdoms of the world.

This brings us to the second assumption and that is the fact that Evil is not some impersonal force, but has as its source a person (or persons).  The spirit of the world is one that is marked by materialism and scientism.  It views the world as a closed system in which given enough time we can explain everything through science.  God is then squeezed out of the picture as a superfluous hypothesis.  Even if He does exist, He is most certainly remote.  But there is a hidden effect of this spirit that we also often overlook.  If the world contains only what can be seen and measured, then there is also no room for the devil either.  Everything that happens has a material explanation (usually psychological) and the devil too is superfluous.  This “humility” of the devil allows him freer rein to orchestrate his plans.  He remains hidden in plain sight.  We demonize “the culture” or capitalism or socialism and miss the personal responsibility that ought to be assigned to the one who uses these things as means to carry out his diabolical plan—“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12).  Properly understood then the last petition is always our pleading with God to protect us from the machinations of the Evil One; “deliver us from the Evil One.”

Although these are viewed as two distinct petitions, they are intimately related because of this link between temptations and the one who tempts.  It is instructive then to look at temptations in general and how it is that Satan tempts us.

Why does God allow us to be tempted?  In turning to the Book of Job, we find that the first two chapters offer us a great deal upon which to meditate.

The first thing that you should take note of is the fact that there is a great battle going on between God’s elect and the forces of the Enemy.  God is not actually a participant in the battle however.  No one can truly fight God because He is all-powerful.  He merely indulges Satan so that ultimately His power is shown through His creatures.  And this is one of the reasons why God allows us to be tempted.  It is for His glory.  Lucifer is the highest of God’s creatures in the natural order.  He is of the first hierarchy of angels, the Seraphim.  He and his minions are so far above humanity in power that it is as if a colony of ants (us) were fighting mankind (the devil and his minions).  Even God’s mightiest angelic soldier, St. Michael is from the lowly eighth hierarchy, the Archangels.  Yet, once the order of grace is introduced, these lowly creatures are made so powerful that they are able to engage these great powers in battle.  A lowly handmaiden is given Lucifer’s place in heaven and now puts on combat boots and squashes his head.  All of this shows forth the power of God’s grace.  To Him be the glory.

Each time we are tempted and overcome that temptation it ultimately serves as a reminder of God’s power.  It is as if it is our own heel that crushes the head of the serpent and pushes him back to the depths of hell.  We grow stronger by the infusion of the divine life in us and the Evil One receives a mortal wound.  We also grow in faith that God always does provide grace in the manner and time that we need it.

Secondly, we are tempted because this is a time of trial and purification for mankind.   Through temptations we are brought low and grow in humility.  This is the experience of St. Paul when he speaks of a “thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated” (2Cor 12:7).  They can also serve as a wake-up call when we fall that we are not quite what we were made to be.  Recall the Pharisee who recounts all his own works to God and imagines himself to be self-sufficient.  He needs a healthy dose of temptation to keep from forming too high of an opinion of himself.

temptation_of_christ

By instructing us to pray “lead us not into temptation” Our Lord was first of all reminding us that ultimately we are powerless in the face of temptation.  It is an act of humility to utter the words.  But because we live in a season of testing, we ask God to remember our weakness when He does give the devil room to work.  We ask Him to limit the amount of power Satan exercises upon us and to give us the grace to overcome them so that they cease to be actual temptations.  We see this as God limits the space that Satan has in working against Job.  The first set of evils he visits upon Job are not allowed to “touch his person” (Job 1:12) and the second he must “spare his life” (Job 2:6).

The petition to be delivered from Evil is not merely a request that we be blindly protected from the ploys of the Evil One but that we are able to recognize them for what they are.  Many people fail to recognize the “ordinary” ways in which the devil is active in their lives.  They may believe in extraordinary demonic manifestations like possession, obsession and oppression, but do not realize that there is an ordinary form of demonic activity to which we are all subject.  We can make tremendous strides in our spiritual journey when we begin to see his ploys more clearly.  To that end, I find that there are four main categories into which they fall.

First there is discouragement.  Psalm 91:6 speaks of “the arrow that flies by day, for the matter that walks in darkness, nor for the ruin and the devil that is in the noonday.”  The great spiritual fathers have identified this “noonday devil” as discouragement leading to sloth.  The fact that it comes at noonday implies that one is already set out on the day’s work and that this devil comes during the heat of the day (i.e. when one is beginning to wear down) to convince the worker to give up the work altogether.

In our lives what this often looks like is that it starts with some idea or expectation of where we should be on our spiritual journey or how much fruit our apostolate should have borne at this point.  This is the “arrow that flies by day.”  Next comes the feeling of discouragement.  We find that it was really too hard to begin with or that we have been doing it wrong all along.  The temptation usually is not to give up altogether but to change something or to put our energies into something else that is “better.”  He can exploit our desire for growth by equating spiritual progress with change.  But discouragement never comes from God.  To arm us against the Accuser, the Advocate gives us the gift of courage to overcome the great stumbling block that discouragement can put in our path.

Second, the Evil One uses Division.  The Greek name for the devil, Diabolos, means “one who tears asunder.”  He does this by fostering division with those we are close to.  It usually starts with an accusation that we latch onto.  Once we are hooked on it, he then supplies us with reasons why they do it.  For example, a man is driving in the car and his wife is telling him to pass the car in front of him.  The devil is quickly there to point out to the man “she always does that when I am driving.”  Notice the absoluteness (always) of the statement so that there is an implication that she has a serious problem.  Once the man agrees with this, the devil then gives him reasons such as “she is so controlling.”  Now the man gets angry that his wife doesn’t trust him and she is left to fill in the blanks (again with the help of the Evil One) why he makes such a big deal out of such a small thing.

The antidote to this weapon of division is what I like to call “compassion in small things.”  It is an attempt to see things from other people’s perspective.  Returning to our example, the man might simply say “No she doesn’t always do that.  In fact she usually only does it when she is worried about being late.  She must be worried.  Let me reassure her.”

Third, there is distraction.  The primary goal of the evil one’s distractions is to have us lose focus and our sense of direction.  This happens in four main ways.  The first is to generate fear about the future.  This is a major theme in CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters.  The senior tempter, Screwtape invites his nephew to exploit fear of the future because all vices are future directed.  He says, “[G]ratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

The second form of distraction is to remind us of slights and offenses we have suffered at the hands of others.  For most people this temptation arises most often in prayer.  This is because prayer is a time of great vulnerability where we open ourselves to God and therefore can be a time when we are reminded of other times of vulnerability and when we were wounded.  The antidote is to remember that God is the ultimate vindicator of wrongs against us and to place our trust in His mercy.  This is closely related to the third form which is to play the comparison game with the situations of others.

If these fail, then there is always the pleasures available at the present moment.  A chief way this is done is temptation through curiosity and I believe the main weapon is the internet.  I think we would all be surprised at the amount of time we spend online each day if we were to log the number of times we stop to look at email, texts or Facebook.

Our Lord Himself called Satan, “the father of lies and a liar from the beginning.”  Obviously then the last form of temptation and the root of all temptations is deception.  As the father of lies, he will always tempt us to deception as well.  Usually this comes in two forms.  First is by equating information about someone with the truth about the person.  This is where we are tempted to label someone as liberal, conservative, gay, straight, etc. and assume that tells us all we need to know about the person.  We even do this with ourselves by assuming a label tells everyone else all they need to know about us.  We can label ourselves as “orthodox Catholics” without even considering those places where we are like the Pharisees.

Second is by tempting us to lie to conceal or avoid some pain.  This is almost always at the heart of every falsehood we tell as a thorough examination of conscience will reveal as our motive for lying.  It could be an attempt to shield us from the pain of being embarrassed about our past, the pain of disappointing someone or of getting caught in something we should not be doing.  Ultimately what we fear is the truth and the lies end up trapping us.  But only the “Truth will set us free.”

St. Ignatius in his Spiritual Exercises says the devil is like a lover who tries to seduce a young girl or another’s wife; once his machinations are revealed the evil one is vexed and he flees.  Let us bring to light the trappings of the evil one by earnestly praying “Deliver us from Evil.”

We Have No King…

Sacred Heart of Jesus

During his 25 year reign as Pope, Leo XIII penned 85 encyclicals, but he issued what he thought the most important, Annum Sacrum, in May of 1899. In it, he proposed consecration to the Sacred Heart as perhaps the most effective means to stemming the tide of secularism that had engulfed much of the world. He thought that no one could stop this except “Him by whose strength alone they can be driven away. Who can He be but Jesus Christ the Only-begotten Son of God?”(Annum Sacrum (AS), 11). He compared modern times to those of the early Church when “immediately succeeding her institution, was oppressed beneath the yoke of the Caesars, a young Emperor saw in the heavens a cross, which became at once the happy omen and cause of the glorious victory that soon followed. And now, today, behold another blessed and heavenly token is offered to our sight-the most Sacred Heart of Jesus, with a cross rising from it and shining forth with dazzling splendor amidst flames of love. In that Sacred Heart all our hopes should be placed, and from it the salvation of men is to be confidently besought.” (AS, 12). Certainly the tide has risen that much higher since he wrote these words and his remedy for the most part has been left untried. Ultimately, whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a battle going on. It is not a battle between liberals and conservatives or Capitalists and Communists or any other groups of men but a battle between the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of Satan. All of us must decide under which standard we will fight and who will be our King. Secularism says “we have no king but Caesar” while Christians must fight to restore the rightful King, Christ, to His throne. But what does the Sacred Heart have to do with this? Is it little more than a convenient symbol to place on the Standard of Christ like Constantine’s Cross?

One of the earliest secularist projects was undertaken by Benedict Spinoza in the 17th Century. He thought society was made up of “human pyramid” of sorts where the population is made up of three distinct classes. There were the intellectual elite (who happened to be materialists), followed by a larger group of experts who are scientifically minded but without the same intellectual capacity of the first group and then the masses of stupid and vulgar people devoid of reason and governed by superstition. He posited that throughout history the pyramid has been inverted because of the Church and if we can eliminate the Church then the pyramid will go right side up. But he was smart enough to realize that a “church” was still necessary for the vulgar masses because they will always be superstitious. He sought to build a secular church to fill this void. Elimination of the Bible was also impossible and so he attempted to insert experts to help read and interpret the Bible (this makes him the “patron saint” of modern biblical criticism). All of this leads to a State that does not define doctrine but only seeks to undermine the Church’s authority by promoting a single doctrine, namely that everyone has a right to believe whatever he wants. By maximizing the right to believe whatever you want this ultimately maximizes the power of the secular state because they will be needed to protect those rights (see Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise for more detail).

The point of bringing up Spinoza is that the secularist project has been directly responsible for distorting the true image of Christ. He is viewed as a soft, effeminate, political revolutionary who shunned all authority. How nicely this fits with the ideal citizen of the world. It is only through contemplation of the Sacred Heart that a true knowledge of Christ can be obtained. Otherwise we always risk making Christ into “my Jesus.”
This is why I have never personally liked the “What Would Jesus Do?”(WWJD) principle. It is entirely the wrong principle for us to guide our lives. Jesus could do so much more than I because He was no mere man. Even if it is a really long acronym and would probably require a necklace instead of a bracelet we should be governed by “With What Spirit Would Jesus Do It?” (WWSWJDI). It is this incarnated spirit that we are trying to have permeate all our actions. That simply does not happen as long as we project our own mediocrity and petty concerns onto Him. Coming to live within the Sacred Heart we break out of this self-imposed prison of mediocrity and allow ourselves to be elevated to His level.

cking-feast

But still, why the Sacred Heart and not just Jesus Himself? This has to do with our human nature and the manner in which we love. All too often we hear “you don’t need to feel love for love is an act of the will.” This is not entirely true. A love that is only an act of the will is not a complete love. In fact it can be cold. But a love that includes not just the will but affections too is a more complete love. This is why we speak of the heart as the seat of our love—it contains both the will and the affections. This, at least, is what Scripture means when it speaks of the heart.
The point is that we often project our suspicions about affections onto Christ and we think of His love as being somewhat cold towards us. But this is the exact opposite of how He loves. His heart (i.e. His will and His affectivity) is literally on fire with love for each one of us. It is through the revelation of the Sacred Heart that He is reminding us of this. When we love a person and long for a return of our love, it is really the heart of the other person that we want to call ours. This is what Christ is offering us in the Sacred Heart. Jesus is not just saying “I love you” but says “I give you my heart.” Which stirs your own heart more?
To give someone your heart is a deeply personal act and reflects the personal love Jesus has for each one of us more clearly. Read the story of the raising of Lazarus to catch a glimpse of the depth of Christ’s personal love. John, because he was the “disciple whom Jesus loved” says “Now Jesus loved Martha and Mary and Lazarus” (11:5) to show not that God loves everyone (how many times have we heard that and not been moved?) but that in Christ there is a deep personal love for me.

When he established the Feast of Christ the King, Pope Pius XI said that the reign of Christ would be accomplished through His Sacred Heart. It is the one who “has loved mankind so much” that desires to reign over us. More accurately, it is the One Who has given us His Heart that desires us to reign with Him. No wonder evil forces are at work trying to rob us of our rightful inheritance.

Consecration then is our response. By consecrating ourselves to the Sacred Heart we pledge that even if we were our own and under His reign then we would still give ourselves to Him. It is an exchange of hearts. As Leo XIII puts it, “For by consecrating ourselves to Him we not only declare our open and free acknowledgment and acceptance of His authority over us, but we also testify that if what we offer as a gift were really our own, we would still offer it with our whole heart. We also beg of Him that He would vouchsafe to receive it from us, though clearly His own.” (AS, 7).

What does this consecration consist in? There are a number of ways this can be expressed, but the most efficacious is through the Enthronement (i.e. put Christ on His rightful throne) of the image of the Sacred Heart. This practice flows from the appearance of Our Lord to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1673-75) when He revealed the Sacred Heart as a sign of His infinite love for us mankind.

He specifically asked that homes be consecrated to His Sacred Heart as a sign of His reigning through the Church, from His throne in the Tabernacle. This link between the Sacred Heart and the Eucharist is vitally important to capturing the true spirit of devotion. The Eucharist is viewed as the fruit of the Sacred Heart itself because it flowed out from Christ’s side when His Heart was pierced on the Cross. Because of this link between the Sacred Heart and the Eucharist, the whole purpose of the devotion is to extend the grace of the Eucharist into the Christian home and from the Christian home into the rest of the society.

Practically, this Enthronement includes an act of consecration whereby all members of the household place themselves totally within the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and ask that His Heart be the source of healing and strength for their poor and wounded hearts. By placing the image of the Sacred Heart in a prominent place in the home it is both an acknowledgement of Christ as rightful King and a sign of the family’s consecration. By the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart, we link the tabernacle to our home, inviting our Lord to be our constant and most intimate companion. The Enthronement becomes a way of life. It means that Christ is also King of our hearts, and His presence as Prince of Peace in our homes changes family life. Cardinal Burke wrote an excellent reflection that encourages Enthronement and provides instruction and I would encourage anyone who is interested in pursuing it further to access them here. You can also contact me if you need information on where to get an Enthronement kit.

O, Sacred Heart of Jesus filled with infinite love and broken by our ingratitude and crushed by our sins, accept the consecration we make to thee of all that we are and all that we have.

Building on Common Ground

Natural Law

In today’s moral climate where issues such as abortion, embryonic stem cell research and euthanasia are legalized, any opposition to the legality of these issues is viewed as an inherently religious position.  The culture then concludes that since all religious views are to be seen as personal, they should be dismissed as having no place in the public square.  How then do we decide if something is morally right or not?  We could consult the civil law, but that is not always a reliable guide as Martin Luther King pointed out in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.  We could consult the Church, but certainly not all her teachings are binding on everyone’s consciences (like observing Holy Days of Obligation for example).  However, if we take what is common to man, namely his nature and what is good for him, then we can form a foundation for all laws.  This is the basis for the natural law and this is precisely why the natural law must play a key role in Catholic morality.  Since the demands of the natural law can be known by reason and by all, the Church is able to use it as common ground in discussing the moral demands of the law with the rest of the culture.

Before discussing how natural law can be used as common ground for disseminating Catholic moral teaching, it is important that we lay out precisely what the natural law is.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us that there are different expressions of the moral law, all of which are interrelated.  It mentions that there is the eternal law which has its source in God, the natural law, revealed law and finally civil and ecclesiastical law.  If the eternal law and the natural law then are interrelated, we must begin by defining what is meant by the eternal law.  Eternal law is the intelligence of God as it is manifested in everything which He has created.

How are the eternal law and natural law related?  The natural law, according to Aquinas, is “nothing other than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law.”  In other words, the natural law is simply the eternal law applied to human moral actions.  Not only is it addressed to rational creatures but it must be viewed as being addressed to creatures who are also free.  In this way it is different from physical laws. In a certain sense, physical laws are mechanical in that they are always “obeyed” while one can choose to obey the natural law or not.

It was mentioned above that the natural law is an extrinsic principle in which man actively participates in the eternal law.  Despite being an intrinsic part of human nature that man can discover the natural law, it still remains the task of practical reason to do so.  The “something” that it discovers are the foundational precepts of the natural law.

As we begin to uncover these precepts, we find that they follow from a set of inclinations that flow directly from human nature.  With the precepts of the natural law then being grounded in these inclinations we can see how the natural law can be used to teach Catholic moral thought to non-Catholics.  It is not without coincidence that each of these precepts also is closely related to the commandments given in the Decalogue.  This is why you will (or at least would have at one point) find the Ten Commandments in many court buildings in the US.  This was not just because the US was a Christian country but because the Decalogue summarizes the just demands of the natural law as well.

Ten_Commandments_marker_in_front_of_Dixie_County_Courthouse

The first of the fundamental inclinations is the natural inclination to the good.  Man by his very nature seeks the good.  This attraction of the good is universally expressed then in the first precept of the natural law: Good is to be done and evil avoided.  This primary precept of the natural law sums up the entire Ten Commandments and is succinctly summarized by Jesus when He says that we are to love God and neighbor.

The second inclination is to preserve one’s being.  What this means practically is that life, and all that promotes life (like food, clothing, shelter, etc.), is to be preserved.  This inclination is expressed in the fifth commandment which says “Thou shall not kill”.

Thirdly, there is the inclination to propagation and education of children.  Man has not only the power to transmit life through the exercise of their sexuality but an inclination as well.  This seems to be the inclination that our generation has the most trouble regulating.  But like all inclinations, it must be regulated if it is to develop properly.  So important is this precept that three of the Ten Commandments address it; the fourth which is ordered toward respect for one’s parents; the sixth which links sexuality with marriage; the ninth which forbids lust.

Because man is not only a material being, but a spiritual one as well, the inclination to know the truth also forms a the fourth foundation for the precepts of the natural law.  The Decalogue again protects this inclination so that it might flourish in the eighth commandment “Thou shall not bear false witness”.

Finally the fifth inclination is the inclination to life in society.  This inclination forms the foundation for the seemingly innate demands of justice.  Anyone who has spent time with young children recognizes immediately that this inclination is present because they often say that something is not fair.

Despite inevitable difference in opinions as to precisely what constitutes a good, nevertheless the natural law can be used to form a common foundation and basic criteria for moral action.  For this reason, Catholics must continue to address human actions in light of natural law in order to share common ground with non-Catholics.

Let’s look at a few so-called “Catholic teachings.” First there is contraception.  While it has been labeled as a “Catholic belief” it is really a teaching based on the Natural Law.  There is a more detailed argument about this in this article, but all one needs to do is look at the five inclinations that I mentioned above.  Because contraception harms the good of marriage and procreation it is contrary to the natural law.

In fact, once we establish the four human goods connected to the five inclinations (namely life, marriage and procreation, society and truth) we can evaluate every law as either good or bad in relation to whether it harms one or more of these goods or not.  A second example will help further clarify a little further.  What about something like euthanasia?  Again, we check the inclinations and we find that it harms both the good of life (voluntary) and society (involuntary).  Involuntary euthanasia harms society because the most vulnerable are wiped out, destroying the trust that is absolutely necessary for any society to remain intact.  This is why St. John Paul II addressed euthanasia very specifically in Evangelium Vitae as belonging to the natural law saying, “I confirm that euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person. This doctrine is based upon the natural law and upon the written word of God, is transmitted by the Church’s Tradition and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium” (EV, 65).

As a very important aside, I should mention this also addresses the question as to whether something like the Church’s teaching against contraception is an infallible teaching.  The argument goes something like this, “well the Pope has never declared ex-cathedra that contraception is wrong so I am free to follow my own conscience.”  Not only does this represent a misunderstanding about when the charism of infallibility is exercised, but no Pope will ever make an ex-Cathedra statement about something that can be known by human reason.  Ex-Cathedra doctrines are reserved for what is considered divinely revealed only.  This seems to be a great source of confusion for many Catholics and mostly ends up being a red herring for following the Church’s moral teachings.  When he was Prefect for the Congregation of Divine Faith, then-Cardinal Ratzinger addressed this—a commentary very much worth reading.

The point is that we need to stop labeling our positions against abortion, euthanasia and contraception as beliefs.  We should not be saying “I believe contraception is wrong” but instead “I know contraception is wrong.”  We can know certain moral precepts infallibly without the Church declaring it so (even if she does as a service to us in many instances).

There is also the evangelical aspects that come with this.  Because the Church alone has preserved the natural law tradition, she can provide a great service to mankind by proclaiming once again these teachings with confidence as binding upon all men as the only path to true freedom.

 

Reclaiming Friendship

Friendship

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he found that democratic principles animated nearly every aspect of American life.  He found that these principles even affected the English language itself. In particular he found that Americans have a “passionate addiction” to generic terms because they condense many objects into a few words (Vol. II, Ch. 16).  The problem with this of course is that it also condenses thought and does not readily lend itself to seeing important distinctions between these objects.  There is perhaps no more glaring example of this than the word “love.”  Proponents of gay marriage have been quite insistent that “love is love” and that “two people who love each other ought to be able to marry each other just like everyone else.”  But without an emphasis on the different kinds of love it is very difficult to show where their thinking is flawed.

In his first Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict posits that “the term ‘love’ has become one of the most frequently used and misused of words, a word to which we attach quite different meanings.” He goes on to ask if “all these forms of love basically one, so that love, in its many and varied manifestations, is ultimately a single reality, or are we merely using the same word to designate totally different realities?” (Deus Caritas Est, 2).While the Pope Emeritus answers this question by differentiating human love from the love of God, he also briefly mentions that there are differences in human loves as well.  There are a number of terms that can be used to describes these human loves, usually the Greek classification of storge (affection), philia (friendship), and eros (love between the sexes) is used.

To address this question properly it is necessary to begin by making a philosophical distinction between differences in degree and differences in kind.  Two things differ in kind if one possesses a characteristic totally lacked by the other or if one can do something that the other cannot while a difference in degree is a characteristic that one has more of it and the other less.  For example, while beer and wine are both types of alcoholic drinks, beer is different in kind than wine.  Adding hops (or anything else) to wine does not make it beer.  Meanwhile different brands of beer are merely differences in degree—one is less filling, while the other tastes great, but both are beer.

I think we all instinctively know that there are differences in kind when it comes to love.  Let’s suppose that a brother and sister are engaged in a sexual relationship with each other and want to have that love recognized in marriage.  We would all agree that this could never be recognized, but why?

One might say it is because of the fact that a consanguine marriage could end up with a child with serious birth defects.  Putting aside the fact that this seems to prove that marriage and children are somehow intrinsically yoked, what if they both agreed to be sterilized before marriage?  Most of us would still recoil at the idea.  This is because we all seem to almost instinctively know that the love between a brother and sister is a distinct type of love from the love of just any man and woman.  Simply adding sex does not make it eros.  There is nothing that can be added to sibling affection that will make it eros.  Only when a man leaves his father and mother (and his siblings) can he find eros because man is truly social by nature and not just familial.  In other words, the consequences are not the reason why there ought not be a sexual relationship between the two.  The consequences are a result of the fact that there ought not be a sexual relationship.

Although this example is based on an improper sexual relationship, sex need not be the only type of expression that makes it wrong.  We have all met people who provide way too much information about themselves after meeting you.  It is not that we don’t care, but that the sharing of personal information is proper to friendship and not simply the affection that follows from first meeting and liking someone.

And here is the point—each type of love is unique and each unique type of love has a proper form of expression.  The expression does not make the love what it is.  It is a sign of a healthy love.  There may be a hierarchy in the loves, but this hierarchy is more like stairs than an inclined plane.  Each step represents a different kind of love, not merely a growth in the degree of love as if we were walking up a ramp.  A couple may certainly have eros without philia even if it is closer to agape when there is both.

These philosophical musings have a rather important practical implication.  For all the talk we have heard about homosexual unions ruining marriage, we should also be greatly concerned about its poisoning effect on friendship.  Gay relationships are not so much a distortion of eros, but philia.  A relationship between two men or two women is limited to the love of friendship.  Friendship cannot bear the weight of a sexual relationship.  “Friends with benefits” always end up ceasing to be friends, whether they are of the same or opposite sex.

While I said that a “relationship between two men or two women is limited to the love of friendship,” this doesn’t mean that friendship is somehow defective.  The author of the Book of Sirach says that “friendship is the elixir of life” (Sir 6:16).  What he means by this is that a life that is healthy is one that is blessed with friendship.  I think we must fight to restore it to its proper place.

It seems to me that there are very few people over the past century who knew both what it meant to be a friend and what friendship meant better than CS Lewis.  He formed a literary group called the Inklings that included his dear friend JRR Tolkien.  In fact, he credits Tolkien for his role in Lewis’ conversion.  Because of the profound effect that friendship had in his life, Lewis wrote extensively on the subject.  Perhaps the greatest of these writings (and arguably the greatest writing on friendship is general) was presented as one of the chapters in his book The Four Loves.

Webster’s defines a friend as one attached to another by affection or esteem or as an acquaintance or a favored companion.  I, and Lewis I think would agree, find that definition limited.  He says that what many people call “friendship” is truly only companionship.  Friendship is something deeper.  Lewis says that friendship “arises out of mere companionship when two or more companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden)…The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend.  He need not agree with us about the answer.”

So Lewis agrees that a friend is a favored companion, but the reason why he is favored is not merely because of affection or esteem, but because he agrees that there is some truth, some question, of utmost importance.  He doesn’t even need to agree with us in the answer, merely that it is an important question.  The deeper and more important the truth that is looked at, the deeper the friendship is.  This is why Christian friendships seem to be the deepest and longest lasting—they are both looking at He Who is Truth itself.

Friendship also is different from other relationships.  “Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not.  They would be glad to reduce it.  The first two would be glad to find a third,” says Lewis.  He presents friends as side by side absorbed in some common interest.  Friendship is also different from the other loves in that it is the least jealous and best when it includes a third person.  This is because it is usually the third that brings out a side of the other people that would not have otherwise been seen.

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All of this is greatly jeopardized when the State promotes a poisoning of friendships.  People come to think that friendships with members of the same sex can sometimes organically go “to the next level.”  What first starts as a reservation ends up becoming a program of life and a fear of friendship develops.  This fear has always been there to some extent between the sexes.  Friendship can be a mere pretext for eros between the sexes when one of the people may not actually want it.  Now this same reservation will be present in nearly all same-sex friendships.  Many heterosexuals can appear tolerant as long as they are not the ones being hit on and being called a homophobe for cutting off the friendship when this happens.

What results is that the number of true friendships greatly diminishes.  We all begin to suffer from what Fr. C. John McClosky calls Friendship Deficit Syndrome.  What is already in danger because of a completely utilitarian culture, becomes obsolete.  Friendship, because it is based on a relationship with another person, is always an end in itself.  That is why when we were in high school those people who merely wanted to have friends and sought to be popular never were.  As Lewis says, “(T)he very condition of having friends is that we should want something else beside friends.  Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? Would be ‘I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a friend.”  How many people do you know that are like this?  They have many friends just for the sake of having many friends.

How can we redeem friendship?  It all begins by seeking to engage in meaningful conversations with people.  There is such an unbelievable hunger in the world for meaning and depth in conversation.   These conversations are the seeds of friendships.  We have to break free from the shackles and political correctness and sound bites and discuss those things that matter.  I always call to mind when GK Chesterton was told he could write about anything other than politics and religion, he responded that there was nothing else and then proceeded to spend the next 20 years writing about nothing other than politics and religion.  We gladly talk about the weather or sports, but we are timid when it comes to talking about the King of the Universe.  We have it so backwards!

In closing we turn to Lewis one last time.  In a personal letter to his friend Arthur Graves he wrote, “[I]f I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.”  If he were with us today he would add that we need to be present to our friends in very real ways—emails and text messages are not enough.  We need to waste time on your friends and be available to them in very real ways.

Catholic Social Teaching and America

Uncategorized

Hidden among the numerous documents found on the Vatican website, there lies what I consider to be a great gem, namely the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.  In fact no Catholic should enter into discussion in the public square without first reading this document. Because only the Church has a correct vision of the human person, only she can offer a correct vision of society (Centesimus Annus, 64).    In many ways then, all of Catholic Social Doctrine is an attempt to articulate the ethical implications of what it means to be a human person in community.  To that end, the Compendium puts forth four principles which “constitute the very heart of Catholic social teaching,” namely, the dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity.  Two of them in particular, the common good and subsidiarity, bear special mention because of their relevance to our situation in America today.

The Compendium defines the common good in its broadest sense as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (CSD, 164).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church points to three elements of the common good which help to illuminate the twofold focus in the definition that is placed on both the individual and the community.  The common good, first and foremost, must recognize the dignity of the person.  This means creating societal “conditions for the exercise of the natural freedoms indispensable for the development of the human vocation, such as “the right to act according to a sound norm of conscience and to safeguard. . . privacy, and rightful freedom also in matters of religion” (CCC 1907).  Second, the common good requires “the social well-being and development of the group itself” (CCC1908).  This however must never be done at the expense of the dignity of the person.  Finally, the common good requires an atmosphere of peace founded upon a just order in which the mutual fulfillment of members may occur (CCC 1909).

This fulfillment is not merely on a material level.  Seeking the common good is not just about a flourishing economy, protection of rights, etc. but requires special attention to truth, justice, love, virtue and duty in the social order.

If one could restore a proper understanding of the common good, then we would go a long way in fixing many social ills.  There is the notion that the common good refers simply to a sum of individual goods.  Politicians then seek to perform a calculus in developing legislation to benefit the most amount of people regardless of who it harms.  But the common good is a good everyone shares in.  If one person in the society is omitted from it then it is not a common good.

An example might help.  Suppose there is soldier who must leave his family to go off to war.  His family would obviously suffer great hardship in his doing so.  So even though it is a hardship on them, it is done for the common good.  How so?  Because the freedom that he protects is part of the common good and it flows back over him and his family.  It is a higher good because everyone in the community participates in it.  In other words, the common good may be achieved at the cost of great personal sacrifice, but it is always for a good that the sacrificing party also participates in.

The common good depends on contributions not just from the State but from everyone.  Furthermore, everyone, either individually or as a member of a family or intermediate group, “has something to offer to the community” (CSD, 187).  This is the reason that a Nanny State is always contrary to the common good.  It hampers the growth of its members by usurping their right to contribute to the community.

Begging Alms

In a country where we put a great emphasis on personal rights, how come this one is not emphasized?  If each member has a right to contribute to the common good then this means that the rest of Society has an obligation to aid that person is exercising this right.

This is also why the Nanny State always tends towards despotism.  Every time that something that a man can do himself is taken away from him, his freedom is diminished because he loses the skills he once had (or would need to learn) and becomes more dependent.  This “Helpful Caesar” is probably more despotic than the “Tyrant Caesar” because we grow so accustomed to sacrificing our freedoms that we no longer know how to defend them.

One might think that based on this that the State ought to do very little in the way of welfare.  But this is true only up to a certain extent.  All State action ought to be governed by the principle of subsidiarity.  This is the principle by which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (CCC 1883).

Subsidiarity is a guard against collectivism by setting limits on state intervention.  It is certainly the case that government has many necessary and indispensable functions to play, roles that cannot be accomplished by individuals acting alone or even by smaller groups in society.  Nevertheless, governments often exceed their legitimate role by absorbing individuals and groups in society in order to control them.  This leads to “a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending” (CA, 48).

What this looks like in practice is that needs should always be met locally.  This is for two reasons.  The first is that those closest to the problem are the ones that are best suited to diagnose the problem and fix it.  If they do not have the means to fix it then certainly they could rely on a local government agency to assist them.  But, notice the government agency should assist those people in solving the problem themselves, not in solving it for them.

So for example, a man may be having difficulty feeding his family. He might visit the local food bank that is privately run.  The local government could then offer subsidies to the food bank (if necessary) to help them perform this service for the community but would not be involved in the actual distribution of the food.

The second reason is even more important and that is because only those who are close to the situation can give love.  Pope Benedict captures this in his first Encyclical when he said, “[T]he State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need” (Deus Caritas Est, 28).

Because it is a local food bank, the members of the man’s own community are the ones helping him.  He encounters a real person who is showing personal concern and love for him by helping him feed his family.  There is no anonymity that is inherent in a bureaucracy.  This means that every member of the community in turn feels some responsibility for those in need because they might someday need it as well (solidarity).  They aren’t simply paying their taxes assuming their obligations to the poor are taken care of.  It also adds a layer of accountability to the recipient because he knows that he is taking handouts from real people and also may be taking from others in his community who need more than he does.  This means he will take only as much as he needs and strive for an increasing level of independence.

We spend so much time discussing politics in our country that we miss the fact that the government is meant to be at the service of society as a whole.  Certainly any society in which the common good is not properly understood and subsidiarity is not practiced will suffer regardless of how good their ruler is.

History is Bunk

Abortion, Church and State, Contraception

Henry Ford once said, “History is more or less bunk.  It’s tradition.  We don’t want tradition.  We want to live in the present.  The only history that’s worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”  Apparently, former Secretary of State and now Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, believes exactly the same thing as Henry Ford did nearly 100 years ago.  Back in 2009, then-Secretary Clinton received the “highest honor” from Planned Parenthood of America, the Margaret Sanger Award.

In her acceptance speech, Mrs. Clinton said the following:

Now, I have to tell you that it was a great privilege when I was told that I would receive this award. I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. Another of my great friends, Ellen Chesler, is here, who wrote a magnificent biography of Margaret Sanger called Woman of Valor. And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.

And there are a lot of lessons that we can learn from her life and from the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so bravely. One in particular, though, has always stood out for me almost a hundred years later. It’s the lesson that women’s empowerment is always, always about more than bettering the lives of individual women. It is part of a movement. It’s about economic and political progress for all women and girls. It’s about making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves to fulfill her potential, a potential as a mother, as a worker, as a human being.

“I admire Margaret Sanger enormously … her vision.”  Wait.  Did she say she admired Margaret Sanger’s vision?  I wonder which part of her vision she admired specifically.  Because what most people know of her vision is quite scary.

One of her visions was to create a new religion.  The religion would be based on eugenics.  Sanger thought that eugenics was the most adequate avenue to the solution of racial, political, and social problems.  She said, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members… Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.”

Sanger thought that she had solved the problem that vexed most eugenicists from Charles Darwin and Francis Galton on down. In her eyes, natural selection was no longer able to remove the unfit because civilization had softened much of the severity of nature by its misguided compassion and medical advances.  She also said the problem was compounded by the high fecundity of the “feeble minded”.

Although this is probably obvious given that they have named an award for her, but Planned Parenthood has never disavowed her or apologized for her comments.  In fact they continue her mission today.  They build many of their facilities in poorer, African-American neighborhoods to help in primarily targeting African-Americans.  In fact, according to the CDC in the year 2000, (the last year for which they have reported these statistics), over 50% (503 per 1000) of pregnancies in the African American community end in abortion.  The CDC also reports that 35% of all abortions are performed on African-Americans.  Given that they only comprise a little over 10% of the American population that is a startling statistic.  It doesn’t take much to connect the dots on this.  If you want to know more of the specifics on this, check out blackgenocide.com.  That is why I was never sure whether the signs of our first African American president standing in front of t of the Planned Parenthood sign promising FOCA were photo-shopped.  How this completely flies under the radar in our racially oversensitive culture can only be diabolically explained.  Either way, it’s sad that a leader in the African American community can be promoting this and certainly Sanger’s vision is not one we should admire.

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Given that Mrs. Clinton’s “great friend” wrote a magnificent biography, none of this can be news to Mrs. Clinton.  It is easy to confront attitudes and accusations when they are true and you are completely unapologetic for them.  Certainly, this is nothing that we should be “in awe” of.  I think what she meant to say is that it is truly “awe-full” what she did.

What about how Sanger was “making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves to fulfill her potential, a potential as a mother, as a worker, as a human being.”? Of course I assume that is not including the nearly 635,000 women who will die in the womb this year because of abortion in our country. What about the fact that in places like China, abortion is used to selectively kill women in the womb? Hard to make the argument based on this alone that it is “making sure that every woman and girl everywhere has the opportunities that she deserves”. To say later, as she does, that it has changed the lives of tens of millions of women is an understatement to say the very least. I think that she means that it has changed them for the better, but anyone who actually lives (or dies) with the reality of abortion would totally disagree. Have the 65% of post-abortive women who suffer symptoms of trauma had all the opportunities they deserve? What about the women who battle suicidal thoughts and tendencies because of abortion?

Let me be absolutely clear on this. These are horrible things that happen to women because they have bought the lies about abortion. But abortion itself is morally wrong primarily because it takes the life of an innocent person. That being said, the fact of the matter is that anyone who says they are pro-women cannot at the same time be pro-abortion.

There is another section of her speech that I think bears commenting upon.  Secretary Clinton said that

It has changed attitudes and perceptions about women and our roles in society. It ushered in demographic and social changes that have brought us closer to gender equality than at any time.

I can’t believe that I am actually saying this, but I agree with her about the attitudes and perceptions about women.  This is the god of equality rearing its head again.  And of course this means first like any false god, it must have its sacrificial victims in the millions of unborn children who have been killed in the name of equality.  Rather than actually meeting the needs of women, Mrs. Clinton and those of her ilk want to make it possible for them to act like men through chemical alteration of their fertility and abortion.  What if we really treated a woman’s fertility as something sacred and helped them to participate more fully in society?

This is why we need to study history accurately.  We can learn from the wisdom of our predecessors.  If we did then we would find that Alice Paul, who was the author of the Equal Rights Amendment, said that, “abortion is the ultimate exploitation of women.”  What abortion does is give society an easy way out of meeting the real needs of women.  In making women as close to men, they do not need to do anything that meets the needs unique to women.  Society no longer has to take pregnancy seriously.  The early feminists such as Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton recognized this and fought against abortion by seeking legal protection from abortion for women and children.

For all the uproar that Humanae Vitae caused both inside the Church and out, Pope Paul VI’s prophetic warning about men easily forgetting the reverence due to woman and reducing her to a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires appears to have been dead spot on.  What he couldn’t have seen though is how powerful women like Mrs. Clinton would also forget the reverence due to women.  “Gender equality” created in this fashion does not mean equality in dignity.  Gender equality as a goal only serves to lessen the dignity of women.  That is what women and men should be fighting for.

 

Reclaiming the Media Culture

Culture, Media

One of the last documents that Pope St. John Paul II presented to the Church was his Apostolic Letter, The Rapid Development.  He wrote this document mainly as a means to “reflect on the ‘challenges’ which the communications media constitute for the Church, which Paul VI said ‘would feel guilty before the Lord if she did not utilize these powerful means.’”(The Rapid Development (TRD), 2).  Among his reflections he recognizes that “[T]he communications media have acquired such importance as to be the principal means of guidance and inspiration for many people in their personal, familial, and social behavior” (TRD,3) and emphasized that Christians should “not be afraid of new technologies! These rank ‘among the marvelous things’ – inter mirifica – which God has placed at our disposal to discover, to use and to make known the truth, also the truth about our dignity and about our destiny as his children, heirs of his eternal Kingdom” (TRD, 14).  I find that the approach many Christians take towards media is either one of indulgence or total avoidance.  Both are unacceptable unless we want to give up the culture completely.  If we are to continue to be a missionary Church then we cannot forget that “[T]he first Areopagus of the modern age is the world of communications, which is unifying humanity and turning it into what is known as a ‘global village’” (Redemptoris Missio, 37).

There is a tendency to somehow personalize “the Culture” and then demonize it without really reflecting on what culture is.  Culture arises out of the fact that man by nature is a social creature that is made to seek the truth.  Therefore, men seek the truth not just individually but also in community.  Culture then is a community’s answers to the great questions.  These answers become ubiquitous, touching nearly every aspect of the lives of the community.  No one, no matter how hard they try can live outside its reach.

There is another aspect of culture that is very important for us to understand which the saintly Pontiff points out, namely that culture itself, prescinding from its content, arises from the very existence of new ways to communicate with hitherto unknown techniques and vocabulary’ (TRD, 3).  In other words, culture is both parent and child in that it is both formed by and forms the community.

Now there are many particular components that make up culture, not the least of which is religion since you can’t have culture without cult.  Each of these components are meant to express in various ways the answers to the great questions but the culture as a whole has the “primary and essential task of education” (John Paul II, Address to UNESCO, 2 June 1980).

Literature and art also play a key role in any culture, but in ours these roles have been taken over by movies and television.  It is nearly impossible to have a culture that simultaneously produces both movies and TV and great literature and art.

To see why this is so, we need to understand the role our imagination in coming to know things.  Because we are material beings, those things that we come to know are known through our bodies.  As St. Thomas reminds us, “nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses.”  This comes about either when an object is present to us it is first experienced through the exterior senses or when it is absent to us its image is presented through the imagination.  In either case, every object of knowledge that we have passes through the imagination.  The imagination passes the images (St. Thomas calls them phantasms) through the agent intellect where they are abstracted and judgments are made.  In essence, our imaginations act as filters for what we think about.

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What is the point of this?  Motion pictures come at us so quickly that we can very easily lose this filtering ability.  We end up surrendering control over the imagination (by our wills).  We then cease making judgments about the images.  This is the dangerous part because the cultural norms that are present in the movie will become ours.  The judgments implicitly found in the movie will be ours.  So for example, if we see a happy gay couple over presented over and over we begin to associate the two together and eventually judge homosexual relationships as a good thing because of this association.  This ability to overwhelm the imagination is at the heart of the TV advertising industry as well.

To see the point I am driving at, recall what JPII said regarding the culture as parent and child.  We are all children of the culture whether we realize it or not.  There is no avoiding this and to simply abdicate our role as Christians in forming the culture is not an option.  What is needed is to recognize that “a vast work of formation is needed to assure that the mass media be known and used intelligently and appropriately. The new vocabulary they introduce into society modifies both learning processes and the quality of human relations, so that, without proper formation, these media run the risk of manipulating and heavily conditioning, rather than serving people” (TRD, 13).  We need to be properly formed in how media affects us and how it can still act in service of us rather than serving as a tool for propaganda.  Once we do that we can assume the parental role in the culture rather than mere children.  Personally I see three key ways we can affect the media.

1) Mental Prayer

This may seem obvious and probably shouldn’t even be mentioned but I mention it for a very specific reason.  Many people simply cannot pray today.  When they sit down to pray and meditate on the Scriptures they are so driven to distraction that they find it impossible to pray.  It never seems to get better so they give up.  The cause of most of our distractions in prayer is that we are unable to govern our imagination.  Once we gain control of our imagination, our prayer life immediately improves.

If you recall what I said above TV and movies’ effect on our imagination then you can see why this might be the case. The remedy is less TV.

Reading also is a great help.  Again if you are accustomed to a lot of TV and movies it is very difficult to develop the habit of reading.  There is a reason why the “book is better than the movie.”  We must fully engage our minds in a book.  We learn to govern our imaginations especially in reading authors are very descriptive.  Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy was the most popular book of the twentieth century precisely because of his ability to actively engage the imagination and paint a world where beauty, truth and goodness win.

Poetry is also great in this regard because of the word pictures that good poets create.  Along with his many talents, John Paul II was also an accomplished poet.  He wrote a poem on the Conclave of Cardinals that was later printed.  One would be hard pressed to watch a video that would capture what these few words do:

It is here, beneath this wondrous Sistine profusion of color that the Cardinals assemble — the community responsible for the legacy of the keys of the Kingdom. They come here, to this very place. And once more Michelangelo wraps them in his vision. “In him we live and move and have our being.” The colors of the Sistine will then speak the word of the Lord: Tu es Petrus (Mt 16:18) — once heard by Simon, son of John. “To you I will give the keys of the Kingdom.” During the Conclave Michelangelo must teach them — Do not forget: Omnia nuda et aperta sunt ante oculos Eius. You who see all, point to him! He will point him out …

–Meditations on the Book of Genesis: At the Threshold of the Sistine Chapel

Finally I would recommend reading books out loud as a family.  This is something that has completely falling out of vogue.  But families have done this for generations and it has served them well in not only forming them in the true, good and beautiful but forming a bond around the shared stories.  He who controls the stories, controls the culture.

2) Become a discerning viewer and teach others what to look for

Notice that above I said the remedy I mentioned was less TV, not to cut it out completely.  Our goal ought to be, first to become discerning viewers, but also to form discerning viewers.  We have to fight the tendency to use TV as means to “veg-out.”  We need to be active in our consumption and make judgments about what we are watching.  In order to do this we need to limit the amount of time (especially consecutive time) we spend watching.  Use the PAUSE button liberally to stop and think about what is going on.  If you are watching with someone else, pause and talk about it.  If you are seeing it in a theater then stop for ice cream on the way home so you can talk about it.  See if you can label the worldview of the producers and writers.  What did they get right?

Along the same lines, resist the temptation to use the TV as a babysitter.  Watch TV with your kids and avoid allowing them to watch it alone.  Help them too become discerning viewers.  When you see something wrong (like teenager boys objectifying girls or doofus dads) point it out.  Having a family movie night is a great way to do this as well.

Which leads to the third way we can affect the media…

3) Demand Excellence

TV and movies, like all good art, ought to reflect the True, the Good and the Beautiful.  If that is lacking turn it off.  Demand an account for the time you have spent.  God will ask you for an account for all the time He gave you, will you be able to give a good account?

Resist the temptation to voyeurism that drives the “Reality TV” genre.  These shows exploit the families that are a part of them (and has led to the downfall of more than a few) and can be made with very little monetary investment on the part of producers.  Family life should never be on display for the world to see.

An important corollary to this is to demand excellence from so-called Christian film-makers.   Often we’re so happy to see Christian media that we don’t care about the quality.  So often the movies are cliché and the characters are so smarmy that it only serves to make Christianity look even worse in the eyes of the rest of the culture.  “If Christians are that dull and fake, then why would I want to be one?” is what many non-Christians think after seeing them.  But shouldn’t Christian media be better off because of its goals and motivations?  If a movie is meant to spread the Faith then it should meet industry standards.  Think of the effect of a Catholic film like the Song of Bernadette winning the Oscar for Best Picture today.  Certainly critically acclaimed movies like Brokeback Mountain and Million Dollar Baby were instrumental in forming the culture.  There was a time when Catholics controlled Hollywood, why couldn’t this happen again?  The desire in all men for the Good, the True and the Beautiful cannot be stamped out and most know it when they see it.  If we make it, they will come.

And certainly never forget that TV and Movies are consumer-driven.  If we don’t watch it then they won’t make it or show it.

St. Francis de Sales, Patron Saint of the Media, Pray for Us!

 

At the Heart of Liberty

Freedom, Politics

As Americans gather this weekend to celebrate the Fourth of July, one can’t help but be nostalgic for the Founder’s vision for our country.  Each year I go back and read the Declaration of Independence and reflect on the great gift God has given us in our country.  What becomes obvious in reading this founding document is that the overall theme is one of liberty.  Americans are called a “free people” that has been endowed with liberty by their Creator.  This liberty was understood as not, what Lord Acton would write a century later, “the power to do what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.”  One has to wonder how the Founders would respond to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s most recent contention that the Bill of Rights guarantees “certain personal choices central to individual dignity and autonomy, including intimate choices that define personal identity and beliefs.”  In other words, his belief is that freedom exists only for the sake of personal autonomy.  By equating freedom with autonomy there is a great danger that true freedom will be greatly compromised.

If freedom and autonomy are not the same thing, then how is freedom to be understood?  To answer this question we begin by looking at human nature itself, just as the Founders did in the Declaration of Independence.  They found it self-evident that man was created with the inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  They thought man was made for a very particular end and that end was called “happiness.”  Although it was probably not in the sense that Jesus used it in the Beatitudes, but most assuredly they used happiness in the Aristotelian sense of a naturally virtuous life.  They listed the two rights only because they were indispensable means to the pursuit of happiness.

What made this self-evident to the Founders was that in looking at man, they knew he had the power both to reason and to will.  They also recognized that man’s will had two categories to it—the necessary and the free.  The necessary meant that no matter what, man must will the good in its universal aspect.  In other words, man cannot choose contrary to his own good.  He may be wrong as to what the good consists in, but universally man will always choose the good (i.e. happiness).  We are not free to choose our own end, it is written into our very nature.

The will is also free insofar as in this life we are not confronted with the universal good, but particular goods.  Our free will is given to us to choose the means by which we will achieve our fixed end.  In other words we have liberty in pursuing happiness and the Founders saw the role of government to protect and promote these “inalienable rights” by which man thrives.

Some may dispute the contention that we cannot choose contrary to our own good.  What about someone diving on a grenade to save his platoon?  One could argue that only someone who sees a good beyond this life that is obtained by selfless acts would do something like that.  Only someone who ultimately (even if they don’t explicitly say it) believes “he who loses his life will save it” would do that.  In fact even the person who commits suicide is acting a manner they think is beneficial to them.  They believe that what awaits them after their death is better than what they are enduring now.

Some of the confusion stems from equivocating on the terms surrounding freedom.  We tend to equate free will with freedom and freedom with liberty.  But these terms should remain distinct if we are to avoid falling into the pitfall that ensnared Justice Kennedy.  When we speak of free will, we are really referring to freedom of choice.  Freedom of choice is the mechanism by which we choose means to achieve our destiny.  This includes freedom from coercion so as not to be interfered with.  As we will see in a moment, this tends to be the current American understanding of liberty as well.

But liberty is something distinct.  It is freedom in its truest sense.  It is a conscious willing of the true end that fulfills our nature.  It is found only in the person who has completely mastered himself so he is not constrained by impulses from within (i.e. concupiscence) nor can he be coerced or forced from the outside to deviate from the good.  This is the truly free man.  It is the “liberty of the sons of God” (Romans 8:21) that St. Paul speaks of because he knows that only the man who is in Christ has liberty.  It also helps us understand how grace can never “force” us because it acts in cooperation with our liberty which is ordered to our true good.

The point is that Thomas Jefferson listed liberty among the inalienable rights not because he was looking for a catchy word but because he recognized this was the highest freedom in man.  He recognized only when man acted in liberty could he properly pursue his end or happiness.  He knew that when this liberty was not protected and promoted, both individual men and society would greatly suffer.  That is why they sought to be free from what they viewed as a tyranny when their liberty was threatened.

As proof of how far we have gotten from this understanding, read Justice Kennedy’s most famous quote from Planned Parenthood vs Casey in 1992, “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.”  If liberty truly means to determine one’s own concept of the meaning then freedom, liberty and autonomy are all the same thing.  These are not merely the ramblings of a single Supreme Court Justice, but instead a reflection of our culture as a whole.  Freedom of choice is a god in our culture.  It is an end rather than a means.  Personal freedom is the highest good and all things are subordinate to it.  This is nothing more than a recipe for slavery as we are blown to and fro by our whims and the incoherent ramblings of Supreme Court Justices.  Slowly but surely we are all becoming enslaved to personal freedom and in great need of a Declaration of Independence of our own.  On this Fourth of July, let liberty ring!