Syndication feed for TheCatholicThing.org: cultural and political commentary grounded in the Catholic Tradition http://www.thecatholicthing.org Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:21:38 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://www.thecatholicthing.org Syndication feed for TheCatholicThing.org: cultural and political commentary grounded in the Catholic Tradition http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2499&Itemid=2 Having funded groups that support abortion and “same sex marriage,” and funneled more than $7 million to ACORN over the span of a decade, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) is coming knocking again this weekend at a parish near you amidst calls for reform, The special CCHD Sunday collection, which funds non-Catholic organizations and does not provide direct relief to the poor, arrives at a challenging time for charitable agencies. Government bodies are increasingly making public funding contingent upon accepting ideological terms and conditions antithetical to the very identity that inspires Catholic social services. But that identity has long been withering from within. Lay people are called to engage vital issues in an indifferent or hostile public square. What recourse is there when their own official charitable agencies fail spectacularly to reflect basic beliefs? This is all part of a broader trend. African bishops meeting in Rome in October repeatedly denounced the virulent ideological poisons” being imposed on Africa from the West, precisely what Catholic agencies encounter – and sometimes succumb to – here at home as well. A Ghanaian bishop stated that there is a deliberate campaign being advanced by some NGOs, governments, and international agencies to undermine the family and African cultural values. A South African bishop pointed to the second wave of colonization from liberalism, secularism, and from lobbyists who squat at the United Nations. It’s ironic that our American Caesar, so celebrated on account of his African extraction, champions destructive western ideologies that African bishops regard as a “subtle and ruthless” form of colonization. Some have argued that, by his actions and rhetoric, he sees himself as more than merely an American president – a transnational leader of sorts. Well, he is (as its most powerful and visible proponent) the present face of the culture of death, whose malignancy knows no borders. It is a distinction that, unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, has been earned. The culture of death knows no borders (or classes) because, as Solzhenitsyn put it in the Gulag Archipelago, “the line separating good and evil” cuts first and foremost “through every human heart.” He further reflects: In the intoxication of youthful success I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power, I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments, I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systemic arguments. Perhaps there would be enough in these words to trigger an epiphany within our Caesar’s conscience, if he read them, though it is admittedly a stretch to suggest that he has ever been well supplied with arguments for his unrelenting disregard for life (even as C.D.C. data indicate that the number of abortions among African-Americans exceeds their top seven causes of mortality combined). He has merely been equipped with what Denver Archbishop Charles J. Chaput calls “great media handlers,” and is abetted by an elite culture that has distanced itself from both faith and reason. Solzhenitsyn stresses that the line separating good and evil within each of us shifts; it “oscillates with the years.” This is one reason why steady witness to the Gospel – being reminders of what is good and true – is such an indispensible part of Catholic charitable activity. True, our American Caesar “bullies religion while he claims to respect it.” But he does not need to shake down all the kids for lunch money by himself as long as CCHD lends a willing hand. Internal reform of the many Catholic agencies such as CCHD that have gone flagrantly adrift of their own volition is a burning priority. The litany of accommodation, in one form or another, is all too familiar: contraception, abortion, condoms, “gay adoption,” etc. Underestimating the perils of statism and the value of subsidiarity in large-scale new initiatives like the healthcare debate is another concern. Reform of our own agencies means nurturing a climate in which committed Catholics can live out their vocations of service even if that means accepting the hazards of being countercultural. At present, such Catholics are unwelcome or marginalized within several Catholic agencies. While that remains the case, reform will stall. This is a matter quite beyond the control of the laity. Cozy careerism compounds the ideological threats to charitable endeavors, as Theodore Dalrymple attests: “One man’s poverty is another man’s employment opportunity: as long ago as the sixteenth century, a German bishop remarked that the poor are a gold mine.” I once heard Dalrymple address his own lack of belief by saying that the leap of faith has thus far simply eluded him – an honest and even moving admission, which reminded me that faith is a gift. It can be asked for, but not procured – even by those who are immensely gifted. This is a mystery. It is also a mystery when those granted custody over Catholic charitable agencies sometimes act as if they would rather exchange that gift for the public esteem that comes not from genuinely noble acts, but from what the elite imagine to be their own providential role in society. We have all squandered the gift of faith. And yet God keeps giving. A renewed gratitude for that gift should animate the reform of our Catholic charitable agencies. That much, at the very least, the bishops can control, and CCHD would be a good place to start. Whether or not we are ultimately able to stay afloat on the high, hostile seas of America’s Caesar, we can at least leave harbor prepared for the voyage with sturdy vessels and full sails. The National Catholic Bioethics Center will be publishing Matthew Hanley's book, with Jokin D. Irala, M.D., Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West. © 2009 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2492&Itemid=2 Nine months of the Obama administration have prompted me to flee, not to New Zealand or Argentina, but rather to Blandings Castle. In such locations, considerable disarray exists. Blandings is more likely to lead to what Chesterton called sanity. The first lines of P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmth are these: “At the open window of the great library of Blandings Castle, drooping like a wet sock, as was his habit when he had nothing to prop his spine against, the Earl of Emsworth, that amiable and boneheaded peer, stood gazing out over his domain.” But the title of the first chapter is ominous: “Dark Plottings at Blandings Castle.” Thus, the second sentence: “It was a lovely morning and the air was fragrant with gentle summer scents. Yet in his lordship’s pale blue eyes there was a look of melancholy….” This was also my mood after the first couple of hundred days of the “new era”-plottings: melancholy. Professor Charles Smith, at Marymount University across the Potomac in Virginia, invited me over to their “Deep Waters” lecture series. Here, the students, in case they miss them in class, might have a second plunge into things of ultimate importance. John Paul II, following Christ’s admonition to the fishermen apostles, advised us to push further into the “deep,” a handy symbol for those things Aristotle called of greatest worth. Smith told me that once, in one of my published book lists, he saw a reference to Wodehouse, whom, unaccountably for a well-educated man, he had never read. At the time, he purchased a book of Wodehouse novels. He confessed, however, that he had not yet read them. Imagine a Smith not having yet read Leave It to Psmith! Marymount’s Smith is an amusing and insightful man, so I am quite sure that Smith and Psmith will soon come together in a happy encounter. Two days before I went over to Marymount, I received an email from one of my students, Elisabeth Griesedieck, who is spending a semester in a Scottish university. I had mentioned the Wodehouse novel in connection with one of her middle names, which is Stith, pronounced, I inquired, “PStith,” like in “Psmith?” It turns out the pun was not wasted. She had already read this great Wodehouse novel. “I love Wodehouse! I have read Leave It to Psmith again and again. I can’t stop laughing when I read it, often on Spring break at the beach. Psmith is up for any job except that which involves fish.” I said to myself, “This young lady does not need to go to college.” If she had delighted over Psmith, she is already educated. Nothing we can do here on the Hilltop of Georgetown will be of much more avail. Another ex-student of mine, Michael Jackson, was the one who put Schall, himself already at the time into early dotage, onto Wodehouse. I still have the copy of Leave It to Psmith that he gave me. But I also have a handsome 1987 Folio Society of London edition that Jackson’s and my friend, yet another ex-student, Scott Walter, gave me for my birthday in 1990. Needless to say, the dedication begins, “For Father Pschall….” Many of the Wodehouse books have happy endings, as do Psmith and Eve Holliday in this novel. The happy ending for Bertie Wooster, however, is when he just manages not to get married to some beautiful young lady with whom he could in no way live happily ever after. Divine providence watches over Bertie in this regard, not that Wooster has anything against marriage. The last chapter of this novel begins with a lovely description of the blooming flowers in Blandings Castle “and its adjacent pleasure grounds.” There are also “birds and bees and butterflies.” We are again warned, however, not to be deceived by the scenery. “But happiness, even on the finest mornings, is seldom universal.” Happiness and unhappiness are located in the souls of men and ladies, as one or two of the greatest philosophers have indicated to us. On this glorious Blandings morning “Even Head-gardener Angus McAllister was as happy as a Scotsman can ever be.” Again the shadow is there. “But Lord Emsworth, drooping out of the library window, felt only a nervous irritation more in keeping with the blizzards of winter than with the only fine July day that England had known in the last ten years.” Pschall shan’t go on. Things turn out all right at Blandings Castle. The last words are “and with a stately gesture of farewell, Psmith passed out on to the terrace to join Eve.” The only lasting city we have here is the one that Wodehouse left us. Indeed, we “can’t stop laughing when we read it.” This is because this world is not our final home. James V. Schall, S.J., a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. His most recent book is The Mind That Is Catholic. (c) 2009 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2485&Itemid=2 It is no exaggeration to say that Catholicism today, not only in America but across the world, resembles nothing so much as a gigantic pizzeria – one in which some people spend their days enjoying the pizza, and others complaining about just which parts of the pie they dislike most. Now, imagine that the parlor doors swing open one day to let in a small but distinguished group of new patrons, all sharing the same gastronomic preference: they, too, are coming to enjoy the pizza rather than to disdain it. What do you suppose will be the likely effect of this group on the overall scene? Won’t it most likely please the already seated pizza-lovers, even as it gives the pizza-complainers a moment of pause as they witness this new group do something they think can’t be done – i.e., enjoy the pizza for what it is? If you think the answer is yes on both counts, then you already understand more than many commentators about Pope Benedict’s bombshell October announcement, offering members of the Anglican Communion a new fast track into the Catholic Church. As Robert Royal noted in his column following the Vatican’s announcement (“Bold, Benedetto, and Bello” (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/content/view/2369/26/)), this forceful stroke “confuses journalists who tend only to think in binary oppositions of left and right that maybe a whole other game is being played.” Now, weeks later, the commotion has only grown louder – a reaction worth inspecting as the pope’s move begins to re-write the next few centuries of Christendom. As ever, outright anti-Catholics have elbowed their way to the front of the japery. Some have provided so much free entertainment following the pope's announcement that a whole new awards ceremony should be designed to recognize them. In the category of reading world historical news through the most parochial lens possible, for example, the Los Angeles Times led a crowded field with this entry: “this religious realignment is also a reminder to supporters of equality for women and gays and lesbians that they must literally preach to the converted if they are to win believers to their cause.” The skies were not much clearer on the other side of the country at the Washington Post. There Benedict’s announcement provoked what might be dubbed the inadvertent miracle award; it caused Richard Dawkins to wax lyrical about a Christian clergyman – specifically the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose “saintly quality,” “benignity of countenance,” and “well-meaning sincerity” he contrasted with that Gulag on the Tiber that “most deserves the title of greatest force for evil in the world.” As for the blogosphere, where the traffic from anti-Catholics, un-Catholics, and ex-Catholics is busiest of all, so much sputtering has been occasioned by Benedict’s move that it might seem nearly impossible to single out any one entry for distinction. Fortunately, the Huffington Post volunteered itself. There, a female Episcopalian priest, disdaining the pope’s announcement, valiantly predicted an influx into the Anglican Communion of disaffected Catholics, and further reported that from what she personally had seen at the Vatican, “the clergy scene in Rome certainly seems very gay” – a statement that, considering the source, fairly cries out for what might be called a Kettle and Pot prize. Even so, amid the showers of crocodile tears, there remains one other interested party about which little has been heard: religious-minded Anglicans themselves, who have watched with dismay for many years now as their liturgy has been trashed, their churches emptied, and their vaunted tolerance twisted by a-religious radicals into a rationale for jettisoning anything besides whistles and bells that smacked of traditional Christianity. Charlotte Hays’ eloquent column on this site, “Outreach to the Homeless,” (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/content/view/2425/26/) said it all: “It’s good I found a new home, because my old one no longer exists.” Similarly, as one former Episcopalian priest turned Catholic wrote in a letter to the New York Times – objecting to the paper’s umpteenth portrayal of believers like himself as simply bad on women and gays – “Priests like me are not reacting to polemics on the theological spectrum. It is the faith once delivered that we are after, which we pursue as an imperative of conscience.” Such personal testimony underscores the compassion of Benedict’s move. It also reminds that there have indeed been victims of what have come to be the teachings of the Anglican Communion – just not the ones that pundits reflexively hostile to the papacy have identified. In his 1952 classic A Traveller in Rome, H.V. Morton writes sweepingly of the longstanding love harbored by English tourists of all times and varieties for the Eternal City, one that influenced their home country in a thousand and one imported ways. “Even today,” he reported from mid-century after surveying the tourists of decades past, “those who have been ruthlessly educated to be chemists and physicists, and to hold down important posts in commercial combines, descend from their coaches and gaze around upon the Roman scene, so dear to their ancestors, conscious maybe that there is something there to be understood and perhaps even loved.” It now turns out that there is more understanding and love in Rome than even Morton in all his brilliance could have foreseen, including and especially for those Anglicans, English and otherwise, who are still searching for a faith that delivers. Their exodus into the pizza parlor will be bad for those want the place to be something other than what it is, and good for those who love it for itself alone. That’s why those in that second category should be standing on their chairs by now, cheering what may turn out to be one of the religious game-changers of our lifetimes. Mary Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, contributing writer to First Things, and author most recently of The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death, and Atheism, forthcoming in Spring 2010 from Ignatius Press. (c) 2009 The Catholic Thing. All right reserved. For reprint rights write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2477&Itemid=2 The hero of Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy Sword of Honour, in the slough of despond in wartime Cairo, goes to a priest to confess that he has wished to be dead. “How many times?” the priest asks. Verbal humor always turns on such little things, mistaking what is being modified in this instance. And as is often also the case, humor is a protective armor against the tragic. Guy Crouchback went off to war in the conviction that his country was embarking on a crusade against the two great political evils in the modern world. It would end as the obsequious ally of one of them, and a leitmotif of the trilogy is the way members of the British communist fifth column positioned themselves for the postwar world. After the war, loathing the leftward lurch of his country, Waugh said that the only way he could bear to live in England was to pretend he was a tourist. Morose delectation is more often a temporary grace than a settled view of life, but longevity brings the feeling that one has outlived his time, that there are events it would have been better not to see, that human folly is a bottomless resource. Now when the secular Advent begins more or less on Labor Day, the familiar lament that Christmas is being trivialized, commercialized, and secularized is once more heard in the land, even though the mourner’s bench has becomes less crowded. Christ’s Mass, the annual commemoration of the Word becoming flesh, the liturgical dwelling on the early chapters of Luke, the hymns that lifted the heart – all that is lost among the tinsel. Philip Roth, in one of his not infrequent anti-gentile passages, chuckles over the way Irving Berlin turned Christmas and Easter into a snowy landscape and a fashion parade, respectively. We all knew what dreaming of a white Christmas meant, but now little is left but the white. Of course one could argue that this was well underway when Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, but there one could still catch intimations of the Christian motive for compassion and brotherly love. A lay brother in the Order of St. Clement, the religious society founded by J. F. Powers for his novel Morte d’Urban, spends his Advent lettering signs he hopes to convince merchants to place in their shop windows. Put Christ Back In Christmas. In the novel this activity is gently mocked as one more pointless effort of the benighted order to which Father Urban belongs. But perhaps Powers saw the campaign as what was already one more lost cause. Religious observances often survive in altered forms. Christianity adapted local cults, and pagan temples like the Pantheon became basilicas. (Not to mention the continued profanation of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.) “Goodbye” once meant God be with you and in Austria God is thanked right and left. Football players who do what they are paid millions to do, often point skyward in an apparent act of thanksgiving, and there are still many batters who bless themselves when they step up to the plate. If God’s eye is on the sparrow, surely he can be on the lookout for a changeup pitch. I would wager there is more sincerity in that sign of the cross than in all the hoopla in shopping malls. What once was Christmas has now been changed irretrievably into a special season of appeal to consumers. There is little chance of regaining it in the commercial world. Let it go, and thank God it is blurred into The Holidays, no doubt to make room for Kwanzaa. Some reminders of its original meaning will be heard, as when the ACLU objects to a crèche on the courthouse lawn. We live in a post-Christian world and it really is pointless to plead for the name of Christmas. Words have meanings and the meaning of that word is surely lost in the contemporary secular world. So we must gather as Christians always have, not as the dominant party in the wider world, but as a group of gawking shepherds hearing the incredible news that God has become man. The message is meant for all, but the response has always alas been confined to a relative few. This should increase our gratitude and devotion rather than lead to grousing about what they are up to down at Macy’s. The secular view of Christmas will inevitably exercise its subtle influence on us. Our chief concern should be over that influence rather than trying to reclaim a word, a word than in any case has been forgotten. So I will go back to lettering my cards. Take The Mass Out of Xmas. That will leave only a symbol of the unknown. Ralph McInerny is a writer of philosophy, fiction, and cultural criticism, who has taught at Notre Dame since 1955. (c) 2009 The Catholic Thing. All right reserved. For reprint rights write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2471&Itemid=2 I’m told by reliable people that there are readers of The Catholic Thing still struggling with mainstream-media addictions. If so, some of you may have been surprised to find your humble editor-in-chief named in a recent any fair reader can see here (http://www.thecatholicthing.org/content/view/2120/26/), and I find the equating of the two scandals both absurd and repugnant. I’ve demanded a correction from Time and will take legal action if one is not forthcoming. But Ms. Sullivan was never really interested in accurate reporting. She brought me into the story merely to show that even other traditional Catholics, such as Princeton’s Robert George, disagree with a position I don’t hold. Professor George and I are old friends and have communicated to clarify this issue. His remarks, he has publicly confirmed, were deliberately taken out of context, which – for once – I myself would have preferred, since the view ascribed to me was made up from whole cloth. The manufactured disagreement between the two of us, however, was not the main point. Rather, Ms. Sullivan, who has done similar stories in the past few months, used the two of us as parallel proof for “A Tale of Two Priests,” which is to say the alleged feud between Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley (compassionate because he attended the Kennedy funeral) and (that evil conservative now resident in Rome) Archbishop Raymond Burke, who takes a harder line about Catholics who present grave and longstanding public scandal. Why does Time care what two high ranking Catholic prelates think? Here’s a plausible explanation. Like many in the media, Ms. Sullivan has noted how the American Catholic bishops as a body have lately worked quite effectively on several fronts. Abortion funding came out of the healthcare bill (though in an earlier confused article Ms. Sullivan absurdly claimed the bishops were asking for new restrictions because, she argued, they had previously seemed to think that existing forms of indirect federal funding were okay). The Church in Maine was instrumental this month in repealing a gay-marriage bill. And bishops like the highly articulate Thomas J. Tobin of Providence have begun to take nominal pro-abortion Catholics like Patrick Kennedy to the public woodshed. So the more outlets such as Time can give the impression that there are differences among bishops, the better on a whole range of issues dear to those who think the Church a baneful public influence. In this particular case, the relationship with the truth was strained beyond the ordinary. Ms. Sullivan interviewed “an American priest” in Rome who reported that diplomatic Italian bishops “roll their eyes” at the mention of Archbishop Burke. It’s convenient that the American priest is not named. Otherwise someone might have to ask him why, if he is such a laughing stock, Burke, who is already Prefect of the Roman Signatura (the rough equivalent of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), was just also named to the Congregation for Bishops. That means he will play a major role in selecting bishops not only in the United States, but the whole world. To be fair, Time is not alone in trying to sow discord, as Dante called it, in the Church. (For the punishments Dante thought such persons should receive, take a look at Inferno xxviii). I was stuck in a university faculty club this week where the only news channel was MSNBC. Keith Olbermann was “interviewing” C. Walton Gaddy, president of the liberal Interfaith Alliance. In response to Olbermann’s leading questions, Gaddy explained that the American Catholic bishops were acting childish by threatening to oppose the healthcare bill if they didn’t get their way on abortion coverage. A Catholic understands that a certain kind of Protestant regards every public question as merely a matter of political compromise. Some of us, though, also know Protestants who easily comprehend why Catholics simply cannot compromise on a few crucial issues because such Protestants can’t in good conscience compromise on those issues themselves. The Washington Post last week engaged in a similar bit of media ventriloquism. It sympathetically reported on members of the D.C. City Council who lashed out at the Church – this time for threatening to suspend social services in Washington connected with the city (as usual, the Church is the largest private provider). The Council is about to approve gay “marriage” and intends to require all agencies with city contracts to practice “non-discrimination.” One council member said she couldn’t believe that the Church would abandon people over “a philosophical difference.” It never seems to occur to such activists – let alone mooncalf reporters – that they are themselves forcing not only their “philosophical differences” but definite behaviors on others, and are breaking with the majority of people in almost every community across the country when they impose radical new arrangements. Politico, a national newspaper, allowed a writer to try another familiar tactic this week: “The bishops know that a vast majority of Americans, including Catholics, disagree with their hard-line dictates regarding reproductive-health care.’’ Really? Those of us who pay attention to such things – and that includes many in the pro-abortion camp – know from polls widely reported in the mainstream media itself that a majority of Americans now call themselves pro-life. So who is this “vast majority” who disagree with the bishops? You can’t help but wonder who our media think they are fooling. It’s a tired ploy. But none of us should grow weary or cease to be vigilant about the media blitz that is now seeking to blunt the Catholic voice – and even create divisions among us. Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West. © 2009 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2470&Itemid=2 A good hearted and extremely well-connected Catholic came up to me at a Catholic event this week in Washington D.C. and said, “Now don’t you see the value of engagement? At the Kennedy funeral, Cardinal O’Malley directly lobbied the president to keep abortion out of the health care bill and look what happened.” This good-hearted Republican, who has been at the very center of the common-ground talks with the White House, had apparently missed the headlines only twenty-four hours earlier. Even before the ink was dry on the Stupak Amendment, which limits abortion coverage in the new healthcare bill, the New York Times reported that the president, “Seeks Revision of Plan’s Abortion Limits.” President Obama told the Times, “There needs to be some more work before we get to the point where we’re not changing the status quo [on abortion].” He said, “We’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortion.” The status quo he refers to is the Hyde Amendment. “On the other hand,” the president continued, “we’re not restricting women’s insurance choices.” That is the talking point of the abortion lobby, one they hope will unravel Stupak and give America the largest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade. The charge by the abortion lobby and their friend in the White House is that the Stupak Amendment goes far beyond the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funding of abortion). In their telling, Stupak says not only that women in the proposed federal health exchange may not use federal dollars for abortion coverage, they may not even use their own money to buy abortion riders. They claim, with the president’s apparent agreement, that this would restrict access to abortion for American women – that it is, in reality, a “middle-class abortion ban.” For the sake of argument, let’s say they are right – that the Stupak Amendment disallows women from using their own money to buy abortion insurance. There is still nothing preventing them from marching into an abortuary and slapping down a wad of cash. That is mostly what happens today anyway. Insurers carry plans with abortion coverage, but most employers choose not to offer it, and most people have insurance through their employers. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified before Congress in April that most “private plans do not cover abortion services except in limited instances.” What the pro-choice groups and president Obama are really asking for is a massive expansion of abortion coverage beyond the status quo – for coverage of all elective abortions and for that expanded coverage to be subsidized by federal dollars. That’s if you concede their position for the sake of argument. But, in fact, they are wrong. The Stupak Amendment does allow women to buy insurance riders for elective abortions. Don’t take Stupak’s word for it. Take a look at Politifact.com, which is run by the left-wing St. Petersburg Times. They say the assertion that Stupak does not allow women to use their own money for abortion insurance is flatly “false.” According to Politifact.com, “The amendment says that individuals buying insurance on the exchange may still purchase coverage that includes abortions as long as no federal money is used.” Politifact.com also dispels the pro-abortion Obama myth that the Stupak Amendment would affect almost every woman in America. Politifact points out that Stupak only covers the virtual marketplace for insurance coverage that is created by the bill and that this virtual marketplace only covers the self-employed and small business owners. They point out that this virtual marketplace “would serve at most a small fraction of Americans.” The day after the Stupak Amendment passed, Planned Parenthood announced that they would go to their ally in the White House to get the abortion language fixed. After all, Obama promised during the '08 campaign that he would put “reproductive health care” at the “center of health care reform.” The very next day Obama began parroting the now demonstrably false talking points of the abortion industry. The abortion lobby certainly knows who their friends and opponents are. Even now, they are demanding that the Catholic Church lose its non-profit status because its role in promoting the Stupak Amendment. Obama has repeatedly shown that he is not really interested in common ground on abortion. Ironically, no issue is more “common-ground” than federal funding of abortion: polls and public policy surveys show that most Americans, even pro-choice Americans, oppose federal funding of abortion. That’s why the Stupak amendment passed with wide bi-partisan support, garnering even more votes than the final bill received. Yet Obama-of-the-common-ground opposes Stupak. And so I ask: At long last, may we call a halt to the “common-ground” conversation that gullible Catholics believe they can have with the Obama Administration about abortion? Can we finally call a halt to the wishful thinking of those in the Vatican who are undermining the American pro-life movement by giving aid and comfort to Obama's aggressive abortion policy? Barack Obama and the pro-abortion Democrats are not seeking common ground. They do not want compromise . . . except from us. What they want is to win. For them “common ground,” compromise, and dialogue are merely strategies of war. Sad to say, dialogue is cat-nip for gullible Catholics – both here and in Rome. Austin Ruse is the President of the New York and Washinton, D.C.-based Catholic Family Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), a research institute that focuses exclusively on international social policy. (c) 2009 The Catholic Thing. All right reserved. For reprint rights write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2458&Itemid=2 Some people, young and old, have trouble with tradition: older folks because they no longer remember where it came from; youngsters because they never learned it. It’s the way we’ve always done it. So do it. And we do, and the tradition may become rote, a routine, and even a rut. As Scott Hahn writes in his latest book, Signs of Life: “Even devout Catholics can treat these many and diverse customs as if they’re disconnected and random acts – superstitions that have somehow gained the Church’s approval.” But it’s not just Catholics who struggle with some aspects of Catholic life. So much about the Church mystifies other Christians, who often ask about one or another Catholic rite or ritual: “Where’s that in the Bible?” Thank heavens then for a book with answers – from Scripture, yes, but also from history and from common sense; a book that celebrates “all things Catholic, and the biblical doctrine that makes them Catholic.” A guide to the mysteries: a mystagogy. Hahn quotes Benedict XVI: “The mature fruit of mystagogy is an awareness that one’s life is being progressively transformed by the holy mysteries being celebrated . . . mak[ing] him a ‘new creation.’” Dr. Hahn discusses forty Catholic traditions, placing each in the contexts of the Bible, history, and the Magisterium. For instance, in the book’s seventh section, titled “Love of My Life,” chapters describe: devotion to the Trinity, the Rosary, scapulars and medals, and reverence for the Tabernacle. Discussing the Rosary, Dr. Hahn eloquently describes the prayer as the fulfillment of Mary’s prophecy in Luke 1:48: “For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.” He gives an overview of the mysteries and the varying ways different individuals and groups say the prayer. But then he goes on to describe the beauty of saying the Rosary as a family, which is no easy task. There was a time in my family when we found it almost impossible to trap all our sport-minded teenagers in the house at once. So we did what we could. We locked onto the one time when we were almost always together – dinner – and we concluded our meal with a decade. Sound thinking. Most of us aren’t like the O’Haras at Tara, who nightly gathered to pray to Our Lady. But Scarlett and the girls had no soccer practice, no television, no cell phones. Hahn ends each chapter with an apposite quotation from a key Catholic figure. In the case of the Rosary, he gives the last word to John Paul II, who describes it as Marian and Christocentric. It is, the pope wrote, “the school of Mary . . .” If the book suffers at all, it’s from being occasionally predictable. After all, we have a catechism, which is the ultimate mystagogy, and in some of Dr. Hahn’s forty chapters it’s fair to say there’s nothing new, nothing startling, nothing memorable. This is not to say that both the information and insight in Signs of Life aren’t rock solid; only that an informed Catholic reader may be inclined to skip over certain sections filled with familiar material. And Hahn sometimes wanders a bit. In discussing the Trinity, for instance, he digresses into a reflection on prayer. Valuable thoughts, but a tad discursive. But please don’t let my nitpicking give the impression I lack enthusiasm about Signs of Life. I’m a convert who has been Catholic now longer than I was ever anything else, and I’ve learned a lot about the faith. But reading this book has answered many questions I’ve never got around to asking and some others I never even thought to ask. The thing is: the book is so . . . so . . . What’s the word? Oh, the word is Catholic. Converts such as I, old or new, will find Signs of Life valuable as a guide – a sort of refresher course – to the history and practice of the essentials of Catholic life, but the book may find its greatest value and largest audience among non-Catholics curious about what makes Catholics Catholic, most especially if they themselves are considering “crossing the Tiber.” (Anglicans take note.) Why do we make the Sign of the Cross? How did the Mass evolve from Passover? What’s a novena? You mean to tell me the Church still grants indulgences!? If you know somebody interested in converting or have a friend who stubbornly insists that many Catholic rites and rituals have no basis in Scripture, this is the book you need to give them. Dr. Hahn is a convert, and, boy!, was he a good get. A former Presbyterian minister and Catholic basher, he has heard all of the sola scriptura arguments of pared-down Protestantism, and he counters them with great effectiveness in Signs of Life. As Archbishop Timothy Dolan puts it: “Lifelong Catholics realize that it usually takes a convert to help us appreciate and better understand the customs and practices we too often take for granted.” Scott Hahn is that mystagogue. Brad Miner, a former literary editor of National Review, is senior editor of The Catholic Thing and author of The Compleat Gentleman. © 2009 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2446&Itemid=2 These days, it’s not easy being an Ordinary in America’s northeastern inner-city dioceses. These bishops have had to cope with rapidly changing demographics that have seriously impacted their ability to carry out the Church’s mission. The Catholic men and women of the nation’s “greatest generation,” who were the mainstay of the Church in New York City, Boston, Hartford, Newark, and Philadelphia, have been aging, leaving the old neighborhoods for retirement settlements in the south or west. And they’ve been dying, too. In the last decade, members of the World War II generation have been passing away at the rate of one thousand a day. As a result, inner-city Catholic populations have declined, as have collection basket revenues; hundreds of churches and parochial schools have had to be closed. The influx of new Catholic immigrants to run-down neighborhoods has posed additional challenges. Dioceses are struggling to provide essential spiritual services to these hardworking, struggling minorities. Political clout has also declined. The days when an Ordinary could make a few discreet calls to deep six anti-Catholic policies are pretty much over. In my hometown of New York, for instance, Catholics in recent years have been defeated on many fronts. Cafeteria Catholic governor, George Pataki (1995-2006) approved state gay-rights legislation and the repeal of the “conscience clause” on state abortion services, thus forcing Catholic medical institutions to violate their commitment to the sanctity of human life. Our current governor, David Paterson, a baptized Catholic, is pushing for passage of gay-marriage legislation. Enter the Most Reverend Nicholas DiMarzio, who became the seventh Bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn in August 2003. Known as the “Diocese of Immigrants,” it is completely urban and has about 1.8 million Catholics and 200 parishes. The sixty-five-year-old DiMarzio has been an incredibly effective Catholic advocate. He has been adept in dealing with special interests and pols of all stripes in City Hall, Albany, and Washington. DiMarzio made his debut on the national stage in 2004 when he criticized a New York Times op-ed piece by a Notre Dame dean, Mark Roche, titled “Voting Our Conscience Not Our Religion,” which concluded that Catholics in good conscience could vote for the pro-abortion John Kerry for president. Bishop DiMarzio blasted the author, complaining that this “Dean of a major Catholic University, confused the issue of conscience and, in fact, told people how to vote.” “This,” he continued, “is something that none of us particularly likes.” DiMarzio reminded Catholics that conscience is “not some type of freewheeling optional determinate of our action” but instead must be informed. The bishop went on to demonstrate that there is “a hierarchy of values” regarding life and that one cannot put poverty issues on an equal plane with abortion or euthanasia. In May of this year, he publicly criticized Notre Dame President Father John Jenkins saying he “made a serious error in inviting President Obama to be commencement speaker…” He endorsed former Vatican Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon’s position that Notre Dame had a responsibility, “not to honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.” The bishop has also been an effective coalition builder. Realizing that 40 percent of New York’s housing foreclosures are in his diocese, DiMarzio teamed up with U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and local legislators to address the problem. Stating that “Housing is a basic human right, not a luxury,” he established Catholic Charity support programs to counsel and aid those in communities most affected. Bishop DiMarzio has led the charge opposing state legislation that would amend the statute of limitations for abuse of minors to permit people who are alleging wrongdoing going back more than fifty years to initiate lawsuits against the Church that are impossible to defend. The bill, he argues, is not “aimed at individuals, but rather at the institution of the Church” and was “spurred by trial lawyers and some victims to punish the Church for its historical inadequacies. In this battle, the bishop has been fearless. DiMarzio has publicly criticized the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Marge Markey, for singling out the Church. He warned legislators at a breakfast at his residence that if the legislation becomes law his diocese could go bankrupt, that he will be forced to close churches in their district and angry constituents will punish them at the polls. When accused by the press of blackmailing legislators, DiMarzio refused to back down saying, “This bill is going to bankrupt the Church. . . .We are going to close parishes in these districts if this bill goes through. I’m not going to deny that I said that.” DiMarzio has also publicly praised Assemblyman Vito Lopez for sponsoring a competing bill that would not significantly alter the statute of limitations on abuse lawsuits. In recorded robocalls to Lopez constituents, the bishop expressed his gratitude for “his firm and courageous stance.” DiMarzio dismissed the whines of the New York Times and other critics who claimed he stepped over the line and violated the Church’s tax-exempt status, saying he cannot be denied the right to thank those public officials who helped the Catholic community. Bishop DiMarzio has been the most adroit Ordinary in the public square since Francis Cardinal Spellman resided in the “Power House” behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He should be the model in our time for priests elevated to the episcopate. George J. Marlin is the author of The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact. (c) 2009 The Catholic Thing. All right reserved. For reprint rights write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2445&Itemid=2 Election night: a good night for the conservative party, with the voters in Virginia and New Jersey evidently registering a rejection of the Obama Administration and its works. But one could watch even FOX News all night, as I did, without learning that something momentous was taking place in Maine. By a margin of 53-47 percent, the voters in this now most liberal of states, would overturn a law passed by the legislature to authorize same-sex marriage. Homoerotic marriage has been imposed now in several states through the judgments handed down by courts. Only in three states – Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine – have legislatures voted to make same-sex marriage legal. This was the first time that a decision of that kind could be submitted to the voters, and once again the people at large weighed in to preserve the institution of marriage. And once again, the comments of despair in the aftermath of the vote revealed the depths of incomprehension. One woman, barred now from marrying her companion, expressed her anger mixed with puzzlement: “It hurts. It hurts personally,” she said. “It's a personal rejection of us and our relationship, and I don't understand what the fear is.” The theme was sounded once again that this was a matter of love, of fairness, of “equality.” But no, it was not so simply a matter of love or equality. It was not a matter of love because no one doubts the love that men may have for men or women for women. Nor can one doubt the genuine love that subsists between parents and children or brothers and sisters. But in the very nature of things nothing in those loves can be diminished as loves because they are not attended by penetration or expressed in marriage. Fathers and daughters are not demeaned, their equality is not rejected, their love not denied, when they are barred from marrying one another. And it is telling – is it not? – that we never hear Rep. Barney Frank asking, “How does it threaten anyone’s marriage that a mother and son who love one another may live as husband and wife?” Apparently, when people regard the marriage as simply wrong in principle, they stop asking the question of just how it would hurt anyone else if the law permitted a mother and son to marry. The irony here is that the people who have argued for years that we should not legislate morality now make the most strenuous use of the law, when the “logic of morals” is attached to their own policy. Lincoln, grasping that logic, conceded that “if slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.”And in that case, he could grant the demand that the abolitionist literature be barred from the mails. If, that is, slavery were right, and opposition to it then were wrong. With this very logic in hand, various authorities in Massachusetts have pointed out that same-sex marriage is legitimate now under the laws of the state. And therefore: Justices of the Peace who refuse to perform the marriage may lose their license. Catholic adoption services, which will not place children for adoption with gay or lesbian couples, will now be compelled to cease their operation. In other states, photographers and caterers who do not wish to offer their services for same-sex marriages have been hit with penalties, newly legislated. And most recently, in Massachusetts, Peter Vadala, working for Brookstone, the retailer, lost his job when he would not chirp up his celebration when told by a woman from another store that she was about to marry a woman. The woman, eager to announce that news, detected the discomfort in his silence. She kept pressing him. Finally, he told her that his Christian convictions could not really accept same-sex marriage. With that admission she filed a complaint, and two days later he was fired. Responding to her prodding, he was accused of “harassment.” Pleading, in effect, for his right to a discreet silence, he was accused of “imposing” his religious views on someone not under his authority. Where, in all of this, is the love, the equality, the respect for persons and their ways of life? It is a fable drugging the mind to suggest that the activists are seeking simply to be left alone in their “personal” relations. When they seek the levers of the law, they are moving beyond things merely “personal.” They are seeking the public and moral approval that the law bestows, along with the moral condemnation of those who will not share their views. The purpose now is to use the law to withdraw that freedom of others to object; to punish people who would dare speak or act in ways that honor a moral understanding at odds with same-sex marriage or the homosexual life; and to make it finally unrespectable, even legally perilous, to express certain moral sentiments, in settings public or private. For the media, the story line is of people in love, now hurt and bewildered. But serenely unnoticed are the accounts of the repression, in things large and small, all offered in the cause of “love.” Surely it is 1984 once more with the inversion of words: Under the banner of love there is loosed a barrage of hatred, and in the name of freedom, repression. Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. © 2009 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2439&Itemid=2 Today, the Pope Pius V University in Rome will be the setting for a day-long conference with the arresting title, “The Scientific Impossibili­ty of Evolution.” The sponsors of the event are known crusaders against Darwin. But they go further than most Darwin dissenters and postulate a “young earth” chronology based on a literal reading of Scripture. Need­less to say, the Catholics among them are not comfortable with what the ordinary Magisteri­um has to say on the subject. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have affirmed that the Book of Genesis is not meant to teach science and that theories of evolution are permissible so long as God is not excluded from the big picture. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously remarked that the test of a first-rate mind is to hold two apparently contradictory ideas and still be able to function. In the debate over evolution, a Catholic must allow both revelation and science their due authority, reconciling the ap­parent con­tra­­dictions between Genesis and modern research. Catholics also have to be skeptical about the claims of materialist ideologies dis­guised as science, while being open to the genuine findings of geneticists and paleontolo­gists. In 1986, John Paul II gave a series of general audiences on the subject of Creation. In them, he laid down a principle of Biblical exegesis that has been around since the Church Fathers: The Book of Genesis is not meant to teach science. Genesis tells what God did, not how he did it. “Indeed,” writes John Paul, “the theory of natural evolution, understood in a sense that does not exclude divine causality, is not in principle opposed to the truth about creation. . . .as presented in the Book of Genesis. . . .It must, however, be added that this hypothesis pro­poses only a probability, not a scientific certainty. . . .[But] it is possible that the human body, following the order impressed by the Creator on the energies of life, could have been gradually prepared in the forms of antecedent living beings.” In an address to Italian clergy on July 24, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI also recognized evolution as a legitimate scientific theory. At the same time, he expressed impatience with the false polarities of “creation­ism” and “evolutionism.” The doctrine of creation and the theory of evolution, he said, are not “mutually exclusive alternatives.” The world need not be divided between fideists who cram scientific data into a Biblical template never meant to receive them and materialists who think that soothing phrases like “random fluctuation in the quantum void” dispense with the need for a Creator. While allowing for the possibility of evolution, neither pope has issued a free pass to evolutionary materialism. The Church has nothing to fear from legitimate science, but is wary of materialist philoso­phies tricked up as science – which is what Darwinism often amounts to. In Truth and Tolerance, Benedict com­plains that evolutionists often trespass their legitimate bounds by making sweeping metaphysical claims. As a result, the educated public has the vague impression that “evolution” explains everything. Why, it even explains Darwinists whose purpose in life is to explain that the universe has no purpose. Benedict reminds us that there are fundamental questions that science in principle cannot answer. Such as: Why is there some­thing rather than nothing? As G. K. Chesterton, an astute observer of the evolution wars, re­marked: “Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.” Apart from the origin of the universe, there are two other ontological leaps that elude scientific explanation. First, the origin of life: Life only seems to come from life. Second, the human person: How could a purely “natural” process produce a creature so unlike anything else in nature? Mankind did not need the ability to write Hamlet­ or compose Don Giovanni in order to compete with the apes. While aspects of evolutionary theory are certainly open to critic­ism, I don’t think a conference of Christian scholars who read Genesis as a textbook in geology is very helpful. One could argue that there is not a single scientific datum anywhere in Scripture – for the simple reason that the sacred writers had no notion of science in the modern sense. When­ever I encounter a creationist, I like to ask how we can see the Milky Way if the universe is only a few thousand years old. The response, needless to say, is wonderfully baroque. The Big Bang is a perfectly reasonable model – as is the common descent of species, since all animals share genetic coding and homolo­gous structures like wings and limbs. Still, we know very little about the origin of species. Darwinists have not satis­factorily explained how bacteria, which appeared over three billion years ago, gradually morphed into everything from trilobites to Homo sapiens. Paleontolo­gists like Steven Stanley and Niles Eldredge tell us that the fossils do not show gradual Darwinian evolution. Geneticists never observe the systematic mutations they deem necessary for major evolutionary changes. Breed­ing experi­ments show species stubbornly clinging to their blueprints: Dogs remain dogs, fruitflies remain fruitflies. All Darwinists can show are small adjustments within species (e.g., the famous beak of the finch) from which they extrapolate macro-evolutionary changes which occur off-stage, as it were. Catholics should take their cue from the Magisterium: Welcome the genuine discoveries of modern science while casting a skeptical eye on evolutionary “science” that for philosophical reasons dispenses with a Creator and treats man as a thing. At the same time, Christians who insist on explaining the universe in terms of ancient Hebrew cosmology are going to have a difficult time engaging the modern world. George Sim Johnston is the author of Did Darwin Get It Right? Catholics and the Theory of Evolution­ (Our Sunday Visitor). © 2009 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own. . Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100