Multiculturalism at its Worst and Best

This past Friday, the seminary took a break from classes to explore questions of Church and culture in a seminar on the multicultural setting of ministry. Many issues were raised that are of profound importance to the Church’s self-understanding and therefore to her relationship with the cultures in which she finds herself. I raised a number of questions with the rector during a brief conversation, and he made it clear that what was presented was not being proposed as an ideal for us, but a perspective that was to be critically evaluated and reflected upon. What follows is my attempt to do both.

Our presenter raised a number of very important points, but I will confine myself to a more abstract critique of the overall flow of his perspective. This perspective can be outlined as a description of the possibilities for interaction between cultures in an age of globalization, and a claim for which of those possibilities is the best one.

First, though, we have to pin down how the word “culture” was being used in our seminar. (A grasp of this is crucial for the full weight of my critique to be felt.) As it was discussed, culture is the man-made component of the external world in which human beings live. There are four dimensions in which each culture manifests its own proper characteristics, the first being its material aspect: artifacts and architecture are prime examples of this. Certain social institutions arise from culture, including family, government, trade, and explanations of the whole (such as religion or philosophy). It also includes the symbols assembled in language, stories, rituals, or writing. Finally, culture places emphasis on certain values, spoken or unspoken, good or bad, and exerts influence on society by holding them up as worthy of imitation either in the abstract or in concrete particulars. Being of human origin, all cultures are inherently limited and therefore biased (so it is said) in their grasp of ultimate values and realities. In other words, no one culture (religious or otherwise) has a stranglehold on reality; all cultures must collectively approach one another to gain mutual insight and approach the ultimate. While the Gospel transcends any one culture, there is always a danger that one dominant culture will insert its own bias into the Gospel and thereby place itself in a position of inherent superiority over all others.

In our age, technology has made it easier for people of different cultural backgrounds to encounter one another than in any prior age. Broadly speaking, the types of encounters can be placed on a spectrum. On the one end is monocultural interaction. This is simply the presence of one culture whose members are mostly homogeneous and unaware or uninterested in the existence of other ways of being in the world. By nature, most of us are comfortable in this situation and seek to reestablish it when equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of persons of a different culture. Next on the line is the bicultural, signifying the ability of persons to effectively live within two cultural settings without the difficulties of transition between them. Moving along further across the spectrum, the multicultural world is one in which many cultures exist side by side without any real interaction, in which each culture bumps up against the others but retains its own integrity. A cross-cultural interaction is one in which members of one culture insert themselves into another while doing no violence to it, operating within its own proper dimensions. Finally, on the other end of the spectrum is an intercultural encounter in which people of many cultures do not merely coexist but actively interact, seeking to understand one another’s cultural setting through dialogue, clarifications, common projects, and tolerance of ambiguity, pluralism, and mistakes.

So far, so good. It can be safely acknowledged that this last kind of interaction is something the Church can hold up as desirable; being the sacrament of unity between God and men, it follows that her mission requires her to set aside coercion and violence while re-establishing harmony within humanity as a sign of the ingression of the kingdom into our historical existence.

Yet there is reason for caution here. By viewing the intertultural ideal through the lens of the four cultural elements listed above, it becomes clear that this ideal is itself a sort of culture with its own artifacts, institutions, symbols, and values. In this respect, the spectrum I outlined above bends back on itself to form a circle or an ascending spiral in which intercultural symbols and values become established as the elements of an over-arching meta-culture that exerts its own influence on the colliding cultures and subcultures within it while resisting any influences that oppose.

We must recall at this point that, being products of human activity, cultures are inherently biased; this is no less true, then, of our ideal of interculturalism. To the degree that interculturalism imposes its values, symbols, and institutions on its constituent cultures and subcultures, and is not open to other perspectives, it is guilty of the same absolutism it is meant to ward off. Anyone with eyes to see is very familiar with this imperialist enforcement of cultural (and by extension, religious) relativism. The prevailing winds of our media and higher educational system reek of such dogma—the turgid and tiresome political correctness, the obligatory endowed chair of religious studies held by an agnostic, the at once prolific and banal prophets who sermonize on the glories of diversity while failing to catch through the sea of fluttering rainbow flags the ironic smiles on the faces of “fundamentalist partisans” shifting from foot to foot in the wings. It is precisely this ideology that a certain Joseph Ratzinger named the “dictatorship of relativism” in his opening homily to the conclave which elected him pope, and this dictatorship is itself an institutional artifact of the Culture of Death.

The reason why we as Christians must qualify our assent to the intercultural ideal, then, is that there a real possibility that the values, symbols, and institutions of this ideal be derived from attitudes and philosophies antithetical to the Gospel. We can see the results of a premature and naïve embrace of the ideal in those once great missionary orders that now confine themselves to teaching missiology instead.

Yet if this possibility exists, then there is also the possibility that the intercultural ideal be informed by the Gospel and hospitable to it. This possibility echoes out from among the “great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue,” standing before the Lamb and the throne, crying out in a loud voice, “salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne, and from the Lamb” (Rev 7:9-10). The “stepping-out-of-oneself” which is so necessary for true intercultural harmony is a discipline integral to the giving of oneself that is humanity’s highest calling. Indeed, it is “law of the gift” that John Paul the Great so tirelessly preached, inspiring in the flock the paramount desire for the civilization of love that called upon each person—no matter how great or small in the estimation of the world—to discover herself through a sincere gift of herself (Letter to Families, 14). Yet this is not to be achieved through the de-mythologization of religion and the bracketing of our own very concrete origins in the person of Jesus, but through standing firmly upon those origins as upon rock. For the one who sees him “sees the Father” (Jn 14:9), and in him “the whole fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form” (Col 2:9). We ought not kid ourselves about the possibility of achieving for ourselves what is first and foremost the work of the Holy Spirit.

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Recommended reading and works referenced in this essay:

Cardinal Ratzinger’s homily to the conclave
“Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today” (PDF), an address given by Cardinal Ratzinger during the meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with the presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops' Conferences of Latin America, held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in May 1996. A very perceptive diagnosis of the conflict as it now stands, though light on solutions (as indicated by the title). You may disagree with Benedict but there’s few who can cast the conflict in such an illuminating posture. I would suggest this specifically to those who attended our seminar this past week.
John Paul II’s Letter to Families

Flannery Gets You Somewhere

Just a couple of weeks ago one of my fellow seminarians (a deacon) mentioned he would be preaching at an all-school Mass for one of our diocesan high schools. Without any specific reason, I was reminded of a letter I'd read a few years ago written by Flannery O'Connor to a young man in college. He had written her regarding his struggle with faith occasioned by his university studies. (She mentioned in a letter to a friend that "he has the unlikely name of Alfred D. Corn III and if he weren't so typical I'd say he had invented the name and himself too.") Just the other night I came across the letter again, and I was pleased at just how fresh and timely Flannery's words are.

You might know of someone that could benefit from this sage advice. I sure can. Here it is, in full.

30 May 1962

Dear Mr. Corn,

I think that this experience you are having of losing your faith, or as you think, of having lost it, is an experience that in the long run belongs to faith; or at least it can belong to faith if faith is still valuable to you, and it must be or you would not have written me about this.

I don’t know how the kind of faith required of a Christian living in the 20^th century can be at all if it is not grounded on this experience that you are having right now of unbelief. This may be the case always and not just in the 20^th century. Peter said, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

As a freshman in college you are bombarded with new ideas, or rather pieces of ideas, new frames of reference, an activation of the intellectual life which is only the beginning, but which is already running ahead of your lived experience. After a year of this, you think you cannot believe. You are just beginning to realize how difficult it is to have faith and the measure of a commitment to it, but you are too young to decide you don’t have faith because you feel you can’t believe. About the only way we know whether we believe or not is by what we do, and I think from your letter that you will not take the path of least resistance in this matter and simply decide that you have lost your faith and that there is nothing you can do about it.

One result of the stimulation of your intellectual life that takes place in college is usually a shrinking of the imaginative life. This sounds like a paradox, but I have often found it to be true. Students get so bound up with difficulties such as reconciling the clashing of so many different faiths such as Buddhism, Mohamedanism, etc. that they cease to look for God in other ways. Bridges once wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and asked him to tell him how he, Bridges, could believe. Bridges was an agnostic. He must have expected from Hopkins a long philosophical answer. Hopkins wrote back, “Give alms.” He was trying to say to Bridges that God is to be experienced in Charity (in the sense of love for the divine image in human beings). Don’s get so entangled with intellectual difficulties that you fail to look for God in this way.

The intellectual difficulties have to be met, however, and you will be meeting them for the rest of your life. When you get a reasonable hold on one, another will come to take its place. At one time, the clash of the different world religions was a difficulty for me. Where you have absolute solutions, however, you have no need of faith. Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge. The reason this clash doesn’t bother me any longer is because I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories. I might suggest that you look into some of the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (THE PHENOMENON OF MAN et al.) He was a paleontologist—helped to discover Pekin man—and also a man of God. I don’t suggest you go to him for answers but for different questions, for that stretching of the imagination that you need to make you a skeptic in the face of much that you are learning, much of which is new and shocking but which when boiled down becomes less so and takes its place in the general scheme of things. What kept me a skeptic in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read.

If you want your faith, you have to work for it. It is a gift, but for very few it is a gift given without any demand for equal time devoted to its cultivation. For every book you read that is anti-Christian, make it your business to read one that presents the other side of the picture; if one isn’t satisfactory read others. Don’t think that you have to abandon reason to be a Christian. A book that might help you is THE UNITY OF PHILOSOPHICAL EXPERIENCE by Etienne Gilson. Another is Newman’s THE GRAMMAR OF ASSENT. To find out about faith, you have to go to the people who have it and you have to go to the most intelligent ones if you are going to stand up intellectually to agnostics and the general run of pagans that you are going to find in the majority of people around you. Much of the criticism of belief that you find today comes from people who are judging it from the standpoint of another and narrower discipline. The Biblical criticism of the 19^th century, for instance, was the product of historical disciplines. It has been entirely revamped in the 20^th century by applying broader criteria to it, and those people who lost their faith in the 19^th century because of it, could better have hung on in blind trust.

Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide upon in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism. It will keep you free—not free to do anything you please, but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.

[From the Library of America edition of her Complete Works, p1163]

For anyone interested in her work, I would highly suggest cruising over to The Morning Oil to pick up audiofiles of the author delivering one of her lectures, and reading one of her own most famous stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." These are very difficult to come by so I'd grab the chance while you've got it!

In Her Passivity's Service

Vacations destroy me.

The last days of classes fill up with exams and papers, but I always insist on turning them in on Friday so as not to allow them to eat into my time off. Getting this done is complicated by my tendency to occupy myself with plannning out the use of two weeks of pristine, unclaimed, most delectable time. Each day leading up to the break sees an increase in the books I am going to read, the poetry I am going to memorize, the people I am going to visit, the hunting I am going to do, the days I am going to spend in silent meditation, and the number of languages I am going to learn.

This all goes well until about three or four days into the break, when I flip on the TV set for the first time. Never mind the Netflix queue of 104 films I've been hankering to devour for months and months; now, Live Free or Die Hard is on, and I'm watching it, though it's not crossed my mind once as something I wanted to enjoy. I stay up way too late and sleep in, burning up the morning between chapters of Horatio Hornblower and nursing that semiconscious state of interminably pleasurable awareness of how I'm-awake-but-I-don't-have-to-be. I get up for lunch with high hopes for the afternoon, and shake off the guilty pleasure of lassitude that hangs about me as best I can. I deserved it, anyway. This vacation. A few hours of goal-driven achievement, then a quick break with some novelties on the Discovery Channel. It's clearly starting all over again, I can see it coming, but I'm on vacation, dangit! Relax a bit! You can't be thinking all the time! (So true, but such a lie.) Soon it's dinnertime, and there's no sense in starting anything after supper. More languor, more dissipation, more distraction. Prayer becomes less and less of a merciful release and more and more of a burden. The breviary gets put off until later and later in the evening. Praying no longer animates the day but lays it down to sleep. Soon, I'm so frustrated with myself that I escape from being alone with myself or with God into more distraction, and then it all just comes crashing down.

To be honest, the only thing that keeps me coming back to visit my folks is the conversations we have over the dinner table. Time and time again, they are the sole redeeming moments of days on end (though I will admit to coming across some pretty sweet stuff on Time Warp last week). If it weren't for that, I'd be long gone. LONG GONE.

Yet tonight, at the rector's address to the whole community, it struck me that my experience on this past vacation (and nearly every vacation) isn't so useless. Admittedly, a little wasted vacation time helps to pull back the protective cloak of self-importance I wrap around this process of preparation. But as scrupulous or neurotic as my compunction about prayer and sleeping in and television viewing taken singly might seem, they are in common powerfully oppossed to the sense of purpose and progress that is present when I'm engaged in the formation process in the seminary. They are the wobble and yaw of the rocket that's exhausted its fuel before reaching orbit. Yet the unwillingness to confront personal weakness and let it BE in the sight of God, choosing rather to fly into various diversions (the very definition of sloth), itself is a powerful experience of what I would imagine many people live on a day to day basis.

Obviously this is not something I would restrict to the category of "people without faith". I would not classify myself as such a person. I believe this is a common experience not because I have a low opinion of people but because it's so easy. The challenges to living a serene, integral, and recollected life are legion, and almost nobody would ever chastise us for our complaints of busyness and frenetic activity. They are more likely to sympathize. Yet deep down, we know better, and we are begging for someone to tell us so.

A recent homily on the season of Advent by the vocation director of my diocese spoke powerfully into this personal situation, and managed to remind me that as usual, I've got it all wrong.

You and I are probably too timid to blame God for our exile, for our long-suffering inability to make ourselves into what we want to be. We instead blame ourselves, and ask God to keep his distance and to give us more time to tinker with our self-improvement projects . . . .

Advent is the time for us to stop asking God to leave us alone as long as possible so that we can mold ourselves before having to turn in the final product for judgment at an unspecified date . . . It is futile to pray that God will give us all the time we need. Rather, we are to expect that God is coming now, so now is the time to beg God Himself to mold us into what we are supposed to be, according to His will. Most of us are too timid to blame God for our exile. We are too self-centered to ask God for less time instead of for more.

If some of that language bothers you, thank God.

After a Brief Hiatus, the Beatings Will Continue

My trusty laptop, faithful servant these many years, has finally gone on the fritz, and I'll be trolling for a nice deal on a new computer. In the meanwhile, this quarter's class lineup has some real promise and will hopefully start sparking some juicy thoughts worthy of sharing.

Check back soon ...

Slavery, Bootlegging, and Abortion ... A Winning Combination

The article of the day on the First Things site, written by a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, resonates with my own thoughts from a few days back on what lies ahead for pro-lifers in the coming years. (Need I say it's a lot more lucid and practical. And there's no laborious rehashing of Tolstoy.) It's well worth your time. A short excerpt:

In a notable pre-election speech in St. Louis, former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee spoke about three legal innovations which he had witnessed in his adult lifetime: limitations on smoking, requirement of access to public places for the handicapped, and requirement of seat belts for drivers and passengers of automobiles. In each case, Huckabee pointed out, people were first persuaded that the proposed change was beneficial. Then, laws were enacted to mandate the change.

Pro-lifers need to heed this lesson. For too long we have been demanding the passage of laws which, though happily supported by a growing number of our fellow citizens, still fall short of the acceptance needed to make them effective. Considering our president-elect is, as Princeton professor Robert P. George demonstrated brilliantly in his October 14 article for Public Discourse, not merely pro-choice but militantly pro-abortion, we need to shift the battle from the legal front and concentrate on changing hearts and minds.

Preach it, padre. Looks like we're going to have to win this the old-fashioned way: one soul at a time. It's a good thing it's what Christians do best.

On the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica

For our homiletics class, I prepared and delivered this homily to my seminarian brothers this past week. I've touched it up a bit here and there but it's substantially the same as it was delivered. Being that the Feast of the Dedication of the Cathedral Church of the Bishop of Rome doesn't exactly speak to a whole lot of people, I tried to work in the significance of this event for the history of the Church.

As to how it was received: my professor said that the greatest thing about my reflection on this gospel passage was that I'd written a paper on it. He then said the worst thing about it was that I'd written a paper on it. What can I say ...

_______________________________________

Jesus' words in today’s Gospel were used to charge Jesus at his trial. They are dangerous words. To the Jews of the time, they could be explained away as the ranting of a deluded maniac at best; at worst, they were treason and blasphemy deserving the penalty of death.

This, of course, is a very different sort of understanding than the usual one. We usually hear it described as the exercise of righteous anger. Jesus, they say, was correcting the sinful use of the sacred precincts of the temple for transacting business, and the Jews were just steamed because he called them out on their failure to reverence the sacred.

Well, not exactly. Since this event took place near Passover, there were literally tens of thousands of pilgrims coming to the Temple to participate in this feast, and there was simply no way each of them could bring their own lamb or kid to sacrifice all the way from home. It would have made an already chaotic situation unbearably messy. So, in order to fulfill their religious obligation, they had to purchase animals on site. And they had to pay the Temple tax, but they couldn’t use coins with the image of Caesar—so they needed to change their money into a currency that could be used for sacred purposes. There was a suitable place ready-made to provide for these needs already—the huge plaza known as the Temple Mount, recently completed under the patronage of Herod (the “46 years” it took to build the “Temple” actually refer to this architectural modification to the Temple building itself).

So what was Jesus getting at if this wasn’t about shoveling manure next to the Temple?

Contrary to what we often hear, this incident should not be referred to as the “Cleansing of the Temple” but the “Abrogation (or Rejection) of the Temple.” The words that accompany Jesus’ actions explain why this is. “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” What the Jews do not understand, but which the later Resurrection fully clarifies, is that Jesus is speaking “of the temple of his body.” In effect, John is saying that Jesus puts his own person on par with the Temple; indeed, he’s going even further than that: he himself makes the Temple obsolete. He is now the definitive dwelling place of God among men. Jesus’ Resurrection passes judgment on the Temple and its rituals. It declares that HE is the full revelation of the Father’s love to the world, NOT the Temple.

You can understand why the earlier Gospel writers didn’t put this claim on the lips of Jesus himself, but phrased it as a charge by his accusers during his trial. It didn’t exactly contribute to Jewish-Christian relations! Only John attributes them to Jesus himself—after a healthy distance between Jews and Christians had come about some decades after the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70.

We read in the seventh chapter of the Acts of the Apostles that the elders and the scribes brought charges against St. Stephen for “speaking blasphemous words against Moses and God,” and for constantly “saying things against this holy place [i.e. the Temple] and the law [i.e. the Torah].” For they had heard him claim that “this Jesus the Nazorean will destroy this place and change the customs that Moses handed down to us.”

These ideas weren’t incidental to the Gospel; they were on the lips of our savior and the first martyr within hours of their deaths. They were of such importance that they clearly found their way into the Church’s proclamation almost immediately.

So those early Jewish converts to Christianity knew the radical decision it took to follow Jesus. Everything had made sense until this Jesus guy had come along. Within a few decades of the Resurrection, Christians and Jews no longer worshipped together. Family members were set against each other by their decision to resist or join this new way of faith. Jews were worshipping side by side with Gentiles. Everything was new. Faithful Jews despised them; the Jewish authorities persecuted, imprisoned, and killed them, thinking they were rendering service to God. Converts from Judaism to Christianity were no longer covered under the legal allowance for religions older than Rome, because Christianity was considered a new religion—and so the Romans could legally persecute them as well. And for all practical purposes it was like they had broken with the thousand years of tradition that stretched from Moses to Judas Maccabeus. These Jewish convents must have asked themselves again and again, “what in God’s name are we doing?”

Fast forward two hundred and fifty years to the dedication of the church of St. John Lateran. Things couldn’t look more different. Christianity isn’t being persecuted and reviled because the emperor, Constantine, has become a Christian. Sixty years after that, Christianity would be the official religion of the entire empire. In just a few hundred years, this despised and persecuted religion had flooded the Roman Empire.

Imagine the joy of the Christian people on receiving the news that what had been withheld from them for so long was finally being granted. It was the granting of a wish soaked in the blood of the countless martyrs, known and unknown, throughout the hundreds of years of Christian existence. If they had been at a loss for words, they might have prayed with today’s Psalm:

The Lord of hosts is with us;
our stronghold is the God of Jacob.
Come! Behold the deeds of the Lord,
the astounding things he has wrought on earth.

For us, the basilica of St. John Lateran stands as a reminder of their joy. It’s easy to lose sight of this memory underneath the many layers of meaning this church has acquired in the 1700 years of its existence. We have to hold fast to its meaning for us as a monument to the faith and radical commitment of all those who staked everything on Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against his Church.

And what fueled this faith? What was the source of their commitment? It was what came to mind every time they asked that question, “what in God’s name are we doing?” It was the conviction that each disciple had to follow his crucified master. They knew that if they were to be the dwelling place of God on earth, the Temple of the Lord, they had to be chiseled, and shaped, and smoothed in order to be fitted into their appointed places within this Temple. They were living stones willing to undergo the process of transformation, as the Scriptures encouraged them:

Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men but in God's sight chosen and precious; and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 2:4-5

While for some this meant heroic acts of generous, self-sacrificing love, for the ordinary people of the time it simply meant having an extraordinary love for God and neighbor.

So it’s very appropriate that this feast day follows only a week after the celebration of All Saints. It is another reminder that we have inherited absolutely everything we need to be extraordinary in love. Are we making use of that inheritance, or do we behave like spoiled children who are ungrateful when every need has been provided for them?

The seminary should be what the Christian community could be. There are all sorts of men here that constantly inspire me with their curiosity, their enthusiasm, and their conviction. Seek those men out. Befriend them. Try to be that kind of man for your brothers. Allow God to stretch your desire for his kingdom. Believe with every fiber of your being that the Holy Spirit is here, now, speaking to you in the Scriptures, giving you desires for faithfulness and glory, of which you had never dreamed? Are you willing to desire things that because of your weakness are so impossible that they become a manifestation of God’s power in the world?

There will come a time when our posterity will think upon us as we think upon our own fathers in the faith. What will the Christian people yet to come say about us? Will they remember our extraordinary love? Will they remember and rejoice over the revelation of God’s power that took place through our weakness? Will they be glad that we weren’t content to rest on our laurels and live off our savings? Will they recognize that we didn’t float with the current and allow the secular humanist agenda to compromise the Gospel? Will the Church flourish on account of our faithfulness?

We are standing on the shoulders of giants. And if we don’t love more than most, if we’re not even able to do the little things with great love, we have to ask ourselves:

What excuse do we have?

A little backstory on this link: I first heard of Francis Beckwith on an evangelical blog. They were informing the evangelical community of his conversion to Catholicism. This caused quite a stir not only because he was a professor (of philosophy, I believe) at Baylor University in Waco, TX but the president of the Evangelical Theological Society. Needless to say, his resignation in that post came soon after. I was much edified by the news and filed it away for future reference.

That occasion presented itself sooner than I'd expected. Beckwith showed up at the 2008 FOCUS National Conference in Dallas and delivered a breakout session on defending the unborn in the classroom to a capacity crowd. It was outstanding. I have a copy of the talk if you'd ever like to hear it. It was exciting to meet him and his wife, and I filed this encounter away for future reference.

Not long after, I discovered he has been doing some blogging of his own, along with several other people of whom I have no knowledge other than their very articulate and well-presented thoughts. The blog is aptly named What Is Wrong With the World (presumably after Chesterton's collection of essays of the same name), and I recommend you check it out in general. Especially when you check my blog and there's nothing worth reading.

Perusing this blog has lead me to some great insights by his fellow posters, especially a certain "Zippy Catholic." A recent post by this blogger sums up marvellously the task that lies ahead for our Church, so visibly divided over this election. He addresses Catholic supporters of Obama:

Now that we have a President elect, you see, there is no longer any justification for remote material cooperation in his wicked policies. Justified remote material cooperation with evil may have made it possible to choose him over McCain (though I think it did not), but now we have the absolute condition of a chosen President. If proportionate reason ever existed for remote material cooperation with his evil policies before the election, they no longer do now. Now your obligation is reversed, as I alluded to earlier. Now your obligation is to oppose his evil policies with all your heart, mind, and strength; all the more so because of your choice to vote for him.

Read the rest here.

An Elementary Mistake

It is bewildering to me the faith that people have in political solutions to moral problems. A wise gal told me recently that as she's grown older, she's come to regard the political process as more of a thermometer than a thermostat. That is, the outcomes of elections have more to do with where people stand than where this country is headed. Though at times this thought produces in me the desire to throw up my hands in disgust and be done with politics, there is a kernel of truth there. The real work is done in the hearts of people and not on the campaign trail or at the convention.

I wrote my bachelor's thesis on War and Peace, and some of Tolstoy's ideas about the true causes of the movement of history strike me as relevant. Tolstoy is convinced that the conventional explanations for major events (the march of Napoleon's army into Moscow, in particular) completely ignore the true causes of those events. He insists that attributing the private acts of bravery, cowardice, cruelty, and heroism of tens of thousands of men to the wishes of one person (say, Napoleon) is preposterous, and such historians merely put in the hands of one man what they refuse to put in the hands of God.

Contrasted with this is the Russian general Kutuzov, who sleeps through meetings and has little to no military strategy in mind. His finger is on the pulse of what Tolstoy refers to as the spirit of the army. The ebb and flood of his men’s spirits are what he acts upon, not the limited tactical perspectives he and his staff are capable of observing. And it is this wisdom—this experiential tasting—that gives the Russian army the power to repel the advance of the vastly more powerful French.

It is this wisdom that leads Tolstoy to conclude that historical events are manifestations of the will and character of individuals and nothing else. He declares,

The battle of Austerlitz was the result of all the complicated human activities of 160,000 Russians and French; all their passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm.

Mutatis mutandis, would it be much of a stretch to substitute “the 2008 election” for Austerlitz? I think not. We’ve seen where the American people stand, and honestly, I’ve seen more “outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm” over The One than I have seen over anybody in the public square in a long time.

The question on most people I know and love is, “What does this mean for our hard-won advances in the pro-life movement?” Conscious that what I'm about to say may sound incredibly callous and ignorant, I think very little is going to change in the grand scheme (just as very little has changed over the last 30-odd years). Whether or not Obama makes good on his promises to liberalize abortion to unheard-of levels, it will affect the numbers of abortions by only a small percentage of an annual toll in in the seven-digit range. On the other hand, this or that pundit opines about the effect Obama’s economic and welfare policies will have on the factors most influential on women getting abortions. Quite frankly, I find these ideas ludicrous. The implication that having more money in the bank or a better job or more food stamps are what determine a woman’s choice to keep or kill her baby is an insult to women. How do you put a dollar sign on that choice? How much money is at stake here, exactly? Do these pundits believe that there are women who think “if only I had $1,000 more in income per year, I would keep this child!” And if they do, perhaps they imagine we could persuade them to accept less?

Of course, precisely the same is true of the legal solution. Making a law forbidding abortions will certainly save untold lives, but there’s one catch—changing the law requires elected officials who are convicted about this cause. Elected officials are, as we know, elected by citizens, each of whom is subject to their own proper “passions, desires, remorse, humiliations, sufferings, outbursts of pride, fear, and enthusiasm.” What leads us to believe that we can ever change a law without bringing about a conversion in the hearts of the citizenry?

Hence the "highblown" rhetoric for which the pro-life movement is often criticized. Yes, yes, to simply bandy words about doesn't help people in real situations who feel as if there really is no option but to get an abortion. The fact that in our country the moral is equivalent to the legal doesn't help; see Solzhenitsyn's 1978 address to the graduating class at Harvard. But what few people are aware of is the fact that the people with the moral rhetoric are usually also the ones getting their hands dirty out on the streets in the largely volunteer-run crisis pregnancy centers. It is highly unfortunate that this effort receives less publicity than it should; these people are too busy doing real work, instead of raising money to promote widespread recognition of their good deeds.

Recently, I've been in touch with a couple of these centers in Chicago and I am simply overwhelmed with the unseen efforts of huge numbers of volunteers. One of them, The Women’s Center of Chicago, has a budget of $1.5 million per year. That amount is what they fundraise through private donations from the citizens of this local area. If I had not gotten involved directly with praying at the nearby abortion clinic and raising money for them through our firewood sales here on campus, I would never have known about the place, or the innumerable hidden sacrifices and acts of heroic generosity that occur on a daily basis.

This is what the political landscape boils down to for me: people vote their convictions, and convictions are formed not by headlines or catchy slogans but the desire for happiness and justice. To seek political solutions to moral problems—which are ultimately spiritual problems—is foolishness.

I, for my part, am ready to spend my life in the service of the God who speaks to the heart of every human being on this planet, calling each into the fullness of their humanity. I believe God speaks uniquely through the Scriptures and nourishes us in the sacraments, and that these are directed most pointedly to forming the heart and mind. I am confident that my life can be spent in no better way than to help the people I encounter to be receptive to that invitation to conversion.

And I am confident that for me, the priesthood is the way in which God has willed from all eternity for me to fulfill this mission.

Catholics in the Public Square

Our very own Archbishop Naumann gave an outspoken presentation to the Catholic Campus Center at the University of KU recently, and was featured in the Lawrence paper. This comes on the heels of a heated exchange in the publication Newsweek between George Weigel and Catholic professors Kmiec, Cafardi, and Kaveny, at least one of whom (Kmiec) is tenured at Notre Dame. I came across this exchange on the First Things blog; it is a site I check daily. Here are the links (and rebuttals) to this highly instructive debate:

Weigel's original essay: Can Catholics Back Pro-Choice Obama? (Hint: no)
The Response: A Catholic Brief for Obama

(This essay brings up an interesting argument: bishops intent upon excluding from communion politicians that support public funding for abortion should also take into account the complicity in evil that material supporters of the Iraq war take upon themselves. It is a fairly direct accusation of hypocrisy that I've not come across before.)

Weigel's Rebuttal: Flawed Thinking

Weigel doesn't respond to the "material cooperation in evil" argument. Keith Pavlischek over at First Things fleshes it out a bit:

It might be instructive to think about how their argument (if we may call it that) might be salvaged from complete incoherence. Absent a full-throated defense of absolute pacifism (which would render Obama’s support of the “good war” in Afghanastan equally subject to condemnation) the bishops could declare that selective conscientious objection to the Iraq war is the only morally permissible option for Catholics. On the assumption that the Iraq war is manifestly “unjust and unjustified,” the bishops could simply declare, that no Catholic may permissibly serve in Iraq as a soldier sailor, airman, or Marine. Such service would, they might argue, involve a Catholic not merely in moral complicity in evil acts but with direct involvement with evil (killing in an unjust war). They might then extend a similar judgment to Catholic politicians who support funding of the Iraq war.

You can find his comments in full here. (Go ahead and bookmark the site.)

My thoughts to follow.

Little Demagogueries If Unchecked Will One Day Embarass You

The history of the stem-cell debate is a study of what happens when politics and science reach out to each other. The politicians were guilty, but the scientists were more guilty, for they allowed—no, they encouraged—politicians to make stem-cell research a tool in the public fights over abortion, public religion, and high finance.

In the small demagogueries of a political season, the science of stem-cell research became susceptible to the easy lie and the useful exaggeration. A little shading of truth, a little twisting of facts—yes, the politics corrupted the science, but the scientists willingly aided the corruption. And with this history in mind, who will believe America’s scientists the next time they tell us something that bears on an election? We have learned something over these years: When science looks like politics, that’s because it is.

[From the latest First Things]

Quote of the Week

Scene: A moral theology classroom. The sun streams in through the windows as groundskeepers run their mowers around the manicured lawns. A well-aged Jesuit with cropped hair and a thick southside accent slouches in the corner while a student presents a short summary of the day's assigned reading to his classmates.

Presenter: Given the choice to either stick with the clear definition of marriage present in the 1917 Code of Canon Law or shift to a more ambiguous but theologically cogent description, the Council Fathers resisted the counsel of the canonists to hold to the ultimately impoverished view.

Jesuit: Those lawyers always need something to sink their teeth into. They can't stand the gray areas, can they, counselor?

Former Lawyer: [short pause] There's a lot of money to be made on the gray areas, Father.

A Feather In the Cap

The furious fascination I had with The Dark Knight back in the summer has subsided, but lo and behold, another review has just been posted over at The Catholic Thing and I was much gratified to see that it coincided with my own opinions on a number of different points.

You can read the new review here.

I wish I could conjure up a nice post for you, but it's midterm week and I seem to be burning up all my time on reading about the financial crisis. Soon I'll be neck deep in a crisis of my own. In the meanwhile, I'll just keep linking to old posts in the hope that one day I'll have what the critics call an Original Thought.