In a letter to the Catholics of the Diocese of Phoenix, Bishop Thomas Olmsted promises not to obey the “unjust law” requiring certain Catholic institutions to include contraception coverage in their employee health-care plans. “Unless the rule is overturned,” Olmsted writes, “we Catholics will be compelled either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer penalties for doing so). The administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.” Olmsted closes by calling on Catholics to “commit ourselves to prayer and fasting that wisdom and justice may prevail” — and to contact their elected representatives “in support of legislation that would reverse the administration’s decision.” (Read the whole letter here.)

Update: The letter, according to USCCB spokeswoman Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, is part of a coordinated effort to inform Catholics about the bishops’ opposition to the mandate. The bishops conference “provided a template [letter],” Walsh told me, “at the request of several bishops.” (Of course, each bishop is free to adapt the letter, or not issue one at all.) Is it the policy of the USCCB to engage in civil disobedience when the contraception mandate goes into effect next year? “At present, no decision on strategy has been reached,” Walsh said.

Olmsted fails to mention that some Catholic institutions are exempt from the mandate — the parishes where his letter will be read, for example. He also asserts that the HHS ruling forces Catholic organizations to pay for “abortion-inducing drugs” — that is, the so-called morning-after pill. That talking point has been made by several critics of the ruling, including Archbishop Dolan, who calls them “abortion drugs.” Is it true? Do morning-after pills really cause abortions? As William Saletan and Ross Douthat have pointed out, while Plan B could theoretically cause an abortion, there is no evidence that it does (here’s one study showing it does not).

This debate isn’t going to get any easier. But it might get less confusing if those involved lowered the rhetorical heat in favor of dealing in actual facts.

Update: Bishop Jenky of Peoria gets into the act.

For those able and willing to follow this contentious subject, Glenn Greenwald has an account of the most recent flare up:

“Also strictly prohibited, according to the ADL, is “minimizing or rationalizing the Iranian threat.” This means that not only are the American intelligence agencies which produced the 2007 and 2010 NIEs guilty of anti-Semitism, as are Israeli officials who believe Iran “has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon,” but so too is Tamir Pardo, the current chief of the Israeli Mossad, who recently rejected the claim that Iranian nuclear weapons would pose an existential threat to Israel; ex-Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy (“[Iran is] far from posing an existential threat to Israel“; instead, domestic radicalization in Israel “poses a bigger risk than Ahmadinejad” because “ultra-Orthodox extremism has darkened our lives”; he added: “The State of Israel cannot be destroyed. An attack on Iran could affect not only Israel, but the entire region for 100 years”); ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan (“a future Israel Air Force attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was ‘the stupidest thing I have ever heard”); and Israeli Defense Minister Barak (“Iran does not constitute an existential threat against Israel”).

“But remember: as an American citizen whose country may be involved directly or indirectly in a war with Iran, you are not allowed to express any opinions that constitute “minimizing or rationalizing the Iranian threat.” You’re presumably also not allowed to question the wisdom and justness of sanctions against Iran even though their principal Congressional sponsor has acknowledged, proudly, that they will “take the food out of the mouths of the citizens.” If you do question any of that, then you are an anti-Semite, pronounces the ADL.”

Whole analysis here: Greenwald at Salon.

As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, it might be helpful to keep in mind developments after Pope John’s announcement of an ecumenical council on January 25, 1958. In my files I have a number of essays that provide some background, and I am making them available on my blog here. There may  be more detail than many feel is necessary, but others may find them illuminating.

The first discusses proposals for a council that were briefly entertained during the reigns of Popes Pius XI and Pius XII.

The second discusses where Pope John may have gotten the idea of a council.

The third discusses initial reactions to the announcement of a council, both in Rome and elsewhere.

The fourth describes some features of the first stage of the whole conciliar event, the antepreparatory period that ran from May 1959 to November 1960 when the preparatory period began.

The fifth are the simple notes I distributed to undergraduates and expanded on in a lecture on the movements of renewal in the Catholic Church earlier in the twentieth century, which made the Council possible.

Finally, there is a very brief outline of the principal dates and events from the announcement of the Council to its conclusion.

I have now added here two other essays on the more remote background to the Council.

From the report on East Haven, CT, Mayor Joseph Maturo’s self-inflicted troubles in today’s New York Times:

Asked what he was doing for the Latino community in light of the indictments and accusation of harassment, illegal searches and seizures and assaults on Latinos, Mr. Maturo responded on camera: “I might have tacos when I go home. I’m not sure yet.”

Facing a blizzard of criticism — Gov. Dannel P. Malloy called his comments “repugnant” and said they represented “either a horrible lack of judgment or worse” — Mr. Maturo apologized, at first grudgingly and then with a long statement offering his “sincerest apologies” for what he called an “insensitive and off-collar comment.”

It’s not the most important part of this story, not by a long shot, but what I want to look at for the moment is the mayor’s coinage in that final quote. “Off-collar”! I’m always fascinated by the weird things people do with language and the ways the news media respond. In this case I could not find an original of the statement of apology, but I assume it was a written document and is rendered faithfully by the NYT, which does not remark on the novelty. The New Haven Register likewise let it stand; CNN silently changed it to “off-color”; the Hartford Courant added “[sic].” I think the Courant’s approach is the right one, and CNN made the wrong call. It’s not clear that “off-color” is what Maturo meant, or at least not all of what Maturo meant. I’m guessing “off-the-cuff” was the expression he really had in mind, but that, too, may not capture all of what he was trying to say. His remark was off-the-cuff, but that’s not what he needs to apologize for. And while it wasn’t “off-color,” it was offensive. So to say it was both spur-of-the-moment and wrong, Maturo comes up with a different part of the shirt — off-collar. The “refudiate” of 2012?

After a lecture Tuesday evening on “Law and the Gospel of Life” at Fordham Law School, I asked New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan about his reaction to President Obama’s decision on the contraception mandate — a decision which seemed to run decidedly counter to the impression Obama had left with the archbishop after their Oval Office meeting last November. From my RNS write-up:

“The president seemed very earnest [in November], he said he considered the protection of conscience sacred, that he didn’t want anything his administration would do to impede the work of the church that he claimed he held in high regard,” Dolan recalled on Tuesday. “So I did leave a little buoyant.”

That optimism ended last Friday, however, when Obama phoned Dolan to tell him that he was not expanding the conscience exemption to include religious institutions — such as Catholic hospitals, universities and social service agencies. In a bid to appease critics like Dolan, the White House gave church organizations an extra year to find a way to comply with the mandate that all health insurance plans provide free contraceptive coverage.

“I had to share with him that I was terribly let down, disappointed and disturbed, and it seemed the news he had given me was difficult to square with the confidence I had felt in November,” Dolan said.

Understandable, I think, given the grief Dolan could now face from bishops who want to take a harder line with the administration.

But not to worry! As my RNS colleague, Lauren Markoe reports, the White House yesterday honored Catholic teachers. All good. Right?

“Irony is the word of the day,” said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Good line.

“I will recover and return.”

Now up on the homepage is Unagidon’s reply to Hadley Arkes’s recent First Things article about the Affordable Care Act. According to Arkes, any law that forces all citizens to enter into a private contract is not only unconstitutional but also a violation of natural rights. Unagidon explains:

[Arkes argues] that the Affordable Care Act’s “individual mandate” will force people to enter into insurance contracts against their will, and that “imposing on people a contract that they do not want would be quite as wrong as dissolving, without their consent, a contract they had knowingly made.” How strong is this argument?By mandating that everyone buy health insurance (or pay some kind of penalty), the Affordable Care Act would seem to violate the principle that contracts must be entered into freely. The actual content of a contract is not supposed to have any bearing on this principle. What matters is only that the signer of a contract had the choice to take it or leave it.

But is the content—and the social context—of a contract really irrelevant when we are talking about natural law? Are current insurance contracts unencumbered in the way that Professor Arkes suggests?…

[T]o really get to the bottom of the health-care crisis—and to see what’s wrong with Arkes’s argument—you need to understand more than the dynamics of the market. You must also understand the social contract that underlies it. As it happens, this contract actually has a name. It’s called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), which was passed in 1986 under President Reagan. With that law, the nation decided that it wouldn’t allow health-care providers to toss indigent patients into the street. Hospitals have to treat anyone who comes to them, whether or not the patient can pay. Because of this law, there is no longer a neutral market space, of the kind imagined by Arkes, in which people can choose either to have health care or to forego it. Those who pretend to be taking their own chances by not buying insurance are really doing no such thing. If they show up at an Emergency Room before they are eligible for Medicare,  they will be subsidized by tax-payers and those with private insurance. In other words, EMTALA is—in addition to being a very humane piece of legislation—an unfunded mandate. If Arkes believes that hospitals should be allowed to deny care to sick and injured people without health insurance (or without enough money to pay for services out of pocket), he should say so outright, for this is one of the consequences of his argument about contracts. That hospitals cannot do this now is one of the things that makes health insurance different from all other forms of insurance.

No surprise, it’s by Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic:

Last week a record store in Dupont Circle announced that it was closing. The immediate cause of its demise—it had outlasted national and regional chains—was Price Check, Amazon’s new idea for exterminating competition. It is an app that allows shoppers to scan the bar code on any item in any store and transmit it to Amazon for purposes of comparison, and if it compares favorably to Amazon’s price, Amazon’s special promotion promises a discount on the same item. In this way shoppers become spies, and stores, merely by letting customers through their doors, become complicit in their own undoing. It will not do to shrug that this is capitalism, because it is a particular kind of capitalism: the kind that entertains fantasies of monopoly. For all its technological newness, Amazon’s “vision” is disgustingly familiar. (“Amazon is coming to eat me,” a small publisher of fine religious books stoically told me a few weeks ago.) Nor will it do to explain that Amazon’s app is convenient, unless one is prepared to acquiesce in a view of American existence according to which its supreme consideration must be convenience. How easy must every little thing be? A record store in your neighborhood is also convenient, and so is a bookstore. There is also a sinister side to the convenience of online shopping: hours once spent in the sensory world, in the diversified satisfaction of material needs and desires, can now be surrendered to work. It appears to be a law of American life that there shall be no respite from screens. And so Amazon’s practices raise the old question of the cultural consequences of market piggishness. For there are businesses that are not only businesses, that also have non-monetary reasons for being, that are public goods. Their devastation in the name of profit may be economically legitimate, but it is culturally calamitous. In a word, wrong.

Read the whole thing here.

David DeCosse in NCR offers this deft analysis of the reasoning underlying recent episcopal (and other) cries about infringements on religious liberty.

Money quote:

At present, the model of conscience used by most bishops is problematic in two ways. First, it emphasizes obedience, law, and hierarchical authority and thus departs from the Catholic tradition’s close linkage of conscience, practical reason, and freedom. Second, on account of this departure, these bishops needlessly lapse into using a sectarian model of the Catholic conscience ill-suited to the Church’s mission in a democratic pluralist society like the United States.

—

[T]he bishops have raised a hue and cry because they are defending the rights of conscience. But, for them, the conscience should be free to adhere to the truth of the universal moral law articulated by the hierarchical teaching office of the Church….But what about the freedom of conscience to adhere to a truth not identical with the moral law defined by the hierarchical authority of the Church? And what about the freedom to allow one’s practical reason to consult empirical data and a wide range of values in determining what conscience should do in a complex matter? Especially if that determination differs from one put forward by the bishops? The model of conscience favored by the bishops in the current disputes has little room for such obvious and significant scenarios.

And there’s lots more about a Thomistic understanding of conscience and the role of prudential reasoning. Too often these days Catholics are urged by Church leadership to ignore the breadth of our own tradition in favor of a narrower view. David reminds us otherwise.

So there I was in a spin (studio cycling) class. For those who don’t partake, spin is a form of group exercise in which participants on stationary bicycles are led through a series of “hills”–increasing the resistance on the pedals–and sprints, accompanied by music. The leader’s role is mainly to structure the class (”OK, we’re heading into an 8-minute hill, now, so let’s start on resistance level 5, at about 70-80 RPM!”) but also to exhort cyclists to do their best, to encourage the class, and to remind us of proper form. (”Relax your shoulders, now, and don’t rest your weight on the handlebars!”) The instructor is also cycling, and his/her sharing the workout and his/her visible fitness are inspiring as well. It’s a heck of a work-out.

I’ve done lots of spinning, but a recent class provided an interesting twist. We were down to our last three minutes, and the instructor said “OK, now I want you to think about the last time you told somebody a lie. This sprint is for that–ready, GO!” After the sprint she said, “OK, look, that’s way behind you. Now think about the last time you weren’t as nice to somebody as you should have been. 3-2-1, GO!” And then “OK, this last sprint is for yourself. Ready….GO!”

A number of things caught me about this sudden examination of conscience and penance during my work-out: Read the rest of this entry »

A harbinger of things to come? One of the largest Catholic health care systems in the country has relinquished its formal Catholic identity. I’ve talked to many people who think that the bishops can “make” a hospital be Catholic -or close them. But that’s not the legal reality, at least in most cases.  What will happen, in most cases, is some type of disaffiliation–the hospital will continue, in some form, although not an official “Catholic” facility.  It doesn’t affect tax exempt status, which most hospitals get through their not-for-profit charitable nature, not through their religious nature.

In a succinct, persuasive essay from 2004, E. J. Dionne argued “There Is No Catholic Vote—And It’s Important.” Dionne recounted this story of Al Smith with his campaign advisors in 1928: “Smith was attacked viciously in the nativist and anti-Catholic press. They had, among other things, quoted papal encyclicals, arguing that these pronouncements from Rome were quite inconsistent with American ideals. Smith is reported to have stared across the table at his aides and said: ‘Just tell me one thing: What is an encyclical?’”

I’ve been thinking of this story ever since the story broke of that invite-only evangelical meeting to anoint the appropriate presidential candidate. The 150 or so leaders met to hold a kind of consistory (with Texas substituting for the Vatican), complete with multiple ballots. They ultimately decided on Santorum, though not unanimously. And I keep imagining how this news would have resonated at a gathering of evangelicals who read Relevant and attend the Q events, or who follow the preaching of Joel Hunter, Tim Keller, and Samuel Rodriguez. Might they have said, “Just tell me one thing: Who are James Dobson and Tony Perkins?”

Even if evangelicals were to have recognized the names of their self-professed leaders, those leaders still should have known that they have very little power to influence the coveted “evangelical vote.” Catholic bishops would know this better than anyone, I would think: if a hierarchical Church has little success influencing its members’ voting practices, how would a “free church” tradition pull this off?

More to the point, the evangelical voting bloc seems to be an illusion. If anything, this is an indicator of evangelicalism’s appeal and success. Like Catholicism, evangelicalism has become a completely normal part of American Christianity, to the point that Rick Santorum, a Catholic, was surprisingly listed among the top 25 evangelicals in the country. (Did Joe Lieberman almost make the list?) Evangelicalism became mainstream by adapting to many different parts of American society, emerging in all classes, regions, and races, and in so doing it lost the cohesion of a “voting bloc.” (One can get a great sense of the shifting landscape vis-à-vis politics by reading David Gushee, The Future of Faith in American Politics, among other recent books.)

Other stories from last week help to make the point about evangelical diversity. For instance, if Rick Santorum is the evangelicals’ preferred social conservative (and now the only one left in the race, judging by deeds and not words), how will his negative views on contraception be received by the significant percentage of evangelical Christians that promotes frequent sex with one’s spouse? Besides the bizarre “sexperimental” roof-top sex promoted by Pastor Ed Young and his wife Bathsheba Lisa last week, there was also the release of popular firebrand Mark Driscoll’s new book about marriage sex. Matthew Lee Anderson assesses the new year’s offerings: “It’s too early to call it, but if evangelicals keep their frenetic pace up, 2012 will be the year they self-combust from over-sexual-exposure.”

How to make sense of all this?  Evangelicals are everywhere on the American landscape, which is another way of saying they are nowhere on the map. Their “voting bloc” can’t be influenced because it isn’t there. The combination of the Texas meeting plus the Iowa and South Carolina primaries is just our most recent evidence.

Update: I was certainly not intending to criticize the pastor’s wife by my post. Rather, their putting a bed on a roof to promote sex is bound to call to mind David and Bathsheba to a Biblically literate audience. In addition, a pastor’s call for his congregation’s couples to have sex every day is, in many circumstances, going to result in an asymmetrical power relationship. The pastor himself said in the interview that when he announced to his congregation the charge to have sex every day, the men of the congregation cheered with a standing ovation.

In many, perhaps most, respects, the last two movies I’ve seen could not be more different. Over Christmas, I saw Of Gods and Men, the story of the  French Trappist monks abducted from the Tibhirine monastery in Algeria in the mid 1990’s–they were later beheaded.   Over the weekend, I saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy- the new movie set in the height of the Cold War about a Russian mole at the top of the English espionage organization. It was based on the John Le Carre novel by the same name.

What struck me about both films was the lack of importance of social, political, and historical context to understanding the film. Yes, Of Gods and Men deals with the religious tensions of Algeria–but the reason why the monks were there, and their relationship with the village, and even the political machinations in which they became trapped was never really fully explained. You don’t come out of this movie with a better understanding of Christianity in Algeria, or the various Muslim factions vying for power.  The movie is about the life inside the monastery–you could have set the same thing in Mexico (with contending drug gangs) or anywhere else.  The political battle creating the problem really didn’t matter to the unfolding of the movie. The themes are courage, fidelity, and loyalty –in the face of great danger.  The source of the danger is really of secondary importance.

The same thing holds true, I think, of Tinker, Tailor.  It’s impossible to read LeCarre’s novel and not get a textured sense of the political and historical context–the very particular battle between two different ways of organizing political and social life that was going on between the West and the Soviets.  But you can watch the movie without knowing any more than that the Russians are the bad guys and the English are the good guys.  Furthermore, any other bad guys and good guys would do. Because the heart of the film is the relationship among the English spies themselves–what counts as loyalty, what counts as betrayal, what counts as fidelity to your job even in situations of danger and disgrace. You could change the clothes, change the villain, and set the movie in the contemporary time, no problem.

Loyalty to one’s commitments is a big theme in both movies. I wonder if we’re seeing a trend.  The contemporary world, and its political currents are so baffling, our bonds of community are so tenuous, we are trying to figure out what integrity and loyalty means–by examining cases that superficially seem very distant, but in fact can be detached from their setting and mapped into the contemporary world quite easily.

Over at the Corner NRO, Mark Steyn has a post about the lessons he draws from the chaos on board the Costa Concordia, which he contrasts with the orderly evacuation of the Titanic 100 years ago.  The difference between the two disasters, he says, tells us a lot about the problems of contemporary society.  (HT John Cole) Like you, my initial reaction to this was to roll my eyes.  Here’s what he says:

On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” [In contrast, the] men on the Titanic — liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure — found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ’oped it wouldn’t ’appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself — operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.”

Let’s complicate Steyn’s observations with some actual facts about survival rates. On the Titanic, these varied dramatically by social class, even among women and children.  Less than half of the third class women (46% saved) and children (34% saved) survived, compared to 100% of the first and second class children, and 97% and 86% of the first and second class women, respectively.  Second, Steyn says that the women and children first ethic “held up under pressure and across all classes.”  In fact, despite the large number of third class women and children who went down with the ship, a significant number of first class men declined the opportunity to “finish in style” and opted to save themselves instead.  Interestingly, adherence to the norm of women and children first seems to have been most completely internalized by the men in second class, just 8% of whom made it into lifeboats, compared to 33% of the captains of industry in first class.  (At 16%, the survival rate among third class men was higher than among the middle class men riding in second class, but still half that of the first class men.)

So a disaster in which the elites play by their own rules and in which the poor survive at about half the rate of the wealthy and middle class is Steyn’s example of how a well ordered society responds to adversity.  Maybe my initial reaction was wrong.  Steyn’s Titanic praise may actually be a perfect metaphor for contemporary National Review Republicanism.

In our January 13 editorial, we criticized a ruling from the Department of Health and Human Services that would require all employers to include “contraception and sterilization coverage in their health-insurance plans, including those provided to employees of religious institutions.” Only religious organizations that primarily employ and serve co-religionists, and whose mission is to inculcate its values, according to the “interim final rule,” could be exempt from the mandate. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, we wrote,

argues that compelling the church to pay for plans that cover services the church has long held to be immoral violates the religious-freedom guarantee of the First Amendment. Catholic hospitals, universities, and social-service agencies see their mission as caring for people of all faiths or none, and they employ many non-Catholics. Given this understanding of mission, inevitably there will be a degree of entanglement between any large religious institution and the modern state. That should not be an excuse, however, for imposing secular values on more traditional religious communities.

So, we concluded, President Obama ought to expand the religious exemption to include organizations like universities and hospitals. Apparently he was not persuaded. (Bear with me, this is going to be a long post.)

Read the rest of this entry »

John Paul the Great University in San Diego is advertising itself on Facebook as the “Catholic Gaming School.”  Endorsed as “authentically Catholic” by the Cardinal Newman Society, the university is offering a degree in computer gaming design.  Students will:

“Design, build, and demo your own game in front of industry professionals

Have the opportunity to launch your own gaming company in conjunction with JP Catholic’s MBA program.

Study in an authentically Catholic environment with peers who share your faith.”

My 13-year old son was very excited, until he saw the daily mass link on the page.  ”Is that mandatory?” he asked. “Can’t I just go to weekly mass?”

So DotCommers, let’s see some ideas for “authentically Catholic” video games.  I’m rooting for “Athanasius,” where you play the 4th century bishop as he travels through the Mediterranean combating the Arians.  I’m sure it would give World of Warcraft a run for its money…

Yesterday, the Obama administration upheld the original provision for religious exemption in the Affordable Care Act by not extending it to religiously-affiliated organizations that employ non-adherents. This is, of course, a victory for all those who care about the religious liberty of individuals and the freedom of individual conscience, which by definition is meant to be protected from the unwelcome coercion by institutions to do things (or not do things) that are not relevant to the performance of one’s explicit duties to them, including one’s employer. The Obama administration did offer one gratuitous concession to those religious institutions, like the USCCB, that seem to be muddled on what exactly conscience is by giving religiously-affiliated employers extra time to comply with the mandate.

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan responded to the announcement saying, “In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.” In fact, the Archbishop could take the year to reflect on what the concept of “conscience” actually means. If he truly believes that the provision of contraception through insurance coverage involves a morally significant participation in evil, then it seems that he, as an individual, has options. He could resign. He could get out of the business of employing non-adherents. He could get out of the business of providing health insurance. He could get out of the business of lobbying for government subsidies. Something tells me, though, that one’s conscience has its limits.

Closer to home, University of Notre Dame President John Jenkins appealed to the desire of religious organizations to participate in a “vibrant democracy” and called for “a national dialogue among religious groups, government and the American people to reaffirm our country’s historic respect for freedom of conscience and defense of religious liberty.” It seems to me that the dialogue has been had, and the best argument prevailed. Of course, it’s ironic that Jenkins is calling for a national dialogue when he has not even hosted a campus dialogue and represents a Church that is decidedly non-democratic in its constitution. Like Dolan, Jenkins too has options. Will he stop providing health insurance to his employees, as he suggested this past fall? Or, will he get out of the business of employing and instructing non-adherents by having them sign a credo, as is done at some other religiously-affiliated universities and colleges? Will Notre Dame stop applying for government grants? Again, something tells me that one’s conscience has its limits.

Perhaps the most disheartening part of this whole affair is the fact that there seems to be very little faith afforded to the consciences of individual religious believers on the part of their religious leaders. If the USCCB really cared about religious liberty and freedom of conscience, it would, I think, trust that those who fill the church pews on Sunday just might have the ability to come to their own moral conclusions in consultation with the spiritual guidance they have come to receive. As it stands, the bishops and other religious leaders seem intent on protecting their prerogative to coerce rather than counsel, and this is a slap in the faces of the faithful, who have already endured and forgiven so much loss of moral credibility among their clergy. It is also a tacit admission that the clergy themselves are perhaps not so confident in their own charism to amplify the small, quiet voice of God in the hearts of those who hear them. In this case, as in all cases where the right to coerce is claimed over the right of individual conscience, fear, insecurity, and, indeed, unbelief seem to be drowning out the voice of faith itself.

Richard N. Williamson, the odd-bishop-out of the Lefebvrite Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), continues to publish a weekly essay despite the demand of Bishop Fellay, head of the group, that he shut down his website. Williamson was the only one of the four bishops of the SSPX not invited to attend the October meeting in Albano of the leaders of the SSPX that was called in order to agree upon a response to the Vatican’s demand that they accept a “Doctrinal Preamble” as a condition for any regularization of their position in the Church. Bishop Fellay, head of the SSPX, had explained in a letter to Williamson that he would receive a copy of Rome’s offer only on two conditions: that he take an oath in writing not to divulge its content and that he shut down his website. Neither condition, it seems, was met.

It is clear from his columns that Williamson is not open to any accommodation with Rome unless the latter repudiates the many and significant errors of Vatican II. It is almost as clear that if Fellay makes such an arrangement with the Vatican, Williamson will repudiate it. Observers suspect that as many as a third of the members of the SSPX will follow that example.

Williamson’s latest essay attributes a “mental sickness” to Roman churchmen. This is not meant as an insult but as a description of “the objective state of the Romans’ minds… Their minds are no longer running on truth.” For the truth derived from Tradition they substitute their own authority. “They are mentally sick. Only they have the authority.”

And he ends with a bumper-sticker pronouncement: “I would rather be a schismatic sedevacantist than a Roman apostate. With the grace of God, neither!”

An Open Letter challenging Republican Presidential candidates Santorum and Gingrich to avoid “ugly racial stereotypes” about those who receive government assistance–on Catholic grounds.

Who, then, receives government assistance? According to the latest government report, whites were a slightly greater percentage of the population receiving government assistance than African-Americans. Moreover, nearly half the recipients were “child-only” families–in which no adult received assistance. 95 percent of adults receiving assistance were parents or caretakers –the vast majority were women.  A friend of mine said to me, “If you can’t find a job and you are a single adult with no children, you’re out of luck.”

Santorum tried to claim that he didn’t actually engage in racial stereotyping in talking about recipients of government assistance. Did he? Stephen Colbert doesn’t think so. Judge for yourself.

Stories of successful engagement between Catholics and Muslims are too few not to pass along one I heard about yesterday at a conference called “Catholic-Muslim Partnerships in Social Services.”

It concerned a program that brought Catholic and Muslim youths together in Staten Island, N.Y. – a locale where Catholics’ distrust of Muslims led a parish to cancel plans for a mosque to find a home in a former convent.

Gayle Murphy, a CYO administrator, described how Catholic and Muslim kids took turns cleaning each other’s houses of worship together. They worked an enormous vacuum in the mosque, and dusted statues in the church. Afterward: pizza.

To get to that point, Murphy had to overcome the fears of parents who were concerned about sending their children to the mosque. Murphy, who participated in CYO activities as a child and became involved as an administrator after her husband died a decade ago, said she brought the parents to the mosque. It was “an eye-opener,” she said, when the imam explained that “not all Muslims act in the way of 9/11 terrorists.” The young folks also worked in a church soup kitchen, and collected enough canned food in advance to send everyone home with some.

The conference, in which I participated, was held at the Interchurch Center in Manhattan (coincidentally the home of Commonweal). Other social-service partnerships in the Bronx and Harlem were discussed. Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York and various mosques and Muslim organizations took part in these projects. (The Interfaith Center of New York organized the conference.)

The idea of Catholics and Muslims working together toward social justice is a worthy one. As George Dardess and Marvin Krier Mich put it in their new book,  In the Spirit of St. Francis and the Sultan: Catholics and Muslims Working together in the Common Good (Orbis), there is a good deal of common ground between the two religions’ outlook on social justice. And there is something to be said for taking concrete actions together rather than just talking about improved relations.

I hope that stories such as this one from Staten Island will be told; they are needed. Catholics need to understand what the church actually teaches concerning Islam and relations with its adherents. Conservative Catholic media often muddle that. Catholic politicians run against mosques. Would that these actions speak louder than their words.

Just before Christmas we had a discussion of Christmas poetry. If I had known the one I give below, I’d have included it. It’s by the British poet Sally Read, and since on another thread below it became clear that not everyone likes it as much as I do, I thought I’d give it its own thread.

Nativity

Her labour’s heat still cloaked her,
and on that, the night’s cold like a slap.
smell of blood and feed brought to mind
jellied foals on stick-legs. But what she saw
was this: a blubbery pink umbilical cord
tethering God to man, tough as pork-fat.

Who cut it? Joseph with a grafting knife,
and the baby juddered red, fists clenched,
as though falling to the floor.
And was she shocked, as all new mothers are,
by that fresh distance spread between them:
pitch birth eyes appraising her from outside—

as if he hadn’t guessed the voice
of his nine-month world to be so sadly
small and human? She could only do
as all new mothers do: knit his skin
back into hers with warmth, milk and song,
breathing out the pain, as with bony gums
and fierce with need, he latched on.

Sally Read, Christmas 2011

PM Netanyahu has reportedly declared the New York Times and Ha’aretz along with world opinion are Israel’s greatest enemies.And we thought it was Hamas and Iran, etc. The Forward.

So what will it be: Sanctions and then Bombing? Or a speech to the U.S. Congress condemning them and asking for a Congressional Resolution telling them to go out of business?  Has Netanyahu left the reality-based community? Be alert world opinion!!

A Last Word in Commonweal’s January 27 issue offers my brief account of Vaclav Havel’s importance as a writer.

This morning I read Paul Wilson’s longer tribute in the NYReview (February 9)–a moving account of Havel’s last days and hours, and then of his “wake” in the midst of the Czech people. Wilson’s moving account conjures all the right memories of the man and his ideas. Wilson has been Havel’s chief translator into English, a labor that must have begun out of a deep affinity with Havel’s ideas. It is a labor for which all of us English readers are grateful. Link now up: NYReview

And here is Patricia Hampl’s deft essay on Havel in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Nothing makes me despair more about the corruption of our legislative process than the dynamic surrounding intellectual property laws.  SOPA and PIPA provide yet more evidence, as it if were needed.  This article by former lobbyist TC Sottek illustrates the point nicely (HT Balloon Juice):

Lawmakers may have their own parochial interests or lofty causes, but first and foremost they’re always looking for votes. To get votes, they need attention and money — something that corporate lobbyists can dish out in abundance. The end product of this system is lawmaking that’s less about making good public policy and more about appeasing the hands that feed — as a result, powerful corporations with deep pockets gain unparalleled access to members of Congress, and they help set the agenda. That agenda is why bills like SOPA and PIPA gain such traction — they were delivered to Congress in return for money and votes.

I know it’s considered naive by many in my line of work to hope for anything more than this, but democracy does not have to work this way.  For a variety of reasons, however, ours currently does.  And, in the IP context, the result has been a steady diet of ever more expansive IP rights without regard to the costs and increasingly draconian and, in my opinion, counterproductive efforts to prevent online copyright infringement.  And, although the legislative process is plainly broken in this area, for a number of reasons (some of them sound), the courts continue to refuse to intervene.

The January 7th issue of the London Tablet has two articles developing the cover story, “The Church’s revolving door.” Christopher Lamb’s piece, unfortunately only for subscribers, discusses women who join or leave and/or return to the Catholic Church as well as their reasons for leaving, joining, or returning. The more prominent piece is by the poet Sally Read and recounts her conversion from an atheism she drank in with her mother’s milk to Catholicism.

A thread of a couple of weeks back was devoted to what we think of when we think of the Church. Here is Ms. Read’s image:

It’s been said before: being Catholic is like being in love. As a poet from a most secular culture, I have come to know the Church asthe ultimate poem. An intricate composition of allegory and reality, that tries to give image to God’s presence on earth.

As many other conversion-narratives, this one is of help to cradle-Catholics (or at least to this one) because it makes one realize the precious character of so much that we tend to take for granted.

Sally Read’s blog is here. An early poem of hers is here. And three poems she wrote last year for Good Friday, Easter, and Christmas are here.  And here she describes how she came to write the poems in a volume about to appear and how a poet is like a hermit.

There is a case in Philadelphia in which a child with disabilities is being denied a kidney transplant. Her parents claim that it is because she is mentally handicapped. It’s hard to know exactly what is going on here, because of the stringent laws protecting patient privacy. We don’t know, for example, whether the child also has associated physical disabilities that make it less likely for the kidney transplant to be successful. We don’t know how well she would respond to the treatment.

But the issue is in fact an issue that has been discussed before, in ways that those engaged in the current discussion might find profitable to consider. The issue first came up in the 1960s with the “Seattle God Committee,” in which a committee decided who would have access to kidney dialysis. The committee considered not only issues pertaining to medical success but also social worth.  Whose life would be most worth saving? The lives that the (mostly middle class) committee thought saving were, not surprisingly, most like their own. The committee came under heavy criticism, from both the public and members of the nascent field of medical ethics.

Treatment of the seriously mentally handicapped has also been discussed a great deal, in the seventies too. One of the most famous cases was that of Joseph Saikewicz, a profoundly mentally handicapped man in his 60s who got cancer. He was unable to make decisions for himself. His guardian did not want to give him chemotherapy, although it would be a course of treatment that most non-handicapped people his age would undergo. In a controversial decision, the court decided that it was not in his best interest to receive the treatment-in part because of the way he would experience its discomfort and trauma.

The Roman Catholic tradition does not teach that life has to be prolonged at all costs — we are not a vitalist tradition. The old-school manualists would say, for example, if the only way to save your life is to get exotic treatment far from home for a prolonged period, you don’t necessarily have to do it — especially if you’re a homebody. It is an “extraordinary” means — at least for you, and you don’t need to take it.

Things are more complicated however, when we’re dealing with adult incompetent patients and with children — because neither group can make decisions for themselves. It’s especially complicated when we get to children with disabilities:  how do we sort out legitimate medical concerns versus illegitimate devaluing of “less than perfect life”?  If for example, the syndrome from which this girl suffers significantly reduces the chance that the kidney transplant will be successful, does that matter? If her life expectancy is much shorter than another child’s (whether or not she is mentally disabled) does that matter?

There are a number of good resources on this topic, for those who are interested.

On the general issue of ordinary and extraordinary means and incompetent patients, see the debate between Kevin Wildes and Gilbert Meilaender in Theological Studies. (Google their names at this website).

For one of the best efforts to grapple with treatment for children with disabilities, see Paul Ramsey’s Ethics at the Edges of Life — which attempts to work out a “medical indications” policy that avoids what he believes to be nefarious quality-of-life judgments.

Finally, of course, we have a different type of “conscience” problem. A transplant requires the cooperation of an entire medical team. It appears that the doctors believe, in conscience, it is morally wrong to do this procedure.  Are we going to make them do it?

Just posted: Ronald Osborn’s “Leaving Iraq: Immunity, Impunity & the End of the War.” It begins:

It was not supposed to end this way. Although President Barack Obama deserves credit for bringing an end to the war in Iraq that he inherited, if he had had his wishes, thousands of U.S. troops would nevertheless have remained stationed in Iraq indefinitely. The decision by the White House and the Pentagon to withdraw all U.S. soldiers before Christmas (with the exception of fewer than two hundred active duty forces attached to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad) was only made around October 2011. It followed months of negotiations with the Iraqi government to revise the terms of the withdrawal agreement signed by President George W. Bush shortly before he left office. That pact mandated that all U.S. troops leave the country by the end of 2011, but the Bush administration expected that the treaty would be renegotiated before the December deadline to keep at least several thousand soldiers in the country. And that is precisely what Obama attempted during the past year. Talks with the Iraqis broke down, however, over a single issue: the unwillingness of the Iraqi parliament to accept a Status of Forces Agreement (or SOFA) granting U.S. soldiers immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

Read the rest here.

This post, in which First Things contributor Greg Forster makes what he calls “The Moral Case Against Child Tax Deductions”, is a strange piece of reasoning. Here is Forster’s argument in a nutshell:

The rule of law is a much higher moral imperative for government than encouraging fertility. The rule of law is our only defense against arbitrary (and therefore, ultimately, tyrannical) use of political power. Fertility is encouraged through many social systems; no one argues either that government is the social system with primary responsibility for fertility, or that promoting fertility is a core competence of government. However, preserving the rule of law is government’s core function and only the government can preserve it.

What the rule of law requires above all else is stable rules that are fair and the same for everyone. Our current tax code is one of the primary threats to that core value, which is why the editors of the Journal have invested so much of their time, effort and social capital over the years in fighting to restore the rule of law to our tax policy.

Let me take a stab at diagnosing the fallacies here.

First, it is just not true that whenever the law treats different people differently, it thereby embodies rules that are not “the same for everyone”. For example, consider the law that sets the minimum voting age at 18: in one sense this law extends a right to some people and not to others, but clearly this does not amount to unequal treatment, as under this law everyone has the right to vote when they turn 18 (unless they forfeit this right in some way, perhaps by committing a felony). Similarly, a tax code that offers tax deductions for childbearing (or home ownership, or health care benefits, or …) is a code under which the rules are “the same for everyone” insofar as under such a policy, everyone has the opportunity to receive the same tax deductions in the same life situations: that some people do receive them while others do not is evidence of inconsistency, not in the rules, but in the factors that determine the upshot of their application.

Suppose, though, that when Forster says the tax code should be “the same for everyone” he means something more specific than this, namely that everyone (over some age, perhaps) should be taxed in exactly the same way, without any credits or deductions based on particular circumstances. Even if we were to accept this claim, it is pretty clear that it describes any number of possible but incompatible tax policies — for instance, here are three of them:

1. A traditional “flat tax” on income, where every citizen’s income is taxed at a rate of n%.
2. An even flatter tax, where every citizen pays $n in tax dollars.
3. A national sales tax, where all expenditures are taxed at a rate of n%.

Each of (1), (2), and (3) admits of multiple descriptions, some of which make them look like policies where taxes are “the same for everyone”, and others of which do not: for example, we could describe (1) as a policy where everyone pays the same rate but also as one where some people pay a larger number of dollars in taxes than others, (2) as a policy where everyone pays the same number of dollars in taxes but also as one where some people pay a greater portion of their income in taxes than others, and (3) as a policy where everyone is taxed on the same portion of what they spend and also as one where people who spend more pay more in taxes and people who spend a larger portion of their income pay a larger portion of their income in taxes. (And this is not all: for we need to determine who counts as a citizen, what counts as income and expenditure, whether to tax even those who do not earn any money, etc., and none of these are trivial tasks.) So how do we decide between these possible policies (preferring, hopefully, (1) and (3) over (2)), given that each has the same claim to make the rate of taxation “the same for everyone”? Clearly the answer is: by answering the question which of these tax policies is MOST JUST, where this requires appealing to factors — such as the precarious financial situation of the working poor — other than mere consistency. And once these factors are on the table, what could be wrong with using them to make the tax code even more just, in virtue of being flexible in yet further ways?

Here is what I take to be Forster’s response to that question: Read the rest of this entry »

R. R. Reno and Fr. Robert Barron have had it with these songs of praise for Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, who was recently named “person of the year” by the National Catholic Reporter. Why all the fuss? After all, Reno wonders, why should anyone be surprised that that “trade union for dissent” otherwise known as the Catholic Theological Society of America would come to her defense? “Yawn.” And how come she’s so well regarded, anyway? Why, her theology offers little more than “a bit of simplified Karl Rahner and lots of talk about contextualization mixed with progressive social attitudes.” That about sums her up, doesn’t it? According to Reno, Johnson’s “great achievement”* was having her book Quest for the Living God “criticized by the USCCB doctrine committee as promoting a theology not in accord with Catholic teaching.” Is that really person-of-the-year-worthy? “Writing and publishing the book wasn’t such a notable thing for Elizabeth Johnson to do,” Reno explains. “Ah, but to be criticized! One hears** the cries of ‘censorship,’ and ‘oppression.’” Reno continues: “NCR as well wants to play it’s supportive role. Thus Elizabeth Johnson as victim, oops, I meant to say person of the year.”

Perhaps Fr. Robert Barron had read Reno’s January 6 post, because just a few days later he released a video about the persecution of Christians around the globe (cleaned up for Real Clear Religion here) in which he mentions Elizabeth Johnson. After spending five minutes updating viewers on several disturbing incidents of religious persecution, Barron pauses, and makes a confession to his off-screen interlocutor: “This reflection was prompted…by an article I read in the National Cathlolic Reporter…. They chose as their Person of the Year Sr. Elizabeth Johnson…. And she was chosen because she was a persecuted victim.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Rod Dreher, here is a terrific column by First Things editor Rusty Reno, taking on a staff editorial from the Wall Street Journal that criticized Rick Santorum’s proposal to expand the tax credit for children as “social policy masquerading as economics”. As Reno points out, the WSJ’s blinkered focus on the role of tax policy in encouraging economic growth assumes a social policy of its own, one according to which GDP is the sole or main measure of a society’s health. Too, the WSJ’s claim that a pro-family tax policy “merely rewards taxpayers who have children over those who don’t” overlooks the role of tax policy in encouraging people to have children, and assumes once again that this — as opposed to growing the economy, of course! — isn’t something that tax policy should be in the business of doing. In short, the WSJ editors are guilty of exactly the charge they lay before Santorum: they pretend to be putting forward a “strictly” economic platform, which actually embeds a social policy of its own.

Here’s a choice excerpt from Reno’s response:

Unlike the acorn that grows into a tree without cultivation and encouragement, human beings don’t just do what they are naturally ordered to do. Or more accurately, we don’t automatically do it well and in a way that brings us the satisfaction that comes with living in accord with our natural propensities. We require cultivation, which is to say culture, which is to say “social policies.”

The free market libertarianism that largely guides the Wall Street Journal editorial page does not deny the need for cultivation and social engineering. It wants to engineer tax policy in order to encourage us to do what we’re naturally inclined to do, which is to work and invest and otherwise try to secure for ourselves a better and more secure financial future. But what that same philosophy denies is that human beings have a natural end beyond economic self-interest, which is why the editorials criticizing Santorum see an increased child tax credit either as an unfair preference for one lifestyle over others, or as case of misguided social engineering.

The underlying view of the human person in relation to society that leads to these conclusions fits with postmodern relativism, which says that we are motivated by a will-to-power or sexual desire (the two main options in postmodern theory), but not in accord with an essential human nature, and not toward any normative end. By this way of thinking there is no human nature, no natural as opposed to unnatural way to live. Society constructs norms (social engineering), and individuals do this or that in accord with their own personal wishes and desires (lifestyle choices).

Take will-to-power and domesticate it as economic self-interest, and you pretty much have the political and social vision of free-market libertarianism. I see little future for what is today a very modern social philosophy in American conservatism. Yes we’d like to be richer, but that’s not all we want. We want to live in accord with our nature as human beings, and that includes contributing to and enjoying the primitive community of the family. If free market libertarians can’t get their minds around that fact—and the fact that as we make personal choices about marriage and children we’re influenced by a manifold of social and economic incentives—then I can’t see how they will be able to formulate a governing consensus. Over the long haul people won’t vote for politicians who won’t work to implement policies that help them live the kinds of lives their nature desires.

One thing that might be added to this is that certain social policies, tax-related and otherwise, can positively thwart proper human flourishing, as e.g. when we drive up the cost of housing and education, and make it prohibitively difficult to live on a single income, thus keeping families small and driving their members apart. What are some other aspects of our “essential human nature” that require social policies for their proper cultivation? I can think of quite a few.