New web-exclusive piece now featured on our home page: David Cloutier’s “‘Intrinsic Evil’ & Public Policy.” From the story:

Moral theologians will continue to debate which acts, described in what way, fall into the category of the “intrinsically evil.” But the case of adultery highlights how inappropriate the term “intrinsic evil” can be in discussions about civil law. After all, adultery is both intrinsically evil and grave…and yet very few people are hankering to recover civil laws against adultery. So a moral category that seems to promise clarity and purity loses its clarity and purity as soon as it is applied in the public sphere. Not everything the civil law forbids is intrinsically evil, and not all intrinsic evils ought to be forbidden by law.

Meanwhile, while we squabble over non-negotiables, Hitler swamps Europe, or the rich use government coercion to oppress the poor in Latin America, or we all continue to abuse the natural world as if its resources and resilience were infinite. If the non-negotiables are supposed to trump everything else, why should Paul VI and John Paul II have even bothered writing documents on peace and on the right to development of poorer nations? And what are we to make of Benedict XVI’s categorical insistence in Caritas in veritate that advanced countries “can and must lower their domestic energy consumption” and must make “a serious review of its lifestyle which…is prone to hedonism and consumerism”? Are these statements to be ignored by the citizens of the richest, most militarized and consumerist nation in the world just because they aren’t about intrinsically evil acts?

Read the whole thing here.

Just in time for Reformation Day, the Vatican’s top official for ecumenism floats the possibility that Lutherans could get their own special church inside the Roman Catholic Church, much as was done for disgruntled Anglicans. Cardinal Kurt Koch spoke to Zenit:

“Anglicanorum coetibus was not an initiative of Rome,” Koch said, “but came from the Anglican Church. The Holy Father then sought a solution and, in my opinion, found a very broad solution, in which the Anglicans’ ecclesial and liturgical traditions were taken into ample consideration. If similar desires are expressed by the Lutherans, then we will have to reflect on them. However, the initiative is up to the Lutherans.”

Hang on Anabaptists, your turn is coming soon!

H/T: Catholic World News

Avik Roy is a conservative blogger on healthcare who is also an adviser to the Romney campaign and who by sheerest coincidence also wants to scare the bejeesus out of everyone about Obamacare, especially if they live in a swing state.  In two articles (so far) covering Ohio and Wisconsin, Roy leads off with a dire prediction: that Obamacare is going to cause premiums to go up 55 percent to 85 percent (Ohio) and 35 percent (Wisconsin) for individual insurance policies.  Is this true?  Are premiums going to go up like this?

The individual market, where individuals (rather than businesses) purchase insurance policies is not like the group market and the way that the individual market operates now underlines a great deal of what is wrong with American healthcare today.  Individual insurance is what is called in the business “heavily underwritten”, which means that each policy sold is heavily scrutinized by underwriters.  This means, of course, that no pre-existing conditions need apply, which in turn means that one has to be in almost perfect health to get such a policy.  People who buy these policies also do not get the same level of benefits (as a rule) that people get with company policies.  (For example, maternity care is usually not covered).  So individual policies are relatively uncommon (only about ten million Americans have them — out of about 200 million people with insurance) and relatively cheap.

Under Obamacare, the individual insurance market will have to offer the same benefits that everyone else gets and will have to offer individual policies to everyone, even those with pre-existing conditions. People who have individual policies and want to keep their current rate levels and benefit levels can be grandfathered. People who before could not purchase insurance at any price will now be able to buy individual policies regardless of their pre-existing condition status and with the same benefit levels that people with group policies have.  These new policies will cost about 55 percent to 85 percent (in Ohio) more than the cut-rate policies that can only now be purchased by the very healthy.  Read the rest of this entry »

The new issue is now live; check it out here. Among the highlights: Daniel Callahan reflects on his religion and his time at Harvard and Yale, Fr. Nonomen examines the loss of good priests, and Richard Alleva reviews The Master. Also, Gabriel Young on Lebanon’s fragile unity, and E.J. Dionne’s latest column, on the role of heartland voters in this year’s election.

New York City is a coastal city. Easy enough to forget until the weather reminds us that high tides (very high tides–full moon) and Category 1 hurricanes can swamp the edges of the city. Otherwise, it’s raining, there are gusts, and the flag across the street has been taken down. No subways, no buses, lots of taxis, and people out walking. The grocery store was open this morning, but completely out of spinach. Spinach! People must be desperate.

How’s the vegetable situation in your neighborhood?

One of the earliest Christian controversies involved the proper date for Easter. It is usually called the “Quartodeciman” controversy, since it was about whether or not Easter ought to be celebrated on “14″ of the month Nisan. In modern times, the split was not about the Jewish lunar calendar, but about two different Christian calendars: the Gregorian (West) and the Julian (East). This division is the reason why almost all Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on a different date than those in the Roman Catholic Church.

Last week, Giorgio Bernardelli of the “Vatican Insider” blog of La Stampa reported that change is coming for many Catholics in the Holy Land. In 2013, Catholics in parts of the Holy Land (excepting Jerusalem and Bethlehem) will celebrate Lent and Easter according to the Julian calendar. Bishops of the Latin rite have been asking for this for a number of years, as was reported by Catholic News Service two years ago at the synod about the Middle East. The idea is that, at the central moment of the liturgical year, the unity of Christians might be expressed. An unofficial translation of the Italian has been provided by Murray Watson on a Jewish-Christian relations listserv, and I post it here:

In 2013, the Catholic parishes of the Holy Land will celebrate Easter together with the faithful of the Orthodox churches on May 5, and not on March 31, as the rest of the world’s Catholics will
Giorgio Bernardelli, Roma
October 17, 2012

 
This is an important decision, as a major step in the ecumenical journey. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem has made this decision, by means of a decree published today. The idea had already been anticipated by Vatican Insider a few months ago, and represents a significant ecumenical precedent. In practice, the Julian calendar will be adopted instead of the Gregorian calendar, as regards Lent, Easter and Pentecost, responding to a request which had also surfaced at the Synod for the Middle East, which was celebrated in 2010.

The idea is that, at least in the most central moment of the liturgical year, the unity among Christians might be able to be expressed, and might thus help to overcome the paradox of a division which, until now, has even had an impact on the level of the home, since weddings between the faithful of the Latin and Eastern rites are quite frequent in the Holy Land.

This provision has been adopted on an experimental basis for the year 2013, aware that in 2014, the date of Easter on both calendars will coincide (April 20), and so, for the next year, the issue will not arise. In the meantime, the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land will draft a definitive decree, which it will present to the Holy Land for canonical approval; it is the hope of local bishops that, by 2015, the Vatican will have “given a green light,” and that this decision could thus become definitive [i.e., permanent].

Another important point concerning the places in which the experiment of a common Easter will be applied: it will be in the parishes of Israel, of the Palestinian Territories, Jordan and Cyprus, which fall under the jurisdiction of the Latin Patriarchate. With, however, two important exceptions: Jerusalem and Bethlehem where, at least for 2013, the Gregorian calendar will continue to be followed (and where Easter will, therefore, be celebrated on March 31).

The reason for this restriction lies in the rules of the “Status Quo,” the old Ottoman-era edict which strictly regulates the schedule of liturgies and relations between the Christian denominations within the Christian holy places, which are shared by various denominations. Changing those rules in Jerusalem and Bethlehem appears, for the moment, to be only a dream. So, for pilgrims who come to the Holy Land, little should really change, at least in 2013.

This remains, however, a major and important sign: the Holy Land is one of the places where the divisions between Christians is most clearly visible. Sometimes, people have found themselves in the midst of scuffles in the basilicas, between religious of the various Christian denominations. This initiative (which was launched by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem) thus moves in the opposite direction, and has been undertaken as a response to a request which came primarily from the faithful themselves.

It is, however, worth remembering that, even beyond the particular context of the Holy Land, Benedict XVI himself has on several occasions expressed his hope that Catholics and Orthodox would soon be able to arrive at an agreement for the celebration of Easter on the same date throughout the world. Jerusalem, therefore, is beginning to open up the path, and hopes that it can, in turn, shed light on the ecumenical journey.

Despite the common assertions that religious and cultural conflicts are increasingly dominating American politics, there is quite a bit of data showing that income still correlates very strongly with voting patterns in about the way you’d predict, with wealthier voters more likely to vote Republican and working class voters more likely to vote for Democrats.  (See, for example, Nolan McCarty et al., Polarized America (2006))  A couple of Cornell professors have recently published an interesting paper trying to parse the impacts of religion and income on voting patterns over the past few elections.  They find that religious conservatism has increasingly manifested itself as political conservatism, but most markedly among those with family incomes of more than $75,000.  You can download the paper here.  There are some problems with the way they measure religious conservatism, particularly as it relates to Catholics.  Specifically, their measure of religious conservatism is based on a set of questions about biblical authority.  While I think this works well for distinguishing among types of Protestants, it works less well among Catholics, since the main axes of disagreement among Catholics do not tend to relate to Biblical authority.  Still, even using that metric, they find the same pattern among Catholics.  It’s interesting to think about the reasons for this.

I’m arriving very late to this argument—in online journalism, as in presidential campaigns, two weeks is an eternity—but I’d like to add something to what Matthew J. Frank and Ross Douthat have already written about this very stupid post by a very smart man.

Commenting on Paul Ryan’s answer to the question about abortion in the vice-presidential debate, the New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik writes:

[Ryan] talked about how, looking at a first sonogram of his daughter, he was thrilled by the beating heart in the tiny “bean” on the image, so much that he and his wife still call that child “Bean.”… But Ryan’s moral intuition that something was indeed wonderful here was undercut, tellingly, by a failure to recognize accurately what that wonderful thing was, even as he named it: a bean is exactly what the photograph shows—a seed, a potential, a thing that might yet grow into something greater, just as a seed has the potential to become a tree. A bean is not a baby.

The fundamental condition of life is that it develops, making it tricky sometimes to say when it’s fully grown and when it isn’t, but always easy to say that there is a difference and that that difference is, well, human life itself. It is this double knowledge that impacts any grownup thinking about abortion: that it isn’t life that’s sacred—the world is full of life, much of which Paul Ryan wants to cut down and exploit and eat done medium rare. It is conscious, thinking life that counts, and where and exactly how it begins (and ends) is so complex a judgment that wise men and women, including some on the Supreme Court, have decided that it is best left, at least at its moments of maximum ambiguity, to the individual conscience (and the individual conscience’s doctor)….

Ryan talked facilely of what “science” says in this case. But what real science has to tell us, of course, very different; it says that life has no neat on and off, that while life may in some sense begin at conception, the moment when the formed consciousness that distinguishes human life from bean life arises is a very different question, not reducible to a dogma or a simple claim. A bean isn’t a baby; a baby was once a bean, and between those two truths it is, or ought to be, every woman for herself.

In response to which, Douthat makes an obvious but important point:

Gopnik is taking the congressman’s nickname for his unborn child and literalizing it…. On the one hand, calling an embryo a “bean” makes embryonic human life sound like a form of vegetative life—not an uncommon rhetorical move in these debates, but also one that collapses on the barest scrutiny. A bean is not remotely like a baby, certainly, but neither is a baby remotely like a full-grown bean plant, and that difference has a more obvious bearing on the debate over embryonic and fetal rights than the facile comparison between plant embryos and human ones. Outside of the world of level five veganism, neither the bean nor the plant have a strong moral claim on us, and it’s their essence as vegetables, rather than their level of development, that makes all the moral difference. Not even the most ardent enthusiast for the idea that ontology-recapitulates-phylogeny has ever argued that developing human life passes through a vegetable phase on its path toward full adulthood. Biologically speaking, we begin as we end up—which is one reason why any normal person would be rightly horrified to find the beans switched out for human embryos in their favorite cassoulet.

The more obvious point, though, is that Gopnik’s argument entails a conclusion that he would almost certainly reject were it put to him plainly. If the difference between a life that’s “fully grown” and one that isn’t were, as he says, “human life itself,” then children and adolescents, being not yet fully developed, would not yet count as “human life.” And, in that case, why should their not-quite-human lives count for as much as those of their parents in the eyes of the law?

Gopnik might reply that this isn’t exactly what he means, since he goes on to write that “life has no neat on and off…while life may in some sense begin at conception, the moment when the formed consciousness that distinguishes human life from bean life arises is a very different question.” But this sentence is no less perplexing than the first. After all, a “formed” consciousness is a developed consciousness, and its development continues over many years, most of them post-natal. On the other hand, if what distinguishes human life from merely potential human life “arises” in a “moment,” then it does indeed have a “neat on and off,” even if it may be hard to place with satisfactory precision.

It is the impossibility of such precision that really seems to backstop Gopnik’s complacency on this question: “It is conscious, thinking life that counts, and where and exactly how it begins (and ends) is so complex a judgment that wise men and women, including some on the Supreme Court, have decided that it is best left, at least at its moments of maximum ambiguity, to the individual conscience (and the individual conscience’s doctor).” But of course the ambiguities of “conscious, thinking life” extend well beyond birth. Infants aren’t conscious the way adults or even two-year-olds are, and such consciousness as infants possess does not begin the moment they are born. If humanity is reducible to “formed consciousness,” why shouldn’t the law reflect these facts too?

A number of Catholics and evangelicals across the political spectrum who have become disillusioned with their usual candidate or with the entire political system are opting out of voting — despite the longstanding tradition of most churches that voting is a serious duty for Christians. (“Voting is a civic sacrament,” as Father Hesburgh once said.)

My latest piece for Religion News Service rounds up some of the arguments for abstaining, or at least threatening not to vote, or voting for a third party:

Julia Smucker, a contributor to the Vox Nova blog who identifies as a “Mennonite Catholic,” wrote in July that Obama had disappointed her so much she may not vote for anyone. Meanwhile her colleague Kyle Cupp said he found both campaigns so vacuous that he has “almost reached the point of not caring.”

Similarly, Jana Bennett, a professor of theological ethics at the University of Dayton in battleground Ohio, wrote a column at the Catholic Moral Theology blog saying she is considering voting for a third-party candidate or not at all because neither party adequately represents her beliefs.

“Something has tipped for me this election and it’s the way I think I’m being asked to rip myself in half, figuratively speaking, by one party or the other, or both,” Bennett wrote in early October, lamenting “the stupidity of the apparent choice with which I am faced in the election.”

“The stark disparity between the two party’s platforms indicates to me that regardless of who ‘wins’ in November, the net result will be that nothing will continue to get done,” she said. “In a two party system, we seem to have only one choice, even if that choice splits us down the middle.”

Bennett’s colleague at the University of Dayton, Kelly Johnson, also advocated not voting, though she framed the decision as a fast in which believers should “abstain from some good for the sake of orienting our desires toward a higher good.”

“Abstaining from voting for now would recognize that in this setting and for us, elections can be an occasion of sin and a site for scandal,” Johnson wrote last spring. “Paul abstained from meat sacrificed to idols for the sake of other Christians; Catholics could abstain from U.S. party politics, for the sake of all of us, Catholics and non-Catholics, who are misled by such efforts.”

I can understand the frustration but I have an instinctive reaction against abstaining from voting. You wind up working to elect someone anyway, in a negative way. And personally, I’d rather be guilty for what I do than for what I don’t do. Thoughts?

Yesterday Paul Ryan gave a speech about poverty in Cleveland, Ohio. The title of the speech was “Restoring the Promise of Upward Mobility in America’s Economy.” As Jonathan Chait points out in his response, the biggest obstacle to upward mobility in this country is not welfare, regulation, high taxes, or any of the other things Ryan worries about; it’s income inequality. Countries that have less of that have more social mobility, even if they also have a more generous social safety net and higher taxes.

Fiscal hawks sometimes speak as if they regret having to cut federal spending for things like Medicaid and food stamps; such cuts are routinely described as painful but necessary. In his Cleveland speech, Ryan insists that what’s good for the budget is also good for the poor: by cutting programs that only encourage dependency, we’re actually doing the poor a favor. We’re like repentant codependents finally cutting off an addict’s supply. As Chait writes,

Ryan paints a picture in which we face an impending debt crisis but also have the good fortune of spending vast sums on poor people in a way that harms them, allowing us to reap large budgetary savings while giving the poor a helping hand. What an incredible stroke of good fortune!

But is it true that these programs foster dependency? Ryan avoids fleshing out this implication with any specifics, perhaps because to do so would quickly expose the vapidity of his claims. For one thing, welfare reform was undertaken during the nineties boom, when a red-hot employment market made it possible for people to transition from welfare to low-rung jobs. The notion that there are jobs today going unfilled but for the laziness of the poor has no relationship to reality.

Second, welfare was designed to replace the role of a male breadwinner and thus created a family model in which a single mother could expect to receive a basic income in lieu of work. That isn’t true of the programs Ryan wants to slash.

There is one ironic exception here, though: Medicaid. Medicaid offers health care for the very poor, along with nursing-home care and other special medical needs. It is possible that the availability of Medicaid could reduce a person’s incentive to earn more money, because at some point, they would earn enough to no longer qualify for Medicaid and then they’d lose their health insurance. But this would only hold true if we enact Ryan’s proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Otherwise, people will have access to health insurance at every income level.

Here is a taste of Amy Sullivan’s (in my opinion, very sensible) take on the Mourdock dust-up:

Take a look again at Mourdock’s words: “I came to realize that life is that gift from God. And…even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.” The key word here is “it.” I think it’s pretty clear that Mourdock is referring to a life that is conceived by a rape. He is not arguing that rape is the something that God intended to happen.

This is a fairly common theological belief, the understanding of God as an active, interventionist. It’s also not limited to conservative Christians. There are liberal Christians who also argue that things work out the way they’re supposed to.

The whole thing is worth a read.

There’s been much talk of President Obama throwing a certain country under the bus. According to an op-ed in today’s NYTimes, it appears that not just one president, but several have done this.

However, it is not the one currently being accused. The author of “Who Threw Israel Under the Bus?” is a former head of Mossad and adviser to Ariel Sharon.

Babel, the second album from the British folk-pop group Mumford & Sons, debuted at #1 on Billboard’s list of the top 200 albums three weeks ago, where it still reigns. Since their first album, Sigh No More, was released two years ago, reactions to Mumford’s brand of (post)Christian salvation rock have been polarized. On the one hand, similarly-bent secular preachers, like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, have embraced the band as carrying on the sacred tradition of bringing hope to the masses through song. On the other hand, rock critics have expressed everything from reserved admiration to disdain for what many take to be a shallow call for SUV solidarity stemming more from privileged suburban nostalgia for a time before private school tuitions than a hard-won, working class rage against the machine. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Mirror of Justice, Robert P. George declares that Michael Sean Winters and I have engaged in “aggressively partisan efforts to smear Paul Ryan as a Randian enemy of Catholic social thought.” Evidently he’s referring to my critique of his response to “On All of Our Shoulders.” In that post, I pointed out that George failed to engage the substance of “On All of Our Shoulders,” whose authors write to remind us that Catholic social teaching is not well reflected in the ideology of libertarianism. Instead, George dismissed the statement as partisan — which is odd, considering that he has endorsed and is advising Mitt Romney (as he did during the 2008 campaign). And he changed the subject, complaining that the authors didn’t focus on the top three issues the Romney campaign would like to determine how Catholics vote (.pdf).

That’s his right, of course. But even though he’s posted about “On All of Our Shoulders” several times since October 12, he still hasn’t gotten around to addressing its authors’ question: If Rep. Paul Ryan no longer looks to Ayn Rand to make sure his policies “square with the key principles of individualism,” as he said in 2009, and instead looks to Aquinas to guide his work, then why haven’t his policies changed? George seems to think that wanting to know how Ryan’s self-described Thomistic shift has affected his policies is itself evidence of partisanship. If so, he’s really not going to like our latest editorial, just posted to the homepage. It begins:

Rep. Paul Ryan has long enjoyed a reputation as a wonk’s wonk. Here was a Republican politician happy to engage in substantive conversation about tax policy, debt, and the future of entitlement programs. The press, accustomed to elected officials far less interested in the nitty-gritty of policy-making, believed it had discovered a serious man on Capitol Hill. Others were impressed that Ryan, a practicing Catholic, didn’t shy away from discussing how his faith has helped shape his policies.

Yet, as Ryan’s national stature has increased, so has scrutiny of his record. He has been well served by media coverage contrasting his allegedly Catholic-infused policies with Vice President Joe Biden’s strained attempts to reconcile his prochoice politics with church teaching. But before long, the same press corps that had portrayed Ryan as a no-nonsense deficit hawk began reporting his long-standing avowal of the works of Ayn Rand as the touchstone for his political life. In 2005, Ryan told a crowd of Rand devotees that he looks to Rand’s writing to make sure his policies “square with the key principles of individualism.” And in a 2009 video he praised her for upholding “the morality of individualism” as “what matters most.” One might detect the influence of Rand’s individualism in Ryan’s 2011 description of the social safety net as a “hammock” that fosters “dependency.”

Read the rest right here.

Andrew Bacevich’s contribution to our Election 2012 series, “Endless War” (published in our October 12 issue), is a bracing assessment of where the candidates stand, and what choice they offer (or do not offer) voters, when it comes to foreign policy.

Here’s what you need to know about the forthcoming presidential election: Whoever you vote for in November, you won’t be voting for peace. Just as there is no credible peace party in American politics, so too there will be no peace candidate on the ballot—at least none with any substantial following.

During the two World Wars, Bacevich writes, and for a long time afterward, “peace remained the actual or theoretical or pretended objective of U.S. policy.” He cites speech after speech after speech in which presidents announced their intentions to bring about peace—often as justification for their latest military venture. But, he explains, the “p-word” doesn’t come up much anymore. “On the occasion of—prematurely? comically?—receiving the Nobel Peace Prize,” Bacevich writes, “the president seemed more interested in justifying war than in offering a clarion call for its elimination.”

Nothing in last night’s foreign policy debate (transcript here) contradicts Bacevich’s point. But “peace” did come up, and it was Mitt Romney who kept talking about it. Answering a question about Hosni Mubarak, Romney said, “Let me step back and talk about what I think our mission has to be in the Middle East, and even more broadly, because our purpose is to make sure the world is more—is peaceful. We want a peaceful planet. We want people to be able to enjoy their lives and know they’re going to have a bright and prosperous future and not be at war.” Later, he said that “our mission” in Iran “is to dissuade Iran from having a nuclear weapon through peaceful and diplomatic means.” And in his closing statement, he said:

I want to see peace. I want to see growing peace in this country, it’s our objective. We have an opportunity to have real leadership. America’s going to have that kind of leadership and continue to promote principles of peace that’ll make a world the safer place and make people in this country more confident that their future is secure.

None of that runs contrary to Bacevich’s conclusion, based on his reading of the Romney campaign’s foreign-policy white paper: “One suspects that the Romney camp values peace chiefly as a euphemism for American hegemony.” (From that campaign statement: “Mitt Romney rejects the philosophy of decline in all of its variants. He believes that a strong America is the best guarantor of peace and the best patron of liberty the world has ever known.”)

The trouble for Romney in approaching last night’s debate is that he wants to characterize Obama as an incompetent leader without disagreeing materially with anything Obama has actually done. Read the rest of this entry »

The Information Age has been overwhelming. The superfluity of the internet has necessitated a sharpening of the virtue of discernment. With limited free time each day, which websites will we visit?

For me — and I’m guessing I’m not alone on this blog — Rocco Palmo’s Whispers in the Loggia is a sine qua non for learning about the Catholic Church, especially in North America. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you like Cathleen Kaveny’s article “The Single-issue Trap: What the Bishops’ Voting Guide Overlooks”? Then you might want to check out the book from which it was adapted: Law’s Virtues: Fostering Autonomy and Solidarity in American Society.

Quick question: Who was the genius who scheduled a presidential debate for a Monday during football season (go Bears)? Anyway, have at it. Don’t forget to refresh the page to update the comment thread.

Over the weekend there were several requests for a thread about Sen. McGovern who died yesterday at the age of 90, shortly after entering hospice care in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  This post can serve as one.

Wikipedia has what seems to be a decent overview of Sen. McGovern’s life and career for those looking for an introduction.  The Sioux Falls Argus-Leader has collected its coverage here.  Eileen McNamara, who cast her first presidential vote for McGovern in 1972, has a lovely and fiery reminiscence by an unrepentant liberal:

“He was right about Vietnam, right about the disastrous consequences of income inequality and right about the man whose unprecedented resignation from the presidency in 1974 looms larger than his landslide victory over McGovern two years earlier.  McGovern was the last presidential candidate unafraid to prescribe bold action in the face of seemingly overwhelming social problems….

“During my years in Congress and for the four decades since, I’ve been labeled a ‘bleeding-heart liberal.’ It was not meant as a compliment, but I gladly accept it,” McGovern wrote last year. “My heart does sometimes bleed for those who are hurting in my own country and abroad. A bleeding-heart liberal, by definition, is someone who shows enormous sympathy towards others, especially the least fortunate. Well, we ought to be stirred, even to tears, by society’s ills. And sympathy is the first step toward action. Empathy is born out of the old biblical injunction ‘Love the neighbor as thyself.’”

There’s a “hopelessly far left … lost liberal cause” for you.”

Please add your own thoughts, reminiscences, observations and prayers below.

What do Mormons teach about social justice? According to a site run by liberal Mormons (and yes, there are liberal Mormons), quite a bit:

“Liberals in many religious traditions use the expressions “social justice” or “peace and justice” to refer to their faith-based activism around issues such as poverty, discrimination, exploitation of workers, war, or the environment. Social justice is more than charitable aid. It means working for change in how the human family organizes itself politically and economically.

Although not so well known, Mormonism, too, has a social justice tradition. Latter-day revelation enjoins the Saints to “plead the cause of the poor and the needy” (D&C 124:75). The Book of Mormon echoes the social justice teachings of the Hebrew prophets, warning that the Lord will bring judgment on those who “oppress the hireling in his wages” (3 Ne. 24:5). Rejecting distinctions by race or gender, God requires that “there should be an equality among all” (2 Ne. 26:33; Mosiah 27:3). The scriptures commend democracy and constitutional law as means to protect human rights (Mosiah 29:26; D&C 98:5; 101:77), while condemning inequity, exploitation, and violence (2 Ne. 20:1-2; D&C 38:26; Moses 8:28). The Saints are challenged to “renounce war and proclaim peace” (D&C 98:16). We are taught that God has made human beings stewards of the earth, with a charge to use its resources equitably, “with judgment, not to excess” (D&C 59:20; 104:14-18).”

It seems to be topic of increasing interest in more mainstream venues as well.

The flagship newspaper of thoroughly Mormon Utah liked the old Mitt Romney, he of the 2002 Olympics and the Massachusetts governorship. But the editors are not so enamored of this new version, and lay out the case against Romney, and for Obama:

In considering which candidate to endorse, The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board had hoped that Romney would exhibit the same talents for organization, pragmatic problem solving and inspired leadership that he displayed here more than a decade ago. Instead, we have watched him morph into a friend of the far right, then tack toward the center with breathtaking aplomb. Through a pair of presidential debates, Romney’s domestic agenda remains bereft of detail and worthy of mistrust.

Therefore, our endorsement must go to the incumbent, a competent leader who, against tough odds, has guided the country through catastrophe and set a course that, while rocky, is pointing toward a brighter day. The president has earned a second term. Romney, in whatever guise, does not deserve a first.

That’s the conclusion; the lead-in is even tougher on Romney.

It is hard to paint the SLT as a bastion of East Coast liberalism; they warmly endorsed Orrin Hatch for reelection, and supported former GOP Sen. Bob Bennett, to my mind a classic, old-school conservative who was unfortunately ousted in the 2010 primary by a Tea Party candidate.

Newspaper endorsements have perhaps zero influence on the electorate. Heck, they may send people in the opposite direction. And Mitt is killing it with his fellow Mormons, judging by the polling. But it seems notable, if not striking, that the hometown newspaper of the Latter-day Saints cannot endorse the first LDS candidate for president in U.S. history.

Did the Boston Globe endorse Kennedy or Nixon?

The indefatigable David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times reports that the chief suspect in the attack on the U.S. counsel in Benghazi that killed the ambassador and three guards is out and about in the city.   “Just days after President Obama reasserted his vow to bring those responsible to justice, Mr. Abu Khattala spent two leisurely hours on Thursday evening at a crowded luxury hotel, sipping a strawberry frappe on a patio and scoffing at the threats coming from the American and Libyan governments.”

Quite a daring fellow! And with strong opinions too: “He said that the United States had its own foreign policy to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “Why is the United States always trying to impose its ideology on everyone else?” he asked. “Why is it always trying to use force to implement its agendas?”

But wait! The Times has added this correction: “An earlier version of this article described incorrectly a beverage that Ahmed Abu Khattala was drinking at a hotel in Benghazi, Libya. It was a strawberry frappe, not mango juice, which is what he had ordered.”

Several readers criticized my op-ed for not saying more about what government can do that might reduce abortion rates. For example, Michael Sean Winters:

[V]oters can recognize the vast difference between Ryan’s position and President Obama’s, and those of us in the pro-life community should not be obfuscating those differences. Peppard would have been on sounder political ground by pointing to the potentially dire consequences for the abortion rate should Mr. Ryan’s proposed cuts to Medicaid be enacted, or Obamacare overturned, robbing dozens of clinics that help women facing crisis pregnancies of the $250 million in funding Obamacare gave specifically to help women in that situation…

Indeed, I would have liked to have said more on that point, but I was already making several other points in a short space. In about 800 words:

- I explained the Catholic moral teaching about abortion, the fullness of which many people don’t realize. The moral teaching is unwavering and nonnegotiable. (Emails from Jewish pro-life readers were especially interesting. There was a genre of emails there that can be summarized, “You don’t have an exception for the life of the mother in Catholic ethics? Whoa!” (followed by quotations from Jewish ethics).

- Paul Ryan has changed his position, now that he’s running for national office — an election which he couldn”t possibly win unless he changed it. With current demographics, a firm pro-lifer cannot win a national election. He backed away from his principled position and articulated a pragmatic one, as a way to try to satisfy firm pro-lifers but also potentially include a few from “the broad middle of the American population, who are deeply unsettled by abortion rates but more unsettled by attempts to criminalize it.”

- More importantly, I wanted to make clear that the “policy” articulated is not a policy. It’s not a realistic assessment of what can be done. So another genre of email I’ve received has been, to paraphrase, “I’m pro-life, and I hated your article. But I will say that I had never thought before about the rape exception in actual practice, and I’ll have to think more about that.”

- Now about abortion rates, which Winters and others wanted me to say more about in the article.  During the editing process, I specifically said, “There is no way I will publish this without some discussion of lowering abortion rates,” and I had two points related to that. First, I had built off Mr. Ryan’s answer about the ultrasound. I wanted to cite the argument from Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace, which proposes that the prevalence of ultrasound technology has been one of the two most important factors in stabilizing pro-life opinions in this country. That sentence was left on the cutting room floor. (The other major factor Putnam and Campbell cite is, of course, increased access to contraception.)  Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t seen very many articles exploring the consistency of Romney’s positions with official LDS positions on controversial matters.  Given the scrutiny that the Catholic vice-presidential candidates have received for the conformity or lack of conformity of their positions with church teaching, I find that to be  remarkable.

So thanks to the Google, I located the official Mormon position on abortion on the LDS website.

1. It prohibits elective abortion for personal or social convenience:

2. It goes on to say that:

Paul Ryan’s photo-op cleaning clean pans at an empty soup kitchen in Ohio brought him much criticism, and the “publicity stunt” upset the head of Mahoning County’s St. Vincent de Paul Society, Brian J. Antal, who said he did not want the kitchen politicized and feared the possible backlash.

Now Antal tells the HuffPo that fear is being realized and donors have begun pulling their money out of the Youngstown, Ohio charity in protest over the embarrassment Ryan suffered:

Ryan supporters have now targeted Antal and his soup kitchen, Antal said, including making hundreds of angry phone calls. Some members of Antal’s volunteer staff have had to endure the barrage as well, he said. “The sad part is a lot of [the callers] want to hide behind anonymity,” he said, adding that if someone leaves their name and number he has tried to return their call. In addition to phone calls, people have posted a few choice words on the charity’s Facebook wall, including statements like “I hope you lose your tax [sic] emempt status,” Anyone who is thinking about donations to you should think twice” and “Shame on you Brian Antal!”…

…Antal said doesn’t understand why donors would take out their frustration over the incident on those who can’t afford to pay for their own meals. “I’m a volunteer,’ he said. “I receive zero compensation. Withholding donations is only going to hurt the over 100,000 we serve annually.”

It’s a terrible story, and I’m sure Ryan didn’t want it to go this way, for reasons personal as well as political. (Maybe he should send a check; maybe we all should.)

But the episode has a deeper lesson in that it undermines Ryan’s contention — which he claims is Catholic social teaching — that care of the poor is an individual responsibility that each person of faith must fulfill. It’s not the government’s job, as he says.

But the backlash against the St. Vincent DePaul Society shows why that can’t be the case. People, even people of faith, don’t consistently fulfill that responsibility. They — we — are flawed human beings who nurse grudges and lash out when angry. We can go blithely on our way, to the next task, the next meal, the next campaign stop — and the vulnerable suffer. Private charity is not a safety net. Government support is indispensable. The parable of Paul Ryan and the soup kitchen should demonstrate this if nothing else.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Three-quarters of Latino Catholics support President Barack Obama’s re-election while just half of Latino evangelical Protestants do, according to a new poll from Pew Research Center. Overall, 61 percent of Latinos who attend religious services at least once a week support Obama.

This level of Latino support for a Democratic candidate is not unexpected. But I would not have necessarily expected that Latino Catholics who attend Mass at least once a week would favor legalizing same-sex marriage.  The poll finds a plurality in favor (46 percent to 37 percent). Meanwhile, the survey said that a majority of white Catholics who attend church services weekly oppose legalizing same-sex marriage (39 percent in favor, 53 percent opposed).

Given the increasing proportion of Latinos in the U.S. Catholic Church, this portends a long-term shift in attitudes among churchgoing Catholics.

This is so three days ago…but the debate on Monday night.

Traveling, I caught only the last half hour on Monday. The sparring candidates looked like they might come to blows. I found it depressing…two grown men, etc. (that has now spawned an alpha male trope [not accurate, more like fourth grade boys revving up for a playground fight]).

Returning home yesterday, I watched the whole debate on our DVR. The sparring didn’t loom so large when the previous 60 minutes were so vigorous and adversarial (Obama doing the Biden smile trick with his teeth ended up looking like the Cheshire Cat; while Romney posed as “father knows best”). But really, Romney is truly annoying, the superior air, the know-it-all facial expression. He avoided the Bush comparison question, though his frequent self-reference to being a problem-solver reminded me of Bush the “decider.”  Those are just my fourth grade girl observations. What do you adults have to say?

Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, has published another missive on Mirror of Justice, in which he, holder of a Harvard JD, a Harvard Divinity MTS, and an Oxford DPhil, writes, ”some of our friends at Commonweal seem to have figured out that I mean to express contempt for the claim made by signers of ‘On All of Our Shoulders.’” He continues:

If those responsible for the statement want serious intellectual engagement from those of us who do not share their views, they can put out a serious statement, free of tendentious claims and characterizations and laughable pretensions to non-partisanship. There are people among the signers of “On All of Our Shoulders” who are capable of writing such a statement. Let them do it. Then we’ll have a serious discussion, if they like.

It was late when George, adviser to the campaign of Mitt Romney, posted, so perhaps he confused his friends at Commonweal with his friends at America, where Vincent Miller, one of the authors of “On All of Our Shoulders,” yesterday posted a series of substantive questions for George. Yet, given George’s ground rules, it seems unlikely that Miller will receive an answer. Unless he’s prepared to sign a statement parroting the Romney campaign’s Catholic talking points, as did George in his critique of “On All of Our Shoulders.” Interesting ground rules for discussion.

RESOURCES

Robert P. George, “We’re Only Concerned for the Integrity of the Teachings of the Catholic Church,” Mirror of Justice.

Robert P. George, “Exposed!” Mirror of Justice.

Robert P. George, “The Catholic Left’s Unfair Attack on Paul Ryan,” First Things.

Vincent Miller, “Unfair to Ryan? Questions for Robert George,” In All Things.

Grant Gallicho, “Tendentious Tendencies,” dotCommonweal.

“On All of Our Shoulders,” 150-plus Catholic scholars and ministers.

“Catholics for Romney Coalition,” Romney for President, Inc.

Mitt Romney, “On the Issues for Catholics,” Romney for President, Inc. [.pdf]

In their dispute with the Obama Administration over the HHS contraception mandate, a number of U.S.bishops have suggested that they will have to close hospitals, schools and Catholic universities if the mandate is not modified or withdrawn.

But would the bishops really be required to do this?  While I’m sympathetic to the bishops’ concerns and support their efforts to broaden the exemption for religious employers, I do not think it is true that a failure in this regard would require the closing of Catholic institutions.  For the moment, I am going to set aside the question of whether closing is the most likely outcome or whether the institutions in question would merely be asked to sever their formal ties with the Church. Clearly, neither is a desirable outcome.

The concept in moral theology that is in play here is known as “cooperation.”  When we facilitate the acts of another person in some way, we are said to be cooperating with them.  If those acts are evil, then we may share some moral culpability for those actions.

In general, Catholics are called to “do good and avoid evil.”  If we share the evil intent of the other person (e.g. driving the getaway car to facilitate a bank robbery), it is said to be formal cooperation with evil and morally blameworthy.  However, if the actor is cooperating but does not share the intent of the other person (e.g. driving the getaway car because you have a gun to your head), their cooperation is said to be material.  Material cooperation may be permissible if the act of cooperation is not itself intrinsically evil (driving a car is, in itself, a neutral act) and there are proportionate reasons for the material cooperation (e.g. fear of death).

A related concept is the degree of proximity between the person cooperating and the original actor.  My moral culpability in the actions of another person may be greater if my actions directly facilitate his act.  If my actions assist the original actor only indirectly and I do not share his evil intent, this is said to be “remote material cooperation” and my moral culpability is reduced still further.

We can assume that some employees of Catholic institutions use contraception, which Catholic teaching holds to be an intrinsically evil act.  To what extent is the Church, as their employer, morally complicit in those acts?  Read the rest of this entry »