Articles by Russell Shaw
Assisted suicide a century ago and now
Oct 16, 2015 / 00:00 amAs Robert Hugh Benson’s apocalyptic novel Lord of the World moves toward its shocking conclusion, a naïve young woman who has placed simple-minded faith in the utter goodness of the Antichrist figure at the center of the story awakens to the fact that her hero has artfully constructed a regime of violence, oppression and thought control. Profoundly disillusioned, she turns to one of the new state-run euthanasia ‘homes’ for help in ending her life. As she ponders what has happened and what lies ahead, she thinks of the humanist belief system that has brought here: “There seemed no way out of it. The Humanity-Religion was the only one. Man was God, or at least His highest manifestation; and He was a God with which she did not wish to have anything more to do.” It’s easy to see why Benson’s century-old tale is one of Pope Francis’s favorite books. Driven by a compelling narrative, the story depicts the frightening reality of a dystopian society without religion that in many respects resembles Western secular society now. I thought of Lord of the World while absorbing the news from California that Gov. Jerry Brown—who the media obsessively kept reminding us is a “lifelong Catholic”—had signed into law a bill making his state the fifth in the U.S. where assisted suicide is legal. The others are Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana. Proponents of assisted suicide were quoted as saying they would turn next to New Jersey and Massachusetts. Curiously enough, though, around the same time California was joining the ranks of states where doctors can help their patients do away with themselves without falling afoul of the law, Britain’s House of Commons was overwhelmingly rejecting an assisted suicide bill. The vote against was 330 to 118. Our British cousins have hardly been slouches when it comes to endorsing whatever the secular establishment is currently pushing as the application du jour of utilitarian morality. Is it possible, then, that the lawmakers discerned some flaws in assisted suicide that have escaped the attention of Governor Brown and others like him? Although even advocates of the right to die generally concede the need for safeguards against abuses, the dynamic of the underlying ideology encourages step by step movement in a radical direction. Perhaps the MPs who voted no were impressed by a medical journal report containing—along with other disturbing facts—the information that in one recent year a right-to-die clinic that had been set up in the Netherlands to serve people whose regular doctors wouldn’t give them lethal injections approved the killing of eleven whose only complaint was that they were “tired of living.” Reviewing this and similar cases, the authors of the article in JAMA Internal Medicine concluded that European trends in euthanasia and assisted suicide were “very worrisome” and “should give us pause.” Really? That’s a bit like saying that you wonder if the neighbors have a problem while you watch the smoke and flames pouring out of the windows of their house. Is America bent on going the same way? Are the rise of moral libertarianism and the decline of religious faith having the predictable result of making Americans increasingly vulnerable to an ideology of self-destruction promoted under the banner of liberation? Should we expect sooner or later to see the Supreme Court deliver a 5-4 decision announcing that the court has discovered a constitutional right to assisted suicide—complete with paper thin safeguards of course? This isn’t scare talk. I only wish it were.
America has accommodated conscientious objection before. Why not now?
Sep 18, 2015 / 00:00 amLet’s begin by recognizing that the case of the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples because same-sex marriage conflicts with her religious faith raises questions that both sides in this argument need to take seriously. Up to a point, this particular dispute has been settled—more or less. Kim Davis was jailed for contempt of court while others in her office issued the licenses, then was released. Whether that’s the end of it remains to be seen, but whether it is or isn’t, issues involved in the Kentucky dispute are likely to keep coming up. They deserve consideration before the fog of conventional wisdom sets in. People who share Davis’ faith-based opposition to same-sex marriage need to recognize that the right claimed here—for public officials to refuse to enforce laws they disagree with in conscience—is not a principle to be invoked casually or unconditionally. How far do you go? Where do you draw the line? Should the principle apply not only to county clerks but to military commanders and even commanders in chief? But supporters of same-sex marriage need to recognize that casually overriding an appeal to conscience is a response worthy of a totalitarian state. Many of them made it a practice to appeal to conscience back when they were working to win approval of what they provocatively called “marriage equality.” If their appeal to conscience was legitimate then, why is somebody else’s appeal to conscience suddenly illegitimate now? And somewhere in the no man’s land between these two sides lies another question. It may be overly subtle for some but for others it’s highly relevant: How truly compromising to conscience is it for a county clerk simply to certify that same-sex couples have met the legal requirements to marry in her state? That’s the sort of question professional moralists like to chew on. Particularly in a pluralistic democracy like ours, matters like these deserve to be debated with mutual respect. Merely saying, as some do now, “The Supreme Court has spoken, so shut up and fall in line” is inappropriate, to say the least. And some assertions made during the Kentucky controversy should not be allowed to stand unchallenged. In that category I place a recent editorial in The Washington Post. This was the heart of it: “Ms. Davis cites ‘God’s authority’ in rejecting marriage applications. But within the confines of the county clerk’s office, there is only one relevant authority: the civil laws of the commonwealth of Kentucky and of the United States of America.” Granted, that could be read in several different ways, but at the very least it has an ominous Big Brother ring. No higher authority than the civil law as it happens to stand at some particular moment? Sorry, but I’m not buying that. The editorial writer then gave an example that destroyed his case: “Soldiers must fight wars they may disapprove of.” Reading that, I thought: Has whoever wrote this never heard of conscientious objection? America has recognized it as grounds for refusing military service for many years. During the Vietnam era, the American bishops even expressed support for selective conscientious objection—refusal on conscience grounds to serve in a particular war. America has found ways to accommodate conscientious objection before. It needs to do that now in the case of people who object to same-sex marriage. It’s unreasonable and unjust to coerce them to cooperate with gay marriage and punish them when they say their consciences don’t allow that.
The Pope and popularity
Sep 3, 2015 / 00:00 amJournalists are understandably fond of conflict—after all, it gives them something to talk about. Media coverage and commentary relating to a drop in Pope Francis’ popularity rating in a recent Gallup poll was an illustration of that. Gallup found the Pope with a favorable rating of 59% now, compared with 76% in early 2014. The new unfavorable number was 16%, against 9% last year, while “no opinion” rose from 16% to 25%. Among Catholics, 71% view Francis favorably now as against 89% in 2014. Religion News Service voiced a common reading of those numbers among journalists in declaring the Pope’s “once Teflon-grade popularity” had been taking a beating. What the media didn’t say—but what the numbers show—is that Francis remains enormously popular in the U.S. Yes, the Pope has irked various groups. Among these climate change skeptics, ideological defenders of free market capitalism, gay rights advocates who think he hasn’t done enough for them, social conservatives who think he’s done too much for gay rights, unrelenting anti-Castro Cuban-Americans, and probably a few others. In a way, the negative reactions aren’t surprising. Francis is a notably free-swinging pontiff. On the eve of his September 22-27 U.S. visit, though, the obvious question is: what difference does this make to the success of his trip? The answer: probably not much. The crowds will still be huge and enthusiastic. There will be moving public gestures like a visit to a Philadelphia prison and a Catholic Charities center in Washington, D.C. There will be impressive liturgies and dramatic pomp and circumstance events as the Pope meets with President Obama at the White House, addresses Congress, and speaks to the world via the United Nations. And at the center of it all will be the same charismatic white-clad figure who has shown himself to be one of the most crowd-pleasing world leaders in a very long time. What will the Pope say during his visit? Certain themes are obvious: protecting the environment and taking urgent action on climate change, world peace, helping the poor and marginalized including immigrants, the multiple evils of consumerism and a culture that values technology over concern for the person, the need to protect and cherish marriage and family life. Probably, too, Francis will speak about the growing persecution of Christians in the Middle East, parts of Africa and Asia, and other places. That is it should be. But persecution, more subtle but no less real, also is on the rise in the United States. Here’s hoping the Pope speaks out strongly against that as well. This will be Francis’ first time in the United States. Like many people from other nations, he may well share the historic image of America as a bastion of religious freedom and tolerance. For so it has been, and so for the most part it remains even today. Yet alongside religious freedom and respect for others’ conscience-based values and beliefs, a new spirit of intolerance is currently abroad in the U.S. Driven by secular ideology, it is directed against religious institutions and individuals with the intention of forcing them to fall in line with public policies and practices that conflict with the deeply-held values of their faith traditions. Strong papal words on this subject might not sit well with yet another group—the secularist true believers who are so prominent in the American media. But even if that should end up costing Francis a couple more points in the next Gallup popularity poll, it would be well worth it.
Why we need to pray for personal vocations, too
Aug 23, 2015 / 00:00 amIn the prayer of the faithful said at Mass in my parish day after day we regularly ask God for “an increase of vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life.” Sometimes “lay ministry” gets added to the list. When we pray for these things, I’m happy to join in the response—“Lord, hear our prayer”—because I share the hope that they increase. At the same, though, I feel a twinge of regret. Not for what the prayer says, mind you, but for what it leaves out. If you think that’s odd, consider a fundamental fact: everybody has a vocation. This is his or her particular role in God’s plan, that life of “good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:11). Thus it seems to me that before praying for vocations to the priesthood, consecrated life, and lay ministry, it would make sense to pray that everyone discern his or her particular calling from God, accept it, and start living it out. But wouldn’t that mean shortchanging vocations to the priesthood, consecrated life, and lay ministry? Not really. For if more people started thinking and praying about their own vocations, more than now presumably would discover that their vocations include a calling to one of those three. In other words, a win-win situation. As matters stand, the practice now prevailing in my parish (and, I suspect, many others) reflects the old-fashioned way of thinking about vocation that more or less equates it with what is commonly called a state in life. It’s customary to speak of four of these: the clerical state (deacons, priests, bishops); consecrated life (for the most part, religious women and men); matrimony; and the single lay state in the world. (Consistency would seem to dictate praying not just for the first two but for vocations to matrimony and the single lay state as well—but that’s another matter.) The trouble with thinking about vocation this way is that it ignores the reality of personal vocation. And although word about personal vocation is starting to get around, it’s mighty slow and by no means everyone has gotten the message. Pope St. John Paul II was a powerful exponent of personal vocation, and the idea is central to much of his writing. His landmark document on the role of the laity, Christifideles Laici, declares the discernment and acceptance of one’s personal vocation the “fundamental objective” of the formation of lay people. And it adds this: “From eternity God has thought of us and has loved us as individuals. Every one of us he called by name….However, only in the unfolding of the history of our lives and its events is the eternal plan of God revealed to each of us…day by day” (Christifideles Laici, 58). St. John Paul II had precursors in understanding personal vocation, including Cardinal Newman and St. Francis de Sales. Today, the number of people for whom it’s a basic element of their spirituality is growing. If you’re interested in seeing it worked out in detail, I modestly recommend a book I wrote several years ago with the distinguished theologian and ethicist Germain Grisez—Personal Vocation: God Calls Everyone by Name (Our Sunday Visitor). So by all means let’s keep praying for more vocations to priesthood, consecrated life, and lay ministry. But, please, could we also pray that more people discern, accept, and start living out their personal vocations? Simple as it sounds, that would be a big step toward a general upturn in vocations.
Complementarity in marriage
Jul 13, 2015 / 00:00 amDoes Henry Higgins hold the key to settling the same-sex marriage debate? Not quite. But in the wake of the Supreme Court decision declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it’s well worth considering what Higgins has to tell us. In “My Fair Lady” Professor Higgins sings a song called “Why Can’t a Woman Be Like a Man?”. It’s an amusing account of his misogyny. But by the end of the story, the professor has learned a great lesson: not only can’t women be like men—or men like women either—it’s a very good thing for both that they can’t. This lesson has a name: complementarity. It needs to be re-learned now in the midst of widespread confusion about marriage. Complementarity is what Jesus is talking about in his well known words about marriage in the 19th chapter of Matthew’s gospel. Some Pharisees ask him if a man can divorce his wife. Jesus says no. And then he says this: “Have you not read that the Creator, from the beginning, made them male and female, and said, ‘For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? Therefore now they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19L4-6). “They are no longer two but one flesh”—that’s complementarity. It includes all dimensions of the man-woman relationship in marriage—physical, psychological, and spiritual. Pope Francis has referred to this special relationship many times. A few weeks ago, speaking to Puerto Rican bishops making their ad limina visits to Rome, he called it “the crown of the divine creation” while warning that today it is “being questioned by gender ideology.” Note that reference to gender ideology—also called gender theory. This way of thinking now stands as the principal intellectual source of opposition to the traditional understanding of marriage and of support for same-sex marriage. The central idea driving various versions of gender theory concerns the part played by culture in shaping individuals’ understanding if their sexual identity and gender roles. Obviously this isn’t all wrong—culture does play an important part in forming our thinking about these things. But gender theory goes wrong in suggesting that gender and gender roles are little more than social constructs that can be shaped and re-shaped according to individual preference and better ideas. Hence much of the current frenzy over the “transgender” phenomenon. Hence the willingness of five Supreme Court justices to scrap millennia of human wisdom and say that men can marry men and women can marry women. Yet man-woman complementarity is and will remain a fact lying at the heart of marriages that deserve the name. It is expressed most powerfully in the begetting of a child, in whom, it might be said, something of both father and mother becomes incarnate in the person of a unique new human being. As Justice Alito remarked in his dissent in the same-sex marriage case, marriage has always been and will remain “inextricably linked to the one thing that only an opposite-sex couple can do: procreate.” Henry Higgins doesn’t say all that of course. But by the end of “My Fair Lady” he is definitely on the right track. Here’s hoping a deeply confused society gets back on track on the subject of marriage before too much more harm is done. But it can only do that by following the sign reading “This Way to Complementarity.”
Is spiritual direction just for nuns and clergy?
Jun 27, 2015 / 00:00 amIs spiritual direction intended only for a small elite group composed of clergy and nuns and a handful of laity with special vocations? Not really. Direction is for serious Christians generally, whether cleric, religious, or lay. But since that is seldom said these days, it needs explaining. Here goes. Spiritual direction can be described many ways, but the best way is to emphasize its role in helping people see, accept, and live out God’s will in their lives. Speaking specifically of the laity, Pope St. John Paul II says the “fundamental objective” of their formation is “ever-clearer discovery of one’s vocation and the ever-greater willingness to live it so as to fulfill one’s mission.” Spiritual direction is a big help in that. As the quote above (from St. John Paul’s landmark document on the laity, Christifideles Laici) makes clear, everybody has a personal vocation. It’s his or her unique role in accomplishing God’s redemptive plan through the life of “good works” which, as the letter to the Ephesians says, “God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph 2.10). Spiritual direction doesn’t give you a personal vocation. The vocation is already there. But direction assists people in discerning their vocations and carrying them out. Which, of course, is a lifetime job. People tend to imagine that a vocation comes whole and entire in a sudden lightning flash, and that’s the end of it. But the unfolding of a vocation is a lifelong process, and discerning it a daily task. As Cardinal Newman says, God’s call is “a thing which takes place now,” and the “accidents and events of life” are prominent among the ways in which “the calls I speak of come to us.” One obvious conclusion is that there’s nothing esoteric or mystical about spiritual direction. It isn’t reading tea leaves or gazing into a crystal ball. Think of it as a conversation between friends. But, you may ask, a conversation about what? There are lots of possibilities, but topics that typically arise include establishing and maintaining a plan of life—a program of spiritual practices helpful in the daily struggle, rooting out stubborn faults, spiritual reading, improving relationships and being of service to others. And that’s for starters. Someone who’d read something I wrote on this subject remarked that if you took seriously what was said, it would mean even plans for the family vacation were potential material for spiritual direction. My critic evidently considered the very idea absurd. I don’t. Although planning a family vacation usually doesn’t call for much soul-searching, there may be times when chatting with a spiritual director really will be helpful in making up your mind about what will be best for the others. Note, though, that spiritual direction isn’t about telling people what to do. It’s about helping them to consider their options in the clear light of personal vocation. Then it’s up to them to make their own free choice. Direction isn’t a form of confession either. If the director is a priest, sacramental confession may be involved. But spiritual direction and sacramental confession are two different things. Finding a director isn’t necessarily easy. Prudence and sensitivity, availability and personal compatibility—these and much else are necessary. But it’s worth the effort. For as St. John Paul says, “personal vocation and mission define the dignity and the responsibility of each member of the lay faithful”—and spiritual direction can go a long way in helping us see what “personal vocation and mission” look like for us.
What the Pew Research Center is telling us about religion in America
Jun 13, 2015 / 00:00 amThe first and arguably most important thing to say about the Pew Research Center’s new overview of American religion is that it offers no grounds for either complacency or panic. What it does instead is invite—perhaps demand—that it be taken very seriously by responsible church people. In its first “religious landscape” study in seven years, the Pew Center found membership dropping steeply in most Christian bodies except for Evangelicals, among whom the loss was much smaller. In seven years the percentage of American adults describing themselves as Christians fell by nearly eight points, from 78.4% to 70.6%, with the falloff especially high among young people. Meanwhile the religiously unaffiliated rose from 16.1% to 22.8%. The decline was notably steep among adult Catholics, whose numbers, according to Pew, dropped from 54.3 million in 2007 to a shade under 51 million last year. In percentage terms, Catholics were 23.9% of the adult population in 2007 and are about 20.8% now. Furthermore, far fewer people are entering the Church than leave it (12.9% of American adults are ex-Catholics, 2% of adult Catholics are converts). Mark Gray of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate disputes Pew’s Catholic numbers, contending that the consensus of studies shows the Church holding its own. But Gray concedes it’s likely the decade after this one really will bring the start of a decline due to sharp drops in Catholic infant baptisms that already have occurred. In any case, arguing about whether the number of Americans identifying themselves as Catholics is going up, down, or sideways is rather beside the point, considering the well-documented drop in Mass attendance and other elements of religious practice among self-identified Catholics. At the same time, it’s important to bear in mind that in an adult population of 245 million Americans, slightly over seven out of ten are still affiliated with Christian churches, including the Catholic Church. The U.S., in Pew’s words, “remains home to more Christians than any other country in the world.” In a way, none of this is new. Religious affiliation and churchgoing have gone up and down in America for a long time. Far from being the norm, the postwar 1950s were an exceptional boom time for American religion. There are many explanations for that phenomenon, but the most obvious is rooted in cold war realities. Locked in conflict with the officially atheistic Soviet Union, Americans spontaneously turned to religious faith and practice. Needless to say, the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s dealt a sharp check to that. As for what’s happened lately, its self-evident cause can be summed up in one word: secularization. But that’s the kind of explanation that, in explaining everything, sheds light on nothing. Saying secularism causes the decline in religious affiliation is like saying the reason for the downpour outdoors is that it’s raining. So it is—but so what? For Catholics, the possibilities for handling this situation and the challenge it poses boil down to two. Accommodation is one. But although some degree of judicious change and adaptation is always necessary for the Church, accommodation would become a form of suicide for the Catholicism if it involved jettisoning essentials of faith. Mainline Protestantism did that in the 20th century and became a mere shadow of itself. Forthright proclamation of the truth of the gospel is the other answer. By all means—proclaim it attractively, use new media, employ language people understand. But proclaim the truth of the gospel. In the end, it’s the necessary choice.
The Persecution Has Begun
Jun 8, 2015 / 00:00 amThe persecution of the Catholic Church and other morally conservative religious bodies has begun in the United States. As predicted, it isn’t—thank God—bloody persecution like the persecution of Christians in many countries. But it’s real persecution and likely to get worse.This new persecution currently has two prongs.One consists of pressuring individual religious believers to cooperate with public policies inimical to faith. The other prong is pressure targeted at religious groups and institutions to adapt their programs to the promotion of values hostile to the sponsors’ moral convictions.When and if the Supreme Court announces its discovery of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, it will be taking a giant step in both directions and paving the way for more. As we saw in Indiana earlier this year, efforts to protect the right of conscientious objection to the radical redefinition of marriage will come under even fiercer assault.Perhaps Indiana’s religious freedom law did need tweaking, but the opponents would have preferred no law at all. For them, simply legalizing gay marriage isn’t enough. Dissent must be stamped out. Consider the case of the Oregon couple, Christian owners of a bakery (now closed), who recently were held liable for $135,000 in damages for declining to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. They did nothing to prevent the lesbians from marrying—their offense was not wanting to lend a hand to the celebration.As for the second prong of persecution—pressure to adapt religious programs and institutions to the promotion of hostile values, coupled with vitriolic denunciations of whoever says no to doing that—it has been visibly in operation lately in San Francisco, where Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone came under attack for saying that teachers in Catholic schools shouldn’t teach things contrary to Catholic morality.This is astonishing. Why on earth should the Catholic Church, in its own schools, be obliged to provide a platform for teaching that contradicts Catholic moral doctrine? Yet this is what Archbishop Cordileone’s critics, including San Francisco media, would require of the Church.Sad to say, the hue and cry was taken up by some Catholics, who went so far as to publish a paid newspaper advertisement calling for Archbishop Cordileone’s removal from office. It is said that Lenin spoke of Western academics and journalists who heaped praise on the Bolshevik Revolution as “useful idiots.” The Catholic Church has its share of those.In a talk several weeks ago to seminarians of his archdiocese, Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia pointed to the driving force that lies behind the new persecution—a radical collapse of moral consensus, reflected in a disastrous breakdown of public moral discourse. “The biggest problem we face as a culture,” Archbishop Chaput said, “isn’t gay marriage or global warming. It’s not abortion funding or the federal debt….The deeper problem, the one that’s crippling us, is that we use words like justice, rights, freedom and dignity without any commonly shared meaning….Our most important debates boil out to who can deploy the best words in the best way to get power.”Speaking in April to a pro-abortion group, Hillary Clinton said religious views opposed to abortion “have to be changed.” In fairness, it must be said that Mrs. Clinton wasn’t urging persecution but persuasion. But who doubts that accompanying the persuasion would be laws, regulations, and court orders? That is precisely the form soft that persecution by the nanny state takes these days.Hang on to your hats. The worst of it has yet to come.
The Pope’s visit and same-sex marriage
May 1, 2015 / 00:00 amWhen Pope Francis comes to the United States in late September, chances are good that he will arrive in the middle of a bitter, highly politicized national debate on same-sex marriage and religious liberty. That suggests several large questions for the papal visit. Should the Pope say anything about these high-voltage issues? Given the circumstances, how could he responsibly fail to do that? But if he does say something, what should it be?Note that this trip will take place just three months after a Supreme Court decision expected to expand the reach of same-sex marriage in the U.S. Although it would be rash to predict exactly what the court will say in late June, it’s likely to do what so far it has stopped short of doing—extend the mantle of constitutional protection to gay marriage everywhere in the country.If so, conflict will intensify over whether individuals and groups with conscientious objections to cooperating with same-sex marriage will also receive legal protection. The blowback lately over a religious freedom measure in Indiana spotlighted the ugly fact that many Americans—by no means only self-identified civil libertarians and gay rights activists either—see no contradiction in advancing the new regime of gay marriage while trampling on the religious rights of objectors.This, then, is the de facto situation Pope Francis will confront upon arriving in America on a trip certain to generate a vast amount of media coverage and commentary. It’s hardly likely this outspoken pontiff can avoid saying something about what’s happening, even supposing he wanted to do that.He will have plenty of opportunities. The occasion of his visit is a church-sponsored international family meeting in Philadelphia where he will preside September 26 and 27. While there, he will celebrate a public Mass that’s expected to draw a huge crowd. After his arrival in Washington four days earlier and before heading to Philadelphia, he will have stopped by the White House to visit President Obama, addressed a joint session of Congress—the first time a pope has done that—and spoken to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. (En route to the U.S., he will make a brief stop in Cuba, where he will encourage further Cuban-U.S. reconciliation.)Francis has spoken out often in opposition to same-sex marriage and in support of religious liberty. There’s no doubt about that. But his U.S. trip comes just days before he plunges into a world Synod of Bishops assembly back in Rome at which one hotly debated topic is likely to be—as it also was at the Synod of Bishops that took place last fall—whether and how the Church should make new friendly gestures to homosexuals. Not only that—on December 8, the Pope will formally launch a year-long Jubilee of Mercy. This is a church-wide observance decreed by Francis with the aim of spotlighting and promoting a Christian quality close to his heart and central to his vision for the Church. The LGBT community is clearly among the groups that he has in mind in this regard.The controversy likely to be raging in the U.S. in September makes it desirable that Francis set out a strong case for religious liberty and uphold man-woman marriage in his public remarks. Any hint of backing down would be a serious blow to the cause. But his own commitments, combined with the overheated political scene he will find here, create a fine line for him to walk. Say a prayer he pulls it off.
The Devil is Real
Apr 2, 2015 / 00:00 amIs the devil real? Here is Msgr. Ronald Knox on that: “It is stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil, when he is the only explanation of it.”Monsignor Knox, eminent British convert, author, retreat master and translator of the Bible, may have been indulging in irony. But irony doesn’t change the fact that the devil and his demonic associates exist. I came across the Knox quote in Manual for Spiritual Warfare, newly published by Tan Books and edited by Paul Thigpen. “Like it or not,” Thigpen begins his thoughtful introduction, “you are at war. No matter who you are—whether or not you know it—you have a mortal enemy who wants to destroy you, not just in this life, but in the next.” That enemy is of course the devil.As chance would have it, a copy of the manual reached me shortly before last Christmas, when the news was all about the murder by fanatics of 150 children and teachers in a school in Pakistan. As this is being written, the world is stunned by the action of a German pilot who deliberately flew his airliner into an Alpine mountainside, killing 149 others along with himself.Human agency obviously was operative in these events, as in other recent horrors, but it’s easy to glimpse a devilish hand in them too—and also in the multitude of less ostentatious but hardly less destructive acts of cruelty, dishonesty and lust that darken everyday life.The standard response to this kind of thinking is to laugh it off. The devil has become a joke. Nothing may have done more to kill belief in Satan than all those cartoons in which demons trade one-liners amid unthreatening flames with balding gents fresh off the links of a country club.It figures. Getting people not to believe in him is one of the devil’s favorite tricks. The cartoons help. But there’s too much evidence of his existence for disbelief to be a viable option. The testimony is abundant in Scripture, the magisterium, writings by and about the saints, and contemporary accounts of demonic manifestations and exorcisms. “It is a mark of the Evil Spirit to take on the appearance of an angel of light,” St. Ignatius Loyola reported from experience. St. John Vianney was tormented by a demon for 35 years and gave him a nickname—grappin, the wrestler. St. Teresa of Avila and Padre Pio, among many others, knew the devil well.Years back a comedian got laughs by saying, “The devil made me do it.” The devil can’t make us sin, though—that takes an act of human will. But the devil is ceaselessly at work offering inducements—temptations —to our propensity to choose evil. “The devil exists and we must fight against him,” Pope Francis says. Manual for Spiritual Warfare is a handbook for the fight. It contains magisterial and scriptural texts, testimony from saints, prayers, devotions and hymns. Bound in sober black like traditional manuals of prayer, it’s meant to be used.There are two extremes to be avoided this matter—fearful obsession with the devil and ignoring the fact that we live on a battlefield, with Satan and his forces drawn up against us. The letter to the Ephesians puts it best: “We are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness” (Eph 6.12). The devil is real.
Hope in secularized times
Mar 9, 2015 / 00:00 amA man I know was walking his dog when a neighbor woman approached him and inquired about his wife. Not having seen her out and about in quite some time, the lady wondered: Was she well?“Not really,” the man said, going on to explain what that meant.“I’m sorry,” the woman said when he finished. “Is there anything I can do to help?”“Not really,” the man said again. “Except—say a prayer.”The woman hesitated a split second, and he could see she was calculating. Then she said: “I’ll send a card. Would she like that?”“I’m sure she would,” he answered. And he thought to himself: All things considered, I guess that sending a card will earn her as much merit in God’s eyes as actually saying a prayer would do.As the woman promised, the man tells me, the card—a stylized Christmas tree—arrived a few days later.In telling this story, I don’t mean to equate greeting cards with prayer. But this little encounter was one of those signs of the times that bears reflection. As faith declines in our increasingly secularized society, religious believers need to make adjustments in how they think about the non-believers all around them—not to place non-belief on the same level with belief, but to factor in God’s immense generosity and try to share in it just a little. This is in line with the thesis lately advanced by Joseph Bottum in an interesting essay in The Weekly Standard. With the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches in America, Bottum argues, something he calls—borrowing from author Flannery O’Connor—the Church of Christ Without Christ has taken their place. One consequence, in his view, is that America is “awash in unconsciously held Christian ideas broken from the theology that gave them meaning” and now finding expression in appropriately secularized ways. Sending sick, bereaved, or otherwise troubled people sympathy cards instead of praying for them is, I believe, one fairly common instance of that. The substance—compassion for someone else in pain—remains, but it’s externalized in a very different form. If that is so, it’s good news. It means that human decency stubbornly persists alongside the all too evident human tendency to cruelty. And this small flame of decency burning in secularized hearts itself has merit in the eyes of God.But let’s not leave it at that. Perhaps the stubborn residue of decency could serve as the starting point for making some progress in the great project of new evangelization for which popes and other Church leaders have been calling for years. Maybe that’s what the controversial interim ratio or report on discussions at last October’s world Synod of Bishops was trying to say—but said in a muddled way—in speaking of “gradualism” as an element in the pastoral approach to people in so-called irregular unions. These include divorced Catholics without annulments who’ve entered into second marriages, same-sex couples, and the like. Like the woman who can’t manage a prayer for a sick neighbor but can send a sympathy card, if people in such situations can find it in their hearts to take some first small step toward conversion, it’s possible other steps will follow. Supposing Bottum is right, there’s no way now at hand to reverse the secularist tide sweeping America. But instead of going back, there could be a way of moving ahead. Don’t be too quick to knock sympathy cards. The human decency they express may point to something better.
The Catholic Church and same-sex marriage
Feb 20, 2015 / 00:00 amThe likelihood that the Supreme Court next June will announce its discovery of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage raises an obvious question for the Catholic Church: What do we do now?Two steps come to mind. First, press for strong legal protections for individuals and institutions conscientiously unable to cooperate with a legal regime that requires sweeping concessions to the LGBT agenda. Second, give serious thought to the possibility that the Church should quit serving as the government’s agent in legitimating marriages.That firm decisions at the top levels of the Church are urgently needed couldn’t be more obvious. Consider a Washington Post editorial trashing Alabama authorities for resisting a Supreme Court order on behalf of gay marriage in that state. The court told Alabama to get cracking even though the court itself remains months away from a constitutional ruling.“The [gay rights] movement is on the verge of a historic victory,” the February 11 editorial declared. “But that doesn’t mean activists and allies have succeeded in transforming the culture that for so long denied gay men and lesbians equal treatment.”Transforming culture? Of course. The Post editorial noted some steps to take. “Marriage equality is just one of many goals. State legislatures and federal lawmakers need to be convinced to enhance civil rights protections for gay men and lesbians—prohibiting employment discrimination, for example, or discrimination in business transactions. In places like Alabama, that will take a lot more effort.”One form it’s already taken can be seen not in conservative Alabama but libertarian Oregon. There the Christian owners of a bakery were found guilty of violating anti-discrimination law by declining—in 2013, before the state even recognized same-sex marriage—to supply a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. Bakery owners Aaron and Melissa Klein cited religious convictions as their reason.According to the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, the Kleins face fines as high as $150,000. The actual amount will be decided in March. A hundred and fifty thousand for a wedding cake? Is this the Post’s “a lot more effort”? Iron-clad legal protection against state coercion to fall in line with gay marriage is desperately needed for individuals like the Kleins and institutions like the Catholic Church. It won’t be easy. Catholic News Agency (CNA) reports that the Ford and Arcus Foundations have given several million dollars to the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups to devise ways of blocking the religious freedom argument for not cooperating with same-sex marriage. If religious groups want First Amendment protections, they’ll have to fight.Urgently needed, too, is consideration of whether the Church should stop registering marriages for the state. Increasingly, it becomes hard to see how the Church can continue as government’s collaborator in this matter once the Supreme Court makes it final that what the government means by marriage is opposed to what the Church means.Confusion about the meaning of marriage is already widespread. It’s the underlying issue in the crisis of marriage that last fall’s Synod of Bishops on marriage should have confronted and didn’t. But the synod’s omission is no reason for the Church to persist in a relationship with government that deepens the confusion.A two-step procedure—come by the courthouse for a civil ceremony that satisfies the state, then come to church for a sacramental marriage—may sound cumbersome, but it’s an opportunity for catechesis on what marriage means. As secular America heads down the same-sex path, the Church now must go another, better way.
The problem of unserious politics
Feb 6, 2015 / 00:00 amI try to take American politics seriously, I really do. Serious issues are at stake, after all. But sometimes, entirely too often in fact, the realities of American political discourse make taking it seriously awfully hard. Considering the seriousness of what’s at stake, this may be what hearing Beethoven’s Ninth performed on the harmonica would be like.A while back Jeb Bush, speaking to a group in San Francisco, promised that if he runs for president next year, he will offer the country “adult conversations” regarding the problems it faces. Whether he does that or not is, for the moment, beside the point. The point now is that Bush got headlines for saying something that should be taken for granted of candidates for high office. But apparently it’s news simply to say you’ll speak to the American people as if they were grownups.Recently I was asked to give a talk on sobriety. The details needn’t detain us here, although this wasn’t a temperance lecture or even particularly about the use of alcohol (although that was part of it). It was about sobriety in the sense of moderation, self-control, and—especially—seriousness. As one example of an area where there’s a sobriety deficit, I cited politics. Here, roughly, is what I said:“Very often, I’m afraid, you find this lack of sobriety and seriousness in political campaigns. It’s not just that they’ve become ridiculously expensive, although that’s part of the problem, but that they also are in some fundamental way frivolous and unserious. “For instance, and without drawing partisan political conclusions, I have the impression that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are both essentially serious men. That being so, my heart went out to them both during the presidential campaign of 2012 in view of all the stupid, fatuous things they were required, or felt required, to say and do. I could say the same of many other candidates for office these days.“Of course, maybe it’s always been that way. Maybe the level of political discourse in America has always been embarrassingly low. Still, I have the impression that lately it’s gotten worse.“It didn’t happen all at once, but the turning point in this process may have been the time Bill Clinton was asked—and answered—a question about his underwear. Somehow I can’t imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln discussing his underwear in public. There are several problems with this, and the conspicuous lack of sobriety isn’t the least of them.”I’m not suggesting that politicians must be sober-sided and dull, but I am suggesting that when they talk about serious matters, they do it in a serious way. If they can combine seriousness with wit, all the better. But what we generally get instead are image-mongering, sound bites, and slogans—all of them carefully pretested in the same way that manufacturers of everything from breakfast cereal to automobiles pretest the advertising for new products and new models. What I’d like especially to see is—to borrow Jeb Bush’s phrase—adult conversations regarding the moral dimension of public issues. Granted, the risk in debating morality is a lapse into moralism that ignores the real moral complexity of many policy issues. But the risk of not debating right and wrong is the encouragement thus given to a debased pragmatism that amounts to saying, “Do what you need to do in order to get the results you want.” Which is, I fear, about where we are now, and it’s not a good place to be.
Ideals and Norms
Jan 23, 2015 / 00:00 amIs the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage, including indissolubility, an ideal or a norm? Although the question may sound abstract, even esoteric, it has urgent, immediate practical implications. To say one admires the Church’s teaching as an ideal is, intentionally or not, to undermine that teaching in the act of admiring it.Here is the key to understanding a struggle that surfaced at last October’s Synod of Bishops on marriage and is likely to continue at the synod next fall. Most obviously, it’s an argument about the correct approach to take to people in “irregular unions”—cohabiting couples, same-sex couples, and divorced and remarried Catholics whose first marriages haven’t been annulled. In particular: should some of those latter be given communion or should they not?This is where the question of norms and ideals becomes crucial. To see why, some definitions are necessary.Start with the Church’s teaching on marriage. A marriage is a union of a man and a woman whose principal characteristics include permanence (indissolubility), faithfulness, and openness to children.As for ideals, the first meaning my dictionary gives for the word as a noun is “a conception of something in its absolute perfection.”And norms? Here’s the dictionary again: “a standard, model, or pattern considered to be as typical for a specific group.”So what’s wrong with calling marriage as the Church understands it an ideal? Look at the definition again. An ideal is the “absolute perfection” of something. And how often do people reach absolute perfection, in marriage or anything else? Human beings always fall short of ideals. So, when it’s a question of marriage, why not just welcome back people who’ve married without annulments after their first marriages failed, and offer communion to those who want it?The notion that the Church’s teaching on marriage is an ideal is apparently widespread. Lately, without trying hard, I found this usage in articles by two cardinals who were prominent at last fall’s synod. They’re scarcely the only ones who talk this way. Describing moral doctrine as an ideal (or using some verbal equivalent: e.g., “vision”) isn’t limited to marriage. The teaching on contraception often receives the same treatment. Some teachers and pastoral personnel who say they accept the doctrine nevertheless find this a convenient way of excusing Catholics who practice birth control. “I don’t have a problem with the teaching,” they say. “I think it’s a beautiful ideal.” By contrast, calling a moral teaching a norm means that there is a real obligation to observe it. There will be failures, perhaps repeated ones, but God is merciful and so is the Church. Forgiveness is always available to those who repent and try to live by the norm.People who wish to lighten the burden of those whose marriages have collapsed no doubt mean well. Rethinking the criteria for annulments and speeding the process might help. But treating the indissolubility of marriage as a non-binding ideal is the wrong way to go.Finally, though, is this teaching really a norm? When Jesus told his disciples marriage was indissoluble—no divorce—they replied that if that’s so, then getting married was “not expedient.” The nineteenth chapter of Matthew’s gospel records this exchange. There is no indication Jesus said, “Not to worry—it’s only an ideal.” What he did say was, “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” Was that just an ideal?Words matter. Misusing them, even unintentionally, can do much harm. Here’s hoping the Synod of Bishops doesn’t make that mistake.
Great Society
Jan 8, 2015 / 00:00 amPresident Lyndon Baines Johnson had spoken the words “Great Society” before, but on January 4, 1965 he brought the pieces together as a legislative package for Congress. His State of the Union message stirred a remarkable flurry of congressional activity that in short order produced major new programs in civil rights, health care, and anti-poverty.In the half-century since then, the Great Society and its offspring have made profound changes in American society. A huge increase in government-sponsored family planning at home and abroad is one of these. Fifty years later, it’s worth considering how Church leadership responded at the start, not just as a history lesson but for the light it sheds on the Church’s response the growing federal embrace now of things like abortion and same-sex marriage.My principal source is a book called Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government by historian Donald T. Critchlow. The heavily-documented volume, published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, has information otherwise not readily available on crucial events in the not so distant Catholic past.Pressure for government birth control was rising before LBJ. Although President Dwight Eisenhower had famously remarked that he could think of nothing less appropriate for government involvement than family planning, private conversations on the matter took place during the Kennedy administration. Meanwhile the population lobby labored to win Catholic support. An important part of this effort was a series of conferences from 1963 to 1967 at Notre Dame University, with the Ford and Rockefeller foundations paying and attendance by foundation people, population groups and Church organizations. Critchlow writes: “Both sides knew what they wanted: a liberal forum to create an oppositional voice within the Catholic Church on the issue of family planning.”Johnson came to the presidency determined to make birth control an integral part of his War on Poverty. Congress agreed. But LBJ, canny politician that he was, feared a Catholic backlash if he moved too fast on the domestic front and therefore stressed family planning to fight the much-ballyhooed “population explosion” abroad. Quiet expansion of existing welfare and health programs was to be the tactic at home.Two administration Catholics—presidential aide Joseph Califano and Office of Economic Opportunity director Sargent Shriver—were given the job of cultivating the Catholic hierarchy, especially its Washington-based organization the National Catholic Welfare Conference, predecessor of today’s U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.A key moment occurred in early 1966 when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) for the first time issued guidelines for family planning grants to the states. The NCWC administrative board responded with a statement protesting “threats to free choice of spouses.” But an NCWC official privately assured Califano this was only “the last trumpet of the older American bishops.” The White House then concluded that non-coercive family planning was acceptable to the hierarchy. The following year brought expanded support for birth control abroad, along with Social Security amendments for the first time authorizing grants to private groups like Planned Parenthood—a breakthrough long sought by the population lobby. By the time Johnson announced he wouldn’t seek reelection in 1968, federal funding of family planning was in the multi-millions and rising fast. And the bishops, Critchlow writes, had “tacitly” agreed to accept federal birth control, provided only it was “noncoercive.” It’s unlikely they could have prevented what happened—public opinion, including Catholic opinion, was against them—but they might have gotten a better deal. Is there a lesson here today as Obamacare abortion grows?
Real Life Heroes: Unknown and Unrecognized
Jan 5, 2015 / 00:00 amLet’s face it, 2014 was a rotten year for heroes and hero worship. Sure, it brought plucky, admirable people who did praiseworthy things. But all too often their good deeds were upstaged by the misdeeds of individuals in many walks of life—entertainers, politicians, sports figures, even clergy—jostling one another in their rush to trip over their feet of clay and drag their reputations in the dust.Of course this wasn’t new. “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” was the famous lament of a young boy in the face of a baseball betting scandal a century ago. Yet 2014 did serve up more than its share of shabby episodes in which Joe—and sometimes Jill—had to admit, “Sorry, kid, it’s really so.”This is serious business. People need heroes (and heroines) as models. Their absence gives rise to cynicism and despair. Remedies for the hero dearth need to be sought and applied forthwith.And here and there one finds efforts to do that. For instance, the Patheos website had a series on “Heroes of 2014.” Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen announced that he’s thinking of teaching a freshman seminar on heroes and invited people to suggest candidates. Many names were offered in response.Some of them came as no surprise: Frodo the Hobbit, Gary Cooper’s sheriff in High Noon. (But how about Grace Kelly’s gutsy pacifist in the same movie?) Troubling, though, was the fact that most of the nominees were from the worlds of literature and film, which suggests that real-life heroes are in short supply.You’d think saints would be obvious candidates for hero status, but I don’t recall seeing any saints’ names on the list. I suppose that reflects the fact that so many holy people lived a long time ago and had lives very unlike our own. But the underlying cause, I suspect, is the suspicion of sanctity infecting just about everyone in these secularized times.Pondering such matters, it occurred to me that the real problem may not be a hero shortage as such but failure to employ sound standards in identifying heroes. Good looks, sharp clothes, cool patterns, a knack for telling people what they want to hear—these are the endowments required to make someone a hero of popular culture today. And when an individual so endowed turns out to be hollow at the core, the disillusionment - though unquestionably real - is in fact unwarranted. There’s a simple lesson here. At a time when false values are the norm, those singled out for hero status may well disappoint in the end. In these circumstances, and with occasional notable exceptions, the authentic heroes and heroines of our time are likely often to be more or less unknown and unrecognized. These men and women won’t be talking heads on TV, headline performers at sellout concerts, or charismatic candidates for office, but relatively obscure individuals known only to God and the handful of people around them who experience their goodness.Speaking of the saints as models, St. Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, suggested something like that when he said, “They were people like us, of flesh and bone, with failings and weaknesses, who managed to conquer and master themselves for love of God...You and I shall also learn to discover so many virtues in the people about us, who teach us by their hard work, their self-denial, their joy.”In other words, there are many to be found even today. You just know where to look for them.
The Culture War
Dec 12, 2014 / 00:00 amFor months after the Supreme Court abruptly legalized abortion in its Roe v. Wade decision of January 1973, people who welcomed the result repeatedly declared that the struggle over abortion had now come to a close. The Supreme Court had spoken, the matter was settled, and prolifers could pack up and go home.Some of the people saying that probably believed it, and for others it was wishful thinking. But in still other cases a different motive appeared to be at work. Declaring the fight ended was a way—so those who said it hoped—of causing abortion opponents to quit. The tactic failed. Four decades later abortion remains a red hot issue in America. It’s worth recalling this bit of history when considering the currently popular line about the culture war. That war is over, it’s said, and the culture warriors fighting for traditional values should recognize its ending and accept the fact that they lost. Those of their opponents who persist are somewhere between troublesome and dangerous and should be suppressed.This recently was an undertone of some coverage of the appointment of a new Archbishop of Chicago. According to this story line, Cardinal Francis George, retiring due to age and ill health, was an active participant in the culture war, but his successor, Archbishop Blase Cupich, wouldn’t follow suit. And good for him.I have no idea how either man, Cardinal George or Archbishop Cupich, sees himself in relation to the culture war, but that isn’t the point. The point, rather, is that, much like the claim that Roe v. Wade had settled the abortion issue, so these claims about the culture war are best seen as tactics in the war itself. They didn’t work back in 1973, and there’s no reason to think they’ll work now—unless of course traditional values people have fallen asleep at the switch.To be sure, there are bad ways of waging the culture war. Personal abuse is one of them. But conservatives are by no means the only ones who abuse opponents. Culture warriors on the left are famously nasty at the expense of those they disagree with. Sometimes the nastiness is visible at very high levels. Writing for the Supreme Court majority which last year overturned the Defense of Marriage Act’s key section recognizing only heterosexual unions as marriages, Justice Anthony Kennedy declared bigotry to be the source of opposition to same-sex marriage. Earlier this year, U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Posner, a prominent liberal jurist, overturned gay marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin in a decision that even media called remarkably sarcastic at the opponents’ expense.Now consider: in a recent address calling for “a new human ecology,” Pope Francis declared that children “have a right to” parents of both sexes—“a father and mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child’s development.” So is this pope of forgiveness a bigot?Moral conservatives have at least two good reasons to persist in the culture war over issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.One is defending moral truth as the indispensable underpinning of values like the sanctity of innocent life and the uniqueness of heterosexual marriage. Take away these pillars and society is critically destabilized.The other is defending their own right to a secure place in the ongoing public debate about morality and public policy. For it’s disturbingly clear that the coercive instincts of the liberal culture warriors will be to punish traditionalists and impose silence on them if they get the chance.
Dietrich von Hildebrand vs. Hilter and the Nazis
Nov 28, 2014 / 00:00 amTo many Germans in the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler looked like just what Germany needed. Here, they imagined, was a charismatic leader capable of restoring social stability, economic prosperity, and national honor to their battered country. Relatively few saw Hitler for what he was—a megalomaniac demagogue driven by racial fantasies that included hatred for Jews and contempt for Christianity.Dietrich von Hildebrand was one of those few. He discerned the terrifying truth about Hitler and the Nazis from the start, and he did his best to warn his fellow Germans of the impending disaster. Even before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923—Hitler’s abortive attempt to launch a nationwide revolution from Bavaria—von Hildebrand’s vocal opposition had landed him on the Nazis’ blacklist, slated for execution when they came to power.In a way, political activism was out of character for this scholarly man, a philosophy professor by trade. But von Hildebrand also was a man of conscience, and having grasped the evil of Nazism before most others, he saw a duty to speak out. Now the record of that speaking out during a crucial decade and a half leading up to World War II is preserved in a gripping new book, My Battle Against Hitler (Image). The volume has been translated and meticulously edited by John Henry Crosby, founder and director of the Hildebrand Legacy Project, a group devoted to promoting continued study of the life and work of von Hildebrand, and John F. Crosby, professor of philosophy at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. Today, Dietrich von Hildebrand is perhaps best remembered for his masterful study of the interior life, Transformation in Christ. But the Crosby volume shows that there was much more to his career.He was born in Florence in 1889, the son of a prominent German sculptor, and prepared for a career in philosophy under the influence of leading figures like Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. In 1914, he converted to Catholicism and in 1919 began teaching the philosophy of religion at the University of Munich, where students found him a reliable and outspoken guide to resisting the evil intellectual currents of the time. “I tell you the Nazis are the most vicious animals,” he said.Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Von Hildebrand, fearing what lay ahead, fled the country and soon found himself in Vienna, where he began publication of a new journal with the specific task of exposing the intellectual and spiritual corruption of Nazism. His efforts moved the German ambassador to declare “that damned Hildebrand” Nazism’s greatest obstacle in Austria.It isn’t hard to see why, as this bit of trenchant prose serves to illustrate: “Anyone with the slightest sensitivity…cannot fail to recognize the nature of National Socialism: naturalistic, antagonistic to the things of the spirit, and based on a materialism of blood….The deeds of the National Socialists truly correspond to the spirit of the Antichrist.” Among his sorrows was the fact that so many of his fellow Catholics nevertheless failed to understand that.After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, von Hildebrand escaped, traveled across Europe, and made his way to the United States, where he taught at Fordham University, writing and lecturing widely until his death in 1977. His output includes important studies on ethics and married love, among other topics. My Battle Against Hitler illuminates a critical period of his career not widely known in this country up to now. Old and new Hildebrand fans alike will find it a fascinating read.
The crisis the synod ought to have talked about
Nov 13, 2014 / 00:00 amDuring the 10:30 Mass in my parish a couple of Sundays ago 32 boys and girls stood in front of the altar, faced the congregation, and formally affirmed their desire to be confirmed. It was part of the preparation for administering the sacrament next spring, and for many of us in that church it was a moving moment.But the occasion was darkened for me by something I’d read just a few days earlier. If those 32 young people conform to the national averages, fewer than half of them will be practicing Catholics 10 years from now.According to Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and colleagues, only 7 percent of the sometime-Catholic young adults who were part of a large-scale study they conducted several years ago were still practicing Catholics. Another 27 percent had plainly dropped out of the Church, while the rest reflected varying degrees of disengagement from their religion. The picture was not a whole lot brighter even where the offspring of solidly Catholic parents were concerned. As one reviewer of Young Catholic America (Oxford University Press) by Smith and his associates put it, “even if you do everything right, the odds are way less than 50-50 that you’ll see your children turn out as Catholic as you are.”These troubling findings coincide with mountains of anecdotal evidence to the same effect: a disturbingly high proportion of young sometime-Catholics in the United States and countries like it are walking away from the faith. Yes, there are plenty of young Catholics who are a credit to their families and their Church. The problem isn’t with them but with the very large number who to all intents and purposes have given up on their religion. This is a crisis that deserves pondering as we try to make sense of last month’s world synod of bishops in Rome. The synod, which was itself a logical place for such pondering, seems to have spent its time talking about something else.The gathering was billed in advance as a meeting on marriage and family life, including, one would suppose, the challenge of transmitting the faith to young people in an increasingly hostile secular environment. What we seem to have gotten instead was a heated discussion in which participants debated what the Church could and couldn’t appropriately do to reach out to cohabiting couples, divorced and remarried Catholics whose first marriages haven’t been annulled, and people in same-sex relationships.No one questions that reaching out to these people is a good thing to do. The issue for the synod, it seems, was how to do it without seeming to approve their current situations—as, for example, by offering them Holy Communion. The bishops gathered in Rome with the Pope presiding apparently found it surprisingly difficult to answer that question.But what does the synod have to say about the rest of us? What about kids like those 32 in my parish and the good Catholic parents who can’t help but worry as their youngsters move into a future in which their religious allegiance will be sorely tested? Mightn’t a synod on marriage and the family at least have given them equal time with cohabiting couples, the divorced and remarried, and people in same-sex unions? There will be a second synod on marriage and family in October next year. Maybe the cardinals, archbishops, and bishops who convene then under the Pope will recoup. Those kids in my parish—and all the others like them in parishes around the world—deserve as much.
Our new Mideast war
Nov 3, 2014 / 00:00 amThe headline on a recent Washington Post Op-Ed about the rise of the Islamic State proclaimed “The Return of Evil.” Although one was tempted to reply that evil never went away, the headline writer had a point—the post-Cold War 1990s in the United States were indeed marked by naïve optimism that the era of conflict had ended and the world could now look forward to universal peace, prosperity, and democratic governance: the end of history, in other words.As we now see all too clearly, and should have realized all along, the persistence of evil is an enduring reality in human affairs. The reason is simple. Evil has its immediate source in the human heart. And how are we to respond to that in light of the gospel?The Christian message is that evil is vanquished by love. But that is largely, though not entirely, in the eschatological future. Here and now it isn’t possible to love away jihadists and terrorists and others who use violence as a tool of conquest and oppression. Wrestling with this fact, Christianity centuries ago came up with the just war theory—a schema for undertaking and waging war against aggression by to a circumscribed and carefully measured use of force. Alongside just war, however, there exists a tradition of Christian pacifism whose legitimacy has been recognized in recent years not only by so-called peace churches but by magisterial documents of the Catholic Church. Statements out of Rome reflect the tension between these two schools of thought. Pope Francis in a message to an international peace meeting declared war to be “never a satisfactory means” of achieving justice and resolving conflict situations. War, he said, “drags people into a spiral of violence….It tears down what generations have labored to build up and it sets the scene for even greater injustices and conflicts.”Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, echoed the priority the Pope had assigned to “the path of promoting dialogue and understanding among cultures” as the way to peace. But then he struck a different note where “terrorism and violence” are concerned, calling it “both licit and urgent to stop aggression through multilateral action and a proportionate use of force.”This brings us to the latest policy of the American government, which President Obama says is to “degrade” and “ultimately destroy” the Islamic State. All well and good, but critics see the specifics of the commitment to this policy as incoherent—a failure to commit military means necessary to achieve the stated ends. Even the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Iraq, Louis Sako, has complained that “bombing these jihadists will not make them disappear.” The Patriarch is no military expert of course, but those who are make the same point: Besting the Islamic State will eventually require those much-dreaded American boots on the ground. Either that or the familiar alternative—declare victory and go home. At this point, one of the just war norms comes to mind. In order to the justified, the use of force must have a reasonable expectation of achieving successful results. And if bombing the jihadists won’t do the job, do America and its ambivalent allies have the stomach for what will?To some minds the Ebola outbreak bears a ghastly metaphorical resemblance to the upsurge of jihadist fundamentalism in the Middle East. Ebola can probably be contained—or so we hope. But can we contain the rise of jihadism among alienated fundamentalist Muslims? We’ll find out soon.