Mirror of Justice

Thursday, November 26, 2009

A Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer

My Creo en Dios! blog post this morninig (which you can read in its entirety here) quote's Washington's 1989 recommendation that this day be observed “as a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favours of Almighty God.” Washington’s proclamation asked the American people to “beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions, to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.”

Individually and collectively, we have much for which to give thanks. Among the people in my life for whom I give thanks are my MOJ friends, who continually help me grow. Thank God and thank you.

Blessings to all of our MOJ friends on this Thanksgiving Day.

On Garry Wills

By Robert George

The gifted and dynamic young Catholic scholar and activist Bronwen Catherine McSchea is a graduate Harvard College. She holds a master's degree in theology from Harvard Divinity School, and is currently completing her Ph.D. in History at Yale. Here are excerpts from her review of Garry Wills' Why I am a Catholic, from the October 2002 issue of Catalyst.

. . . Wills presents himself as a kind of oracle for this Vatican II “spirit.” He envisions an empowered laity, unencumbered by Roman assertions of authority or “petty” concerns about orthodoxy and obedience, and cheerfully building up the “people of God.” It is a vision of outreach, of a glorious harvest of Christ-like understanding, tolerance, and love. In writing his book, Wills purports to be following the Vatican II way, witnessing to his faith as a layman, offering his pen and public influence as God’s instruments for touching hearts.

It is time to call Wills’s bluff. For all of his posturing, the example he sets is not one of genuine outreach, tolerance, or love. He willfully mistreats the Church’s scriptural and historical foundations, undermining Catholic claims that often prove decisive in winning converts . . .

He indulges unjustly and uncharitably his distaste for fellow Catholics who, in remaining faithful to Roman teachings on a host of subjects, offer a fighting strength to the “people of God” against the pitfalls of the modern age—among them the enervating materialism and moral relativism that find commonplace expression through our culture’s sexual fixations . . .

Wills deals with the Scriptural foundations of the papacy with a carelessness to make even the most anti-papal Protestant cringe. Looking askance at Matthew 16, where Simon is renamed “the Rock,” Wills wonders whether Christ was only “teasing Peter when he called him ‘Rocky,’ ab opposito, as when one calls a not-so bright person Einstein.”

Yes, that’s right: Wills reduces a most solemn moment in the Gospel to a humorous interlude. He portrays Saint Peter—the man who identified Jesus of Nazareth as “the Son of the living God” before Christ acknowledged as much to any man—as a hopeless buffoon who “invariably takes the wrong action.”

. . . Wills wants to have his cake and eat it too, and the weakness of his position is apparent to any attentive reader. Protestant converts to the Church, especially, can tell us how important Rome’s unique claims to authority have been to their spiritual walk. They and the many non-Catholics who respect Rome’s ancient and eminently rigorous tradition despite deep disagreements with it can only be disappointed by Wills’s cavalier dismissal of papal authority alongside his non-Scriptural, essentially sentimental explanations for the papacy’s continued existence.

Along with his flippant readings of Scripture, Wills the historian abuses his professional discipline to write a most tendentious, whirlwind account of Roman corruption, error, and folly throughout the millennia—again in order to undermine Vatican claims to authority. One of the more remarkable occasions of this is where he portrays King Henry VIII of England as a “loyal son of the Church” whose hand was forced by the incompetence of Pope Clement VII, who refused to condone the dumping of Queen Catherine for her vivacious and fecund lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn.

Yes, that’s right: Wills lauds a tyrant king whose axe fell not only on two of his six wives, but also on Saints Thomas More and John Fisher, and a number of other “papists” who rejected Henry’s revolutionary claims to be “Supreme Head of the Church of England.” This is the same Henry whose minions confiscated monastic lands all over England, looted Catholic sanctuaries, and desecrated the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury.

Wills leaves out these facts of Henry’s reign for the simple reason that he wants to take a cheap shot at a pope who ruled against a divorce. He continues along in this unscholarly fashion, remarkably, by blaming the persecution of English Catholics after Henry’s reformation on the political interference of popes who gave them permission to resist a regime that oppressed them. Offering not a word on the messy English marriage of religion and politics responsible for dreadful persecutions, Wills claims that “the papacy’s political ties to governments opposed to England robbed Catholics of their presumption of loyalty.” He goes so far as to fault sainted martyrs of the Church for their “treason.” According to Wills’s formula for good Church and State relations, English and Irish Catholics should have just taken it on the chin when their masters arrested priests for saying Mass and sent all those presumptuous papists to the scaffold.

Wills desires a similar passivity from the “people of God” today in the face of cultural norms directly opposed to what the Church has always taught about the sacraments, the Mother of Christ, and just about all matters sexual. He insults fellow Catholics on points of particular sensitivity: the concept of Transubstantiation in the Blessed Sacrament, and the sinless nature of the Blessed Mother and her miraculous appearances around the world. He yawns at the Aristotelian arguments about “substance” used for centuries by the Church to describe the miracle of the Mass, suggesting the concept of Transubstantiation was one of the many “petty” developments at the reforming Council of Trent. And he sneers at “the Marian zealots” who uphold Mary’s perpetual virginity against the tired protestations of amateur Scripture scholars, and who—with Pope John Paul II—believe in the “superstitious” “Fatima nonsense.”

Furthermore, Wills calls Vatican teachings on holy matrimony and ordination “silly,” suggesting that those who disagree are not “conscientious” Catholics like himself, but rather are trying to bring the Church back to the “dark days” preceding Vatican II. He accuses those who consider artificial contraception to be in any way immoral of “stubborn clinging to a discredited position” (leaving out, of course, by whom and in what way the position was discredited). He dismisses as “weird” the hope that a renewal of the culture of celibacy would help solve the shortage of priests. Without offering any thorough, reasoned counter-arguments, he sums up all the Vatican teachings concerning sexuality—the definition of holy matrimony, the Scripturally based prohibition on divorce and female ordination, natural law arguments against homosexuality, contraception—as “dishonest, naïve, or stupid on their face.”

Yes, that’s right: the tolerant, understanding, liberal devotee of the “spirit of Vatican II” can hardly mention those who disagree with him without resorting to ad hominem assaults on their intelligence and character. At a time when our scandal-ridden Church is starving for charitable aid from her sons of influence and means, Garry Wills opts to expose fellow Catholics to great shame and ridicule and to increase the splinters between himself and all who adhere to the finer points of Roman teaching. His vindictive tone makes his calls to “the good will” engendered by Vatican II seem like so much hypocrisy and grandstanding.

The “people of God” can do without Wills’s instructions on insulting one another. And they deserve far better than the sort of faith he offers them—a faith that encourages their weaknesses, a faith so indulgent toward the moral relativism, the blinding naturalism, materialism, and sexual obsessions of our age . . .

Except for a sentimental attachment to rosary beads and an emasculated papacy, the Catholic Church according to Wills would be indistinguishable from our faltering secular society, with a dogmatic integrity and spiritual stamina to match it.

Wills audaciously equates his cause of reform to that of the medieval monastics and the conciliarists of the past few centuries. His is but a “lover’s quarrel” with the hierarchy of the Church, he says. Yet the greatest revelation from the pages of Why I Am A Catholic is that Wills needs to exercise far greater charity and humility in his personal crusade for “reformation.” To this end, he might reread the texts of his beloved Vatican II and the writings of his favorite authors, St. Augustine, John Cardinal Newman, and G.K. Chesterton, who receive considerable mention in his book. Surely along with the many one-liners that can be quoted out of context to gratify Wills’s self-righteous agenda are pages and pages that speak to a far different “spirit” than the one he purports to know so intimately.

When Garry Wills matures further in his faith, he should write another book about it. In the meantime, let us wait with patient hope that the “people of God” will one day begin to benefit from the fruits of Wills’s “conscientious” labor.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Garry Wills on our degraded politics

By Michael Perry

Garry Wills is one of the most prominent Catholic " public intellectuals" in the United States. Among his many books are Why I Am a Catholic, What Jesus Meant, What the Gospels Meant, and What Paul Meant. Here are Wills's reflections in a recent blog post, titled The New American Hysteria:

The hysteria shown at town hall meetings this summer is simply the tip of an outpouring of organized hostility to government that is unparalleled in our history. We have had wildly emotional opposition movements in the past—red scares, nativist riots, anti-Catholic and anti-Semite outbreaks. And there are some parallels with past forms of extremism. People who think Obama is a Muslim are like anti-New Dealers who thought Roosevelt a Jew or John Birchers who thought Eisenhower a Communist.

But there was a kind of crazy consistency in those old causes (if they can be called that). The institutional Catholic Church was officially anti-democratic in the past, and the United States was falsely thought to be a Christian nation. The John Birch Society was fanatically anti-Communist, but most Americans were at least strongly anti-Communist. There were always emotional roots behind the formal position of the extremists. Richard Hofstadter found status anxiety and anti-intellectualism in the right-wing extremism of the 1950s.

Now, however, there is a deeply panicky combination of pathologies—racist, xenophobic, fundamentalist—screaming about death camps and euthanasia and baby-killers and 9/11 conspiracies (by the “truthers”). Every aspect of our present government is considered illegitimate. Some look at our leaders and recognize nothing of themselves in them. They see a black man as president and cannot even consider him a citizen, a Christian, a sane man—he must be a Muslim, a Nazi, a Hitler. They see a Latina on the Supreme Court. They see a woman as secretary of state. They see a black attorney general. This is not America.

The John Birch Society was at least focused on communism. The new emotions raging have no focus, just an infection and mutual reinforcement of nameless fears. This is less the pushing of a political position too far than a multiple-sourced and violent nervous breakdown, a St. Vitus dance from the Middle Ages. Bircher “extremism” was mild compared to these anguished roilings. People feel betrayed, robbed of their country. The waving of the Constitution at the town halls had nothing to do with constitutional arguments. It was a way of saying, “Give us back what we thought our country was all about.” Extremism is normally a protest against what is seen as rapid change. But the changes these frightened people think they see are not rapid, they are monstrous.

How serious is this new hysteria? It is hard to say. It is normally remarked that only “the fringes” hold beliefs like the birther-deather nonsense. That is probably true. But the willingness of others to entertain these fantasies—in a recent survey, 42 percent of Republicans said that Obama was born outside the US— is also a new thing. There is nothing opponents can do about most of this. In the past, extremism was checked by people who were partly or nominally on the side of the extremists. Barry Goldwater dissociated his 1964 campaign from the John Birch Society. William F. Buckley rebuked the anti-Semites on the right. On the other side, there were plenty of liberals who denounced the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers.

But now supposedly responsible Republican leaders, commentators, and congressmen—Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and Arizona Representative Trent Franks—encourage the citizenship and euthanasia screamers. A recent vice-presidential nominee endorses the death panels myth. There is little or no determination to dissociate the right in general from the right-wing fringes. Why is this? Partly, I suppose, the Republican Party has shrunk so drastically that it feels it cannot cut away any supporters. This is the opposite of what was said about the banks, that they were too big to be allowed to fail. The birthers are too small to be allowed to fail. Everyone must be kept in the camp if there is to be a camp at all.

This situation cannot be reversed until and unless the Republican Party begins to recognize that keeping these people in the camp will destroy the camp, that the party cannot pretend to respect and responsibility before the electorate so long as they coddle the crazies. Barry Goldwater was considered an extremist in his day, but his movement went on to prevail for a time because he did not temporize with Birchers, anti-Semites, or religious fanatics.

William F. Buckley became an influential supporter of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan because he was willing to free his movement from fringes like the John Birch Society, the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby, the Ayn Rand objectivists, the anti-fluoride kooks, and other exotic specimens. That is the price of full participation in our national politics. It is a price the current Republican Party is unwilling to pay.

I won't even answer your questions

By Patrick McKinley Brennan

Michael Perry has kept us more or less up to date on certain aspects of the Apostolic Visitation of congregations of women religious in the U.S. Most recently, he linked to a report according to which many or most of the women religious involved in the Visitation are refusing to answer the questions posed by the Holy See. See for yourself: http://ncronline.org/news/women/women-religious-not-complying-vatican-study For my own part, I wonder why anyone would think it's a good idea for members of religious orders bound together and to the larger Church through promises (or vows) of obedience to refuse to answer these questions. If there are good and sufficient reasons for this particular refusal, they're not coming to my mind. The "they don't understand who we are" (and therefore we aren't talking to them) line, which I have read over and over again, isn't equal to the task. If "they" don't understand, then help them. That's part of what it means to be Church, even as obedience (to morally licit demands) is the last word. Meanwhile, disobedience of the kind on display here probably makes one of the points under investigation by the Holy See. And, for the record, I would have the same view on this question if men's institutues were under a Visitation, as I wish they were. Who knows why the Holy See has not undertaken an Apostolic Visitation of the men's congregations. Meanwhile, the life of religious orders in the US, whether of men or of women, is a shambles, with impressive exceptions here and there. Thank God the responsible parties in the Church beyond the US are doing something that has the potential to raise hope and expectation, even if some of those in the moribund orders don't yet see it.

Manhattan Declaration

By Robert George

I thank Bob Hockett for his gracious comments about the Manhattan Declaration. It does not speak well for those of us on the conservative side of the spectrum that a good and fairminded man like Bob "expected to find anger and hardness of heart in the document." We need to take that to heart. Bob self-critically attributes his expectation to "a bit of unconscious bigotry" on his own part, but I''m sure that isn't true. In any event, it is deeply gratifying to hear him say, "instead what I found was great dignity, manifest compassion, and humane adherence to principle."

In engaging the ideas in the Declaration, Bob mentions his belief that all life, and not merely human life, is sacred, and his inclining towards the view that marriage is an "inherently sacramental" category and that "the state is accordingly not the apt institution to define its countours." I myself would not use terms like "sacred" and "sanctity" in relation to the lives of creatures that do not possess a rational nature, and therefore cannot properly be said to be made in the divine image and likeness. Non-human creatures (as far as we are aware -- of course, we don't know whether there are rational creatures elsewhere in the cosmos) should be treated with a certain respect (not reverence), but they may, in my opinion, legitimately be used for our benefit and need not be treated "as ends and never as means only," to recall Kant's famous formulation of our most fundamental obligation to each other. Having said that, in Body-Self Dualism in Contemporary Ethics and Politics, Pat Lee and I give some reasons for believing that the wanton killing even of non-human animals is wrong. On the marriage question, my view is that marriage, considered not as a mere legal convention but as a one-flesh union of husband and wife, is a natural, pre-political, and pre-ecclesial form of relationship and basic (i.e., intrinsic) human good. The duty of Church and state is not to define its contours, which are given, but to recognize its necessary and inherent character and the norms that both shape and protect it, and to play their respective (and distinctive) roles in supporting and fostering it. Of course, as the Church herself teaches, Christ elevates the marriage of Christians to the status of a sacrament. But even non-sacramental marriages are recognized, esteemed, and honored by the Church as true marriages possessing profound human worth and dignity. They are true marriages because marriage is, as I say, a natural (pre-political, pre-ecclesial) form of human relationship and basic human good.

Obviously, there is much more to be said on both of the important matters Bob has introduced into the discussion. I thank him for raising the issues, and, again, for his very gracious comments on the Manhattan Declaration.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

America Magazine on Caritas in Veritate

By Amy Uelmen

The current issue of America includes six brief reflections on various issues in Caritas ("Papal Correspondence") - including a brief overview of the "Economy of Communion" project. Enjoy!

By Michael Perry

Women religious not complying with Vatican study

By Thomas C. Fox

The vast majority of U.S. women religious are not complying with a Vatican request to answer questions in a document of inquiry that is part of a three-year study of the congregations. Leaders of congregations, instead, are leaving questions unanswered or sending in letters or copies of their communities' constitutions.Read More

Manhattan

By Steve Shiffrin

Hello All,

Just a quick thanks to Rick for posting the link to the M Declaration, which I've finally just found a moment to read. I'd also like, in my capacity as (I think) one of the resident 'lefties' here, to commend the full document to any who might not have read it thus far. For I must confess that, indulging in a bit of what I now think must have been unconscious bigotry of my own, I expected to find anger and hardness of heart in the document, and instead what I found was great dignity, manifest compassion, and humane adherence to principle.

I am sure that I would quibble on some points in the document, but what I am most happily surprised to be able to report is that I do think that any such disagreements would indeed be quibbles.

1) I incline, for example, while emphasizing the sanctity of human life, to add that I also believe all life to be sacred, and believe that we human beings are charged with the task of serving as what I think of as 'the steward species,' even 'the servant species.' We are here, that is to say, I think in significant part to care for the other life forms our Lord has placed here with us.

2) With respect to marriage and conjugal relations, I incline, as mentioned in earlier posts, to the view that 'marriage' is an inherently sacramental category, and that the state is accordingly not the apt institution to define its contours, which might vary from religious insitution-cum-tradition to religious institution-cum-tradition; but thus far, as I say, I simply incline to this view, upon which I continue to reflect in what I hope is good conscience, with what I hope will be assistance from others.

3) Finally, both because of that developing view on marriage as distinguished from domestic arrangement, and for many other reasons that have been operative in my own humble attempts at thinking for decades now, I can only wholeheartedly support the declaration's principles of religious freedom.

I am eager to read what others among you all think.

All best,

Bob

Monday, November 23, 2009

"Sectarian or Civic?"

By Rick Garnett

This piece is a few days old, but still worth a read, I think. Over at the First Things blog, Michael Liccione reports on Helen Alvare's recent lecture, "The Catholic Voice in the Public Square: Sectarian or Civic?" A bit:

Alvaré suggested that we hammer home two points that ought to be obvious but aren’t: Most Americans are religious in some fashion, and few people are motivated by purely secular considerations to become . . . well, better people. This is why liberalism’s standard prescriptions for addressing various social problems—especially unwanted pregnancies, births out of wedlock, STDs, and family breakdown—just don’t work. The question is not whether religious voices may be heard; the law still says they may. And as we just saw in Congress, they can be heard. The challenge for the darkening future, though, is to mine our Catholic patrimony for language that can appeal to people’s hearts as much as to their minds. Two examples Alvaré gave were Joseph Ratzinger’s theme of conscience as “memory” and Karol Wojtyla’s theology of the body, in which life is defined as interpersonal communion established by mutual self-gift. It’ll be interesting to see whether the secular appeal of such themes can be enhanced in the public square.

The Manhattan Declaration