Tenure Requirements in a Nutshell

"To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person."

So said Bl. John Henry Cardinal Newman, who was perhaps the most brilliant thinker in England of his day. I notice that the modern university demands that its faculty do both, or face termination. Small wonder that so many graduates learn so little from their myriad classes.

Quote of the Day:Rowe's Rebuttal

Today's quote is passed along without further comment. First, some context, which is given by one of the hostesses from MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry:

HARRIS-PERRY: “I want us to be super careful when we use the language “hard worker.” I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work really looks like. But in the context of relative privilege, when you talk about work-life balance, the moms who don’t have health care aren’t called hard workers. We call them failures. We call them people who are sucking off the system.”

And now today's quote, a rebuttal from Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe:

To me, it sounds as though Melissa is displaying images of slavery or drudgery in her office to remind herself of what hard work really and truly looks like. That’s a bit like hanging images of rape and bondage to better illustrate the true nature of human sexuality. Whatever her logic might be, it’s difficult to respond without first pointing out a few things that most people will find screamingly obvious. So let’s do that.

First of all, slavery is not “hard work;” it’s forced labor. There’s a big difference. Likewise, slaves are not workers; they are by definition, property. They have no freedom, no hope, and no rights. Yes, they work hard, obviously. But there can be no “work ethic” among slaves, because the slave has no choice in the matter.

Workers on the other hand, have free will. They are free to work as hard as they wish. Or not. The choice is theirs. And their decision to work hard, or not, is not a function of compliance or coercion; it’s a reflection of character and ambition.

This business of conflating hard work with forced labor not only minimizes the importance of a decent work ethic, it diminishes the unspeakable horror of slavery. Unfortunately, people do this all the time. We routinely describe bosses as “slave-drivers,” and paychecks as “slave’s wages.” Melissa though, has come at it from the other side. She’s suggesting that because certain “hard workers” are not as prosperous as other “hard workers,” - like the people on her office wall - we should all be “super-careful” about overly-praising hard work.

I suspect this is because Melissa believes - as do many others - that success today is mostly a function of what she calls, “relative privilege.” This is fancy talk for the simple fact that life is unfair, and some people are born with more advantages than others. It's also a fine way to prepare the unsuspecting viewer for the extraordinary suggestion that slavery is proof-positive that hard work doesn’t pay off.

Now back to work!

We Will Be Judged

We repeat this fact every time that we recite the Creeds, which for Catholics means at least once per week: Christ will judge the living and the dead. I was reminded of this as I read through the opening editorial of the May/June 2015 edition of Touchstone Magazine, "Ashamed of the Gospel: The End of Comfortable Christianity." Near the close of the editorial, Robert P. George writes:

Powerful forces tell us that our defeat in the causes of marriage and human life are inevitable. They warn us that we are on "the wrong side of history." They insist that we will be judged by future generations the way we today judge those who championed racial injustice in the Jim Crow south. 

But history does not have sides. It is an impersonal and contingent sequence of events, events that are determined in decisive ways by human deliberation, judgment, choice, and action....The idea of a "judgment of history" is secularism's vain, meaningless, hopeless, and pathetic attempt to devise a substitute for the final judgment of Almighty God. History is not God. God is God. History is not our judge. God is our judge. 

One day we will give an account of all we have done and failed to do. Let no one suppose that we will make this accounting to some impersonal sequence of events possessing no more power to judge than a golden calf or a carved and painted totem pole. It is before God--the God of truth, the Lord of history--that we will stand. And as we tremble in his presence, it will be no use for any of us to claim that we did everything in our power to put ourselves on "the right side of history." 

One thing alone will matter: Was I a faithful witness to the gospel? Did I do everything in my power to put myself on the side of truth?

History, too, will be judged. That is notwithstanding the ruling and/or chattering classes' insistence that we ought to change all--even our very beliefs--to bend knee to their whims, also known as "being on the right side of history." We will all be judged, not against history, but against eternity. I pray that I will be found on the right side of eternity--that is the only judgment that ultimately matters.

Living Martyrs

"Many men and women in the history of our Church have been willing to die for their faith. The deaths of these martyrs inspired people to believe that there is more than this life. Giving their lives was a tremendous form of evangelization. They died for the sake of the kingdom to come. However, in this day and age, we need people who are willing to live for their faith."
John R Woods, Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Mission: 5 Steps to Winning the War Within.

Yesterday I posted that I had found a couple of insights from Dr. Wood's book, and shared one of them. This is another. I sometimes wonder if we live in a despairing age which at times makes the error of romanticizing martyrdom via death at the expense of other forms of martyrdom (the word basically means "witnessing," and so there are other forms of this than literally dying for one's faith). Martyrdom via death only has some effect because this life is worth living, and because while our hope is for something in the next life, it must be lived in this life.

Being eager to die in this life--welcoming death so that we can be rid of this life--is not martyrdom, but rather is spiritual suicide.

Redemptive Suffering

The men's group at my old parish has a tradition (if it can be called that--they've done it every year since their formation 3 or 4 years ago) of buying many copies of a book of spiritual and religious nature for the men of the parish. This year, the book is John R. Wood's Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Mission: 5 Steps to Winning the War Within. I've nearly finished reading it--it's not the greatest book ever written, but it's not bad and it is generally sound and practical in approach--and I have gained at least a couple of interesting insights from it.

One of these is a nice "connection of the dots" concerning the Catholic practice and piety around "redemptive suffering." By this, I mean the pious belief that we can unite our suffering to Christ's and that, when so united, this suffering can have some redemptive effects. The idea is that we "offer it up," that is, offer up the suffering in our daily lives as a sacrifice to God, for the salvation of souls.

Here is the relevant passage from the book:

"In Colossians 1:24-26, Saint Paul writes, 'Now I rejoice in my suffering for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, the church, of which I am a minister in accordance with God's stewardship given to me to complete for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.' This almost sounds like heresy. Is Saint Paul saying that Christ's passion and death are missing something? Absolutely not. Christ redeemed the sins of generations past, present, and future. Saint Paul is telling us that we're the body of Christ. When we unite our suffering to Christ's suffering, we too can help save souls. This union is key. Here is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains it: 'Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.' (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1521)"

The concept of redemptive suffering is therefore rooted in the in the idea that we are Christ's body, and that therefore what we suffer as members of His body, He suffers (see also Matthew 25:31-46 and 1 Corinthians 12:12-27). Christ's suffering is completed, final, once-and-for-all, yet is is also being completed in our lives. Another way of looking at this is that suffering is a necessary consequence of Original Sin, not merely as punishment, but rather as redemption. Our suffering is not just an arbitrary punishment meted out by God, but instead it is Christ's suffering echoed in our lives* because we are members of His body. He suffered because we suffer, but on the other hand we are suffering because He has suffered.


*Or Christ's suffering anticipated by those who came before His Incarnation.

Chesterton on Suicide

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes -- for it makes even crimes impossible.

GK Chesteron, Orthodoxy

I know that there are a number of people who are grieving over Robin Williams suicide--it seems that every major celebrity who dies, and especially who dies early, invokes a bit of national mourning. It is a tragedy, and depression is an unfortunate thing to struggle against.

With that said, there is something far, far worse than depression even, something for which depression is at most a symptom, though something which may exist without depression. That is despair. There is the suicidal depression which preys upon the mind and the emotions, but it pales next to that deep and dark despair which preys upon the very soul. The man who is depressed may yet find hope: but he who finally despairs has rejected hope and so is lost.

Commencement

No, not mine, though my name was listed among those graduating form the department. If all goes well, then I will this summer. No, I'm thinking of commencement speeches, most of which are actually pretty banal.

The one P.J. O'Rourke would give for Rutgers isn't, however:

What intrigues me is that there are 31.1 million Americans between 18 and 24, and 21.8 million of you—70 percent—are going to college. It is not possible that 70 percent of you are among the 50 percent of you who are above-average in intelligence....

What constitutes a “college education”?

You need to study history, so that it doesn’t come around again and, per Santayana, bite you in the Ukraine. You’re thinking, “Santayana—historically great guitar player.”

You need philosophy, not the modern bull session kind but the Socratic method of “What the hell am I thinking?” And what the hell were you thinking, majoring in History of Film? At least you got to see So-crates in action in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

You need literature and the arts so you can read something longer than a Beyoncé tweet and throw Bartok into the iPod mix and hear what Jay Z is up against experimenting with music.
A general understanding of science is necessary. You don’t have to learn how to cure cancer. You just have to learn that the guy my age with what’s left of his hair tied in a ponytail who works at the organic locavore shop and talks about the healing properties of crystals and magnetic fields is crazy.

The same goes for mathematics and economics. You should be able to do the math—if you’re still repaying your student loans when you’re 50, college education probably wasn’t a good investment....

Eight or so subjects to get a college education. Think you could find 100 wonderful experts in each of these, 800 professors, for $1.4 billion? That’s $1.75 million a year apiece. There would be applicants. You could hold classes in the Moose Lodge or at the Y. Classes would be large. So was the agora where Socrates taught. But there’s no free WiFi in the Moose Lodge.  And this kind of college education sounds like work.  Which is something you’ll be looking hard for, starting tomorrow.

Go read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day and a Few Good Links (vol. 13)

"Apparently devil worship can only get you a win at the district court level" (Tony McDonald).

We can only hope so.

A few more quick links in the same vein:

1. A very good discussion of the four key questions which underlie any attempts at defending the Obama Administration's tyrannical HHS mandate. That it is a burden against the rights of religion and conscience are obvious, but there are sometimes legitimate reasons for a government to place limitations on these things. However, the HHS mandate fails to satisfy any of these criteria, and thus is naked tyranny.
2. In related news, some (many? most?) people who support the Obama Administration in this tyrannical exercise of power do so not because they think he is doing the right thing, but rather because they want to see conservatives and Christians suffer. Some go so far as to openly wish that we would all be murdered (or castrated), which is I suppose consistent with their ideology in general. Why stop at murdering babies?
3. At what point does the analogy to Nazism cease to be hyperbole? One does not need to wear a swastika to plumb the depths of depravity and monstrosity which were the Nazi ideology, or to carry out atrocities which rival (or exceed) those of Hitler and his followers, or to add the extra inhuman touches which make onlookers really recoil.
4. The runner-up bonus quote of the day: "The leader of the free world met with the president today." Apparently, he talked about abortion and religious freedom; income redistribution, not so much. Bonus for the pope gave President Obama a copy of his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. Nicely done, your Holiness.

That's about what I have time for right now.

Quote of the Day: Modernity's Idols and the Aztecs

"At least when the Aztecs sacrificed you to their gods you got to visit a nice ziggurat.  Modernity’s gods are so much more clinical." From the Zippy Catholic.

The moderns may have ceased believing in God, may claim to have dispensed too with gods and idols and demons. But they still offer their sacrifices, often human ones, to these deities. It just goes by another name.

Quick Links and Quotes: Guns and Freedom

Some links, but one requires a password/invitation to view so I'll excerpt.

First, there's civil disobedience in Connecticut over gun registration. I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if this is a bad thing, because it weakens the government's ability to pass laws which help preserve an ordered freedom, or a good thing because this is a bad law which should be resisted.

Second, guns really do defend freedom (and not only lives and property):

"a widespread insurrection against the government wouldn’t take the form of a massed militia marching against the US military...Politicians would be easy targets, except for a few who could surround themselves with a ring of steel.  Roads and railroads would be blocked and destroyed.  Water and electrical systems would be constantly disrupted, as would the provision of everything from medicine to food.  Loyalist citizens would inform on their rebel neighbors, with the rebels in turn killing those suspected of informing.  Criminals would prey on everyone who was too weak to resist.

It would be dreadful, regardless of who won in the end. And in that terrible scenario, the personal firearms protected by the second amendment would be very effective.  A drone beats an AR-15 or a Glock, but the drone needs fuel, and an airfield, and an operator who likely has a home and a family.  Civil war is an awful thing, but the threat of a desperate populace resorting to it provides a check on the government."

Actually, that "Criminals would prey on everyone who was too weak to resist" is generally true. There is a saying that when seconds count, the police are just minutes away. We see it especially in high-crime areas: hello, Chicago and LA; hello, US border towns (and farms, etc) which get drawn into the Mexican Drug Cartels' ongoing wars; and hello, anarchy in New Orleans immediately after Katrina.

It's not that those of us who support Second Amendment rights live in a state of paranoia. Rather, we live in a state of preparation, not necessarily for revolution (wars are ugly things) but for the very real possibility of being victims of a mad gunman or a violent criminal or a drug enforcer; or, indeed, of the increasingly common infringement on our rights brought by the militarized police state (etc.).

The statists' desire to see us disarmed and helpless really is as much about the latter as it is the former. Make us helpless before any threat, and the citizenry will beg for more government to solve its problems. The fight over firearms also has this at its root, because if we give up our ability to self-defense (including potentially lethal self-defense), our only alternative for "safety" is to have a well-funded and well-oiled police-state, which then conveniently can be used to keep the citizens in line.

TMM: Failure of the Pharisees

"Holiness is not just a collection of virtues. Indeed, such a conception of holiness causes great harm; it stifles our hearts, and after a while it fashions us into Pharisees. Holiness means 'walking in the presence of God and being perfect'; holiness means living in constant encounter with Jesus Christ."
Pope Francis, Open Mind, Faithful Heart

The Pharisees are today among the most frequently thought-over (and fought-over) groups in the Gospels. In an age which latches onto the statement "Judge not, lest you be judged" and then misapplies it (by applying it only to conservative Christians), there is no surprise that the liberals of all stripes would judge conservatives of all stripes to be the new Pharisees.

And, on this reading of how the Pharisees failed, it might be argued that the faithful Christian is nearer to the Pharisee than the liberal one is. It is almost universally considered a "bad thing" to be a sort of Pharisee, though in understanding how and where the Pharisee fails, we see that there are some worse things.

The Pharisee, after all, did get holiness half-right, even if they got the lesser half. The failed in the more important task of "walking in the presence of God," though they did at least try "being perfect." They missed that only God is perfect, and that only by turning to God can we even remotely approach being "perfect." There are, of course, virtuous pagans and virtuous atheists, just as there were virtuous pharisees.

On the other hand, the great majority don't strive for perfection, don't strive to be virtuous. It has become hip to claim that atheism offers us ethics and that pagans can live moral lives, a claim which is often made in the same breath as the statement that many Christians don't. Indeed. But we get an epicurean paganism and a hedonistic atheism (or "agnosticism" or "skepticism") more often than a virtuous one.

The failure of the Pharisee was not that he tried to be moral or that he had a complex morality; it was that he did this without necessarily trying to do it for God. He focused only on himself and how good he was--thereby indulging pride--while ignoring God and thus looking down on others. There is something worse than this, which is to utterly ignore others. Pride may be the worst of the seven deadly sins, but apathy does not belong only to sloth. To ignore--and, at times, actively block out--God is the worst thing we can do; to do the same to others is the next worst. But one compounds this by ignoring God, ignoring neighbor, and then ignoring one's own conscience and God's Laws (through which God does speak).

Ignoring God and man might be done passively, for the still small voice is hard to hear, and we must be vigilant against the pride and sloth which allows us to do this. This is where the Pharisees fail. But ignoring the moral law which God gave us, and indeed ignoring that somewhat louder voice of our own consciences: this is more active by far. It is a deadlier pride or a deeper sloth, because we must often work at it. Though we should not be satisfied to be like the Pharisees--trying to be moral, trying to be virtuous, but at the expense of being actually holy--there were worse men than these.

Some Links About Story

A few quick links about story and story-telling, mostly science fiction. The first come from Ace of Spades, who is talking about the sense-of-wonder which should be included in any good science fiction (or fantasy) story. This, in the context of the Godzilla remake:

I'm always wondering to myself: Where, when they were writing the script, did they expect a 10 year old boy (or the 10 year old boy in all of us, including in women) to go, "Wowww...!!!"
The only Wow factor they're offering CGI Cartoon shit happening faster and bigger.

This reminds me of why Metallica stopped playing speed metal. They realized that the competition in speed metal had simply become unidimensional -- it was simply to play things faster, and then faster, and then faster still, and then, when that got boring, to try playing things even faster.

What is the endpoint of that, they wondered? Is that a competition worth winning?
CGI hasn't had the effect of liberating filmmakers' imaginations -- it has had quite the opposite effect. CGI promises, they think, a guaranteed payoff: We'll just make our cartoons bigger, louder, and faster than they were last time, with more pixels and more texture-shading, and there you go. Art has been made.

But Bigger, Louder, Faster is a creative ditch just like speed metal's Faster Faster Faster....

And I don't care about Godzilla at all. I'm not a child. I don't care about giant monsters knocking about cities. I've seen this before.

In the last ten years, I've seen this kind of thing about 35 times now.

And blog favorite John C Wright continues his discussion of strong female characters, also in the context of science fiction and fantasy. I forget how many of these I linked the last time, so here's part 5, and here's part 6. Part 6 is especially worth the read. Instead of quoting some passages which are representative of the whole, I give these two nuggets from part 6:

"More truth is held in the pages of trashy romance novels than in all the worthless books penned by college professors."

"I read with some skeptical bitterness that when neurologists first started publicly admitting that there were neurochemical differences in brain structure between males and females, Gloria Steinem said that social conditioning could overcome this innate genetic predilections. I understand that the Left also says that homosexual attraction is caused by innate genetic predilections, but that to use any form of social conditioning to overcome such predilections is illegal in California. Consistency is not the strong suit of the Left."

Indeed. Here is a more representative passage:

The story logic requires that if a superheroine falls for a guy, he has to be virile and potent in relation to her, in some way her superior, so that she has something she thinks is sexy to admire and adore; and likewise she, even if she is physically stronger and shows directness and leadership and cooks outdoors and has great clumps of underarm hair and in every way is masculine and manly, she has to be shown as devoted, because fidelity is what sexually attracts men to women.

The old cliché of rescuing a damsel in distress is based on the idea that a woman rescued from danger by a man will be devoted to him, because ingratitude in such life or death situations was unthinkable, particularly for an admirable female lead.

Again, the logic of Political Correctness requires that men and women not be complementary because the concept of complementary strengths and weakness is not a concept that Political Correctness can admit, lest it be destroyed. The concept of complementary virtues undermines the concept of envy, and Political Correctness is nothing but politicized fury based on politicized envy. We can define Political Correctness as the attempt to express fury and envy via radical changes to legal and social institutions.

Quote of the Day: Chesterton on Nietzcshe and Nihilists

I have been re-reading Chesterton's story, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. I had just read the part in which a detective and an actor has infiltrated the anarchist council by playing the part of a nihilist and is telling his part of the story (spoiler alert for those who haven't read it):

"I am in profession an actor, and my name is Wilks. When I was on the stage I mixed with all sorts of Bohemian and blackguard company. Sometimes I touched the edge of the turf, and sometimes the riff-raff of the arts, and occasionally the political refugee. In some den of exiled dreamers I was introduced to the great German Nihilist philosopher, Professor de Worms. I did not gather much about him apart from his appearance, which was very disgusting, and which I studied carefully. I understood that he had proved that the destructive principle in the universe is God; hence he insisted on the need for a furious and incessant energy, rending all things in pieces. Energy, he said, was the All. He was lame, short-sighted, and partially paralytic."

I'm not going to turn this into a Nietzsche hate-fest post. I still don't like Nietzsche, and (after having spent a little more time with his writings) haven't found much there to convince me of his greatness as a thinker [1]. Actually, I've only heard/seen three people whom I respect really defend him: two friends who sort of share a name, and one well-respected Thomistic philosopher. The rest have said some nice things about him at times, but have largely said that he has done more harm than good (and a few have had nothing positive to say about him at all). I haven't read anything of his which convinces me otherwise, though I still haven't read enough to say that I am a Nietzsche expert, nor enough for a proper synthesis of his thought.

Suffice it to say that Chesterton's description of Professor de Worms is in fact his caricature of Nietzsche, the man who would not soften his heart and thus suffered a soften head (as Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy). But it is even better than a caricature of Nietzsche, whom a few good thinkers have admired and still more respected: it is a reflection of the many people who wanted to imitate Nietzsche's Nihilism without tempering it with Nietzsche's pessimism, or really his utter despair.

Nietzsche may be received by many today as the prophet of pessimism, or the doctor of despair. On the other hand, de Koninck has argued that Nietzsche did not quite go far enough: he wanted it all, but did not know what it all meant. And thus all that he wanted fell short of everything, just as the superman ultimately fell short of the Son of Man. Many of Nietzsche latter-day followers in turn fall short of his own desires: where he wanted it all yet despaired of getting it all, they start by wanting nothing and then end in despair of getting even that.

Nietzsche almost certainly knew that he would himself fall well short of being the superman--hence his despair and eventual madness. But Nietzsche might be credited for this foresight, since some of his other imitators failed to have this realization. The scholars say that Nietzsche would not have been a Nazi, but there were more than a few Nazis who would style themselves Nietzscheans: they would at the least co-opt some of his ideas for the superman and corrupt them to be a super-race. But the Nazis did not despair of finding their supermen, but rather embraced the idea as a sort of cult, employing every means to obtain that end: from eugenics to executions to "educational" propaganda. For all their optimism in  the overman, the Nazis ultimately only succeeded in creating several under-races, in particular the Jews.

It is entirely possible--and here I can only speculate--that Nietzsche realized only too late that the real superman is the saint. Neither Nietsche's superman nor the church's saints can in the end make themselves: though it seems to me that Nietzsche's superman must make himself, whereas the saint must be conscience that it is God Who makes men and transforms them from sinner to saint. Perhaps Nietzsche knew this, and perhaps this is why he ultimately sank further into the madness of despair. In rejecting God he not only lost grace, and truth, and goodness: he also lost his only chance to become a real superman by becoming a saint.


---Footnotes---
[1] This is not to say that I have found nothing at all. I largely disagree with him, but he has a few interesting insights along the way, and (equally as important) a few other insights which others have inferred from him. Also, his attempts at blasphemy make the the modern God-haters pale in comparison. There are also a few places where he seems to go wrong more by way of premise that by conclusion, though of course a bad premise will likely as not result in a wrong conclusion. Thus, he shows us what the world might look like without God and without hope.

Monsignor Pope and Mortal Sins

Monsignor Pope has a post about mortal sins, including five biblical lists (which are not by any stretch exhaustive). He notes that the one biggie that gets left of is failure to forgive, though I noticed another really big one: blaspheming the Holy Spirit. He pretty much avoids the Old Testament lists, which is understandable I guess since any reference to the Pentateuch elicits knavish remarks conflating (or really, intentionally muddying the waters) between morality/sins on the one hand and "religious disciplinary practices" (for lack of a better word) on the other. By this I mean that any reference to Deuteronomy or Leviticus gets some knee-jerk response about not weaving a garment of two type of thread, or not planting two crops in one field: anybody with a little common sense can figure out that these latter are symbolic of something else (namely, not practicing idolatry, serving as reminders to turn to God, etc). Still, these are some good lists to consider, since our culture is awash in sins of these kinds (and, frankly, celebrates these sins).

I also appreciated this exchange in the com box, in which someone disingenuously implies that Jesus never said anything about sexual morality, but only against the pharisees who judged others by their sins. The monsignor's reply was both direct and correct and charitable:

The quote from Revelation is Jesus Speaking. Further you might take a gander at few things Jesus said on the topic: 

Matt 5:27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’e 28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.Matthew 15:19 For out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. 20These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.” 

Messy enough for you? Please read scripture more carefully. Also avoid false dichotomies such as driving a wedge between what Jesus said or didn’t say from what his appointed apostles said. There is one Holy Spirit.

I really do wish people would stop kidding themselves about Christ's views of morality. He didn't exactly abolish the Law, nor did He ever say "I'm ok, you're ok, we're all ok except those pharisees." And, as the monsignor shows, Jesus did in fact speak against sinning in general sexual immorality in particular.

Quote of the Day: On Justice and Mercy

Father Dwight Longenecker has a interesting post-combo (for lack of a better term) about "Peace and Justice" Catholics and "Purity and Piety Catholics." I think the point of the post is to be irenic, to reconcile both the "conservative" and the "liberal" Catholics. It's practically a work of mercy to do this, and I think he gets some things right and some things wrong:

The left is wrong and the right is wrong and the left is right and the right is right.

Peace and justice Catholics are right to take a prophetic stance against corporate greed, governments that engage in unjust war, the destruction of the environment, racism and any form of injustice. They are right to stand up for the poor, the marginalized and those on the margins of society. They are wrong, however, when they foster dissent in the church and turn a blind eye to the moral teachings and the authority of the Catholic church. 

Too often when the Peace and Justice Catholics demand peace they really mean the appeasement of evil. Too often they mistake pacifism for peace. Similarly, they too often they call for justice for some oppressed group, but never think that justice would also judge their moral laxity. Why don’t the Peace and Justice Catholics demand justice for the millions of unborn babies that have been slaughtered? 

On the other side, the Piety and Purity conservatives are all for “family values”. They are opposed to same sex marriage, contraception, abortion and divorce. However they are too often silent about the injustice in our society. I’m shocked at the anti-semitism and subtle racism I sometimes hear within their ranks. I’m worried when their conservative family values are equated with a jingoistic, uncritical American patriotism and militarism. Why are the silent about the assault on the environment, the plight of immigrants and the widening wealth disparity in the developed world? Why do we hear so little about their involvement in the fight against hunger and solidarity with the poor? Why are they so often dismissive and hateful of everyone not like themselves?

He then goes on to say that we should all strive to be "Justice and Mercy" Catholics, a point I agree with. But. It seems like in the hurry to try and appeal to both sides, these kinds of posts often alienate a lot of people. My main beef is that while he picks on two sides which do exist, one of these two sides has a lot more representatives than the other.

His "silly caricature" of the liberal Catholics actually does describe many of the liberal Catholics I know. They say that it's important to care about the poor and downtrodden, and place primary concern on "social justice," then decide that social justice is best applied to calling for open borders and in-state tuition for "undocumented immigrants" and greater government social spending (a few of the better ones do, to their credit, volunteer in food pantries and soup kitchens and the like). And perhaps just as often, while they call of the government to spend more and more to accomplish less and less in the name of their faith, they openly oppose any attempts to regulate abortions, and (even more commonly) actively support the so-called "gay agenda" up to and including spending their time calling those of us who support traditional marriage bigots (I once was called this by a liberal Catholic friend for saying that I thought the sacrament of Holy Matrimony could only be received by a man and a woman regardless of what society as a whole does).

On the other hand, I find that his "silly caricature" of the "Piety and Purity" (conservative) Catholics really is mostly a caricature. I know one or two Catholics who are like this, but most of the conservative Catholics I know still do care about (and even volunteer to help) the poor and downtrodden, even if we exclude the poorest and most downtrodden of all (the unborn, and for that matter women in "crisis pregnancies"). Perhaps it is because I don't frequent the Latin Mass.

It seems to me that there is a second problem, related to the first. Suppose we grant the caricatures (e.g. that the "Purity and Piety" crowd is surly and grumpy and looks down on others, that the "Peace and Justice" crowd openly undermines Church authority, gleefully subverts the Church's doctrines, and actively flaunts the Church's moral teachings). Which is worse? The former is bad, I'll grant, in that it turns people off to the Church. But the latter is worse, in that it turns people off to the Church while saying that the Church is not something which is worth heeding even in principle. It muddies the waters, so that those who want to figure out what the Church really does teach are left confused.

I agree with Fr Longenecker, though, that both camps have room for improvement, and I like the "Justice and Mercy" idea, though I think that a better summary would be to say that the conservatives want justice without mercy, and the liberals want mercy without justice.

Quote of the Day: Gene Wolfe on Sex Abuse

I've been reading Gene Wolfe's Pirate Freedom, which is one of his newer works. It's also one with the most explicitly Catholic protagonist (the protagonist is a young man who time traveled to the past, became a pirate captain, then found himself in the modern world and became a priest). This is one of the more interesting exchanges in that book:

THERE WAS a meeting of all clergy last night. Fr. Wahl and I drove into town for it. Priests molesting"children" was the big topic. Bishop Scully tried not to show how he felt about it, but it leaked through.

"It has happened," he told us, "and happened right here in our diocese. More than one priest has sinned in this way. What is worse, priests who have confessed and been forgiven have sinned again. Every one of you must unite with me in opposing this sin, and report it to me whenever it occurs. Believe me, you are doing your brother no favor by concealing his sin."

After that, he detailed four cases without revealing the identity of the priests involved. When he asked for questions, those he got were pretty obvious. "How could we know a brother priest's sin unless the sanctity of the confessional were violated?" "Shouldn't a report be made to the police?" "How much was needed to settle these cases?" "Shouldn't a guilty priest be punished as well as counseled?" "Might not some priests be falsely accused?" An so on.

Finally, I stood up. I said, "When you began, Your Excellency, I thought I was going to hear about little girls being forced by priests, girls in kindergarten of first grade. That was what I expected. I used to run the Youth Center at Saint Teresa's. All the victims you talked about were boys, and it sounded like they were teenagers. I'm not used to thinking of teenaged boys as children, so it took me a while to get on top of what has really been happening. Isn't it our job to tell boys that they shouldn't put up with anything like this? I don't believe that there are many priests who would keep trying if the boy he was after yelled and swung a few punches."

After that I caught it from everybody--alright, to be fair is was not, but it seemed like it. I was blaming the victim. That was one of them, and both of the priests who felt like that piled it on strong.

I was encouraging violence. That was the other one and the most popular one. I was blamed for encouraging so much violence that I felt like I might be lynched. I never got the chance to defend myself in the meeting, so I am going to to do it here. I was not blaming the kids. I was blaming us grown-ups for teaching them to be victims.

If you teach a girl to act like a sheep, you do her quite a bit of harm. But if you teach a boy to be a sheep, you do a lot more. If the girl is lucky, there will be boys to protect her. But they have to be real boys, not sheep. A boy who has been taught will not protect himself of anybody else. If he is molested and does not fight, the people who taught him to be a sheep are at least as much to blame as the molester. Maybe more.

As for encouraging violence, I have to wonder how many of those priests who molested boys thought the boys wanted it and enjoyed it, even if they would not say so. Many of them--maybe all of them--must have thought that if a boy did not like it, he would yell and fight. The boys were the victims of those priests, I am not arguing that they were not. But those priests were the victims of the people who taught the boys that even a little bit of violence was the worst thing in the world. The priests had only one victim, or that is how it seems to me. Those people had two, because the priest was another. The tough kids who came to Saint Teresa's Youth Center would have coldcocked anybody who tried what those priests had done.

Gene Wolfe is notorious for using unreliable narrators, though I have seen these theme in his stories before (e.g. one of his short stories, about a reality television show in a dystopian future). Whatever Mr Wolfe (a Catholic, by the way) thinks about this, I can say that I actually sympathize with the narrator/protagonist above. Granted, it wasn't my first thought when I learned about the abusers, and I am skeptical about any claim that they might have been confused as to whether or not this was wrong (to put it mildly).

With that said, he does have a point, or really two points. The first (larger) point is that, in the words of C.S. Lewis, we have been raising boys to become "men without chests." They are too timid to really fight or even stand up for themselves. The second point is that it is not blaming the victim to say this, but rather in this case it is to point out that the victim was made a victim twice--once by the molesting priest, and once again by all of the other authorities (parents, role models) in his life who did not teach him to stand up for himself, even a little. Would he have won in a physical fight against a priest? Perhaps not, though I suspect that if a child came home with some bruises and/or bleeding the situation would have been resolved a lot quicker than it actually was, bad as this would be for the child. There certainly wouldn't have been more than one or two instances, and probably no repeat instances.

The whole thing would have been made a lot more public a lot more quickly in this case, which would have been for the best for everybody. Alternatively, the priest would have dropped it then and there (if he were smart), and perhaps no more incidences would have been forthcoming.

Boys are increasingly being taught that "violence never solves anything"--this comes from some good motives and some bad ones. Violence obviously should not be the first recourse, but at the point in time when sexual molestation is occurring the situation has already escalated to require more desperate measures form the victim. The result of this "no violence" campaign--which is, oddly enough, just old enough to have been picked up on by C.S. Lewis in his Abolition of Man, thus dating it to around the time that these abuses would have first begun--has been that we have raised now three generations of "men without chests," in which chivalry has slowly but surely faded from the manly virtues; the cardinal virtues of fortitude, prudence, justice, and temperance have all faded with it, and this is not a coincidence.

As Professor Budzisewski has observed in his book On the Meaning of Sex, the result is that rather than men becoming either knights (for the more spirited) or cads (for the less spirited), they have largely grown up to be either cads (for the more spirited) or poltroons (for the less spirited). So enters the next phase of C.S. Lewis' prophetic book, that of the trousered ape. I am sure that this may ruffle a few feathers, so there wil be two follow-up posts later this week.

Quote of the Day: Charles De Koninck on Beauty

I discovered the writings of Charles de Koninck a few years ago thanks to a fellow physicist-philosopher, and suffice it to say that I can't recommend them enough. The Charles de Koninck Project is doing a good work by transcribing and translating his works to English; today I went over to their site and found this post:

The intelligence as such is a certain concrete nature, it is a natural appetite of its proper object, the intelligible. Being, considered as a term of this appetite, has beauty as a transcendental property. That is to say that every being, as an object of intelligence, is beautiful. Consequently, although mathematical being, being only a being of reason, does not at all participate in goodness, and cannot be an object of will, nevertheless it participates in beauty. And thus, like every object of intelligence, mathematical being can be indirectly an object of will insofar as will desires the concrete good of intelligence. In effect, one can distinguish a twofold good of intelligence: the good of the object considered as term of the desire to know for the sake of knowing, which is beauty–pulchrum proprie pertinet ad rationem causae formalis–but it is also the good of the concrete act which entails knowledge in intelligence taken as nature, and this act is an object of will and causes in it this characteristic joy which is as a complement to contemplation. Without being essential to the beauty which is formally in contemplation, delight is a quasi per se accidens. The enjoyment proper to beatitude which consists in contemplation is consequently an enjoyment of the object of intelligence as object of intelligence; this enjoyment, which one can call aesthetic, is the most noble of all pleasures.

All beings--whether beings of reason or real beings--participate in some way in beauty. This makes sense (and yes, it can include the demons, as St Paul warns us in 2 Corinthians 11:14), that anything which is is beautiful, that it can be contemplated and appreciated for its beauty. Even the pagan philosophers recognized this (notable, Aristotle), though it took Christianity to show that this beauty ultimately points back to God, that while contemplation is among the highest acts of man qua man even here, that contemplation is elevated when it turns to God in prayer. It is further elevated in the next life, when it turns to the contemplation of God "face-to-face" in heaven.

And just as beauty in this life can be distorted (again, think of Satan, but think also of smut), so too do I think it will be distorted in the next life for those in Hell. They may contemplate God in fear and loathing, and do their own misery is increased by this loathing, this inescapable beauty upon which their backs are forever turned. Perhaps Hell is the realization that the heart's greatest desire is right there, behind you, but the inability to ever see it when you turn: always behind you, never before you.


An in related news, the Dominicana blog (St Joseph Province) has a post about modern music and heresy:

With this in mind, we return to the driver’s seat. When listening to popular music one is often most struck by the euphoria-inducing dance beat. It seems that much of the music played on pop stations is composed/generated/programmed with the intent that one dance to it at a club. Frustrated in such a pursuit, I find myself relegated to fist-pumping. And yet, when one goes in search of the other elements typically associated with music (melody, harmony, lyrics, etc.), the pursuit is many times in vain. The profusion of DJ mashups testifies to the fact that it is indeed possible to cut a record having only played four chords, and the staggering amount of forced and awkward rhyme (Yes, “man” does rhyme with “man”) makes evident a clear disassociation of modern music from substantive poetry. For example, take a song popular about four years ago: Apologize by Timbaland featuring OneRepublic. In the song, the primary artist’s sole contribution are the syllables “Eh, eh, eh” repeated some two dozen times to the exact same three notes at strategic points throughout. I note the phenomenon merely to suggest that musicality is no longer the primary criterion for the production and consumption of pop music. Where then can the casual listener turn the dial for solace?

We do get glimpses of heaven on earth--and Hell also.

Quote: Mark Steyn on Detroit's Downfall

Mark Steyn is one of my favorite political commentators. Here's his article on the Detroit bankruptcy fiasco:

Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the “arsenal of democracy,” and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land. Half a century on, Detroit’s population has fallen by two-thirds, and in terms of “per capita income,” many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards... 

The city’s Institute of Arts paid $300,000 for the original Howdy Doody puppet — or about the cost of 300,000 three-bedroom homes. Don’t get too excited — you can’t go to Detroit and see him on display; he’s in storage. He’s in some warehouse lying down doing nothing all day long, like so many other $300,000 city employees... 

With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we’re told that “innovation hubs” and “enterprise zones” are the answer. Seriously? In my book After America, I observe that the physical decay of Detroit — the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block — is as nothing compared to the decay of the city’s human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, which is about the same rate as the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled throughout the Seventies by a cannibal emperor. Why would any genuine innovator open a business in a Detroit “innovation hub”? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent president of the school board, Otis Mathis, which doesn’t bode well for the potential work force a decade hence.

I suspect that as our nation continues its decadent slump toward barbarism, stories like this will become more frequent.

Also, "If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit."

Quick Quote: Monsignor Charles Pope on "The News"

Monsignor Pope doesn't like the mainstram media much, either.

The news does not really seem to be the news. Either it is advocacy journalism, or it is simply trying to peddle crisis and controversy or just showing how shallow and debased our culture has become. The result for me was too much anger, anxiety, and even a sort of bitterness for “them” i.e. the people on the other side. 

Yes, I was being played. And I didn’t like it. And most of the people who were trying to play me and sell increasingly insulting news do not share my faith and even feel free to ridicule what I find sacred, holy and valuable.

Life would be better if "the news" was presented without "the views." I mean, is it so much to ask for a reasonably honest attempt to just report the events, sort of what happened, when, where, how, and who?

Quote of the Day: Fr George Rutler on the Moral Exploitation of Penguins

Another writer who is always delightful to read is Fr George Rutler. I suspect that he also gives excellent homilies. Here he is holding forth on the moral (or immoral) exploitation of penguins for ideological purposes (in this case, by the homosexualist movement):

While my contempt for the unfitting things that The New York Times prints is not effortlessly concealed, I was especially exercised by the way that declining journal has over the years used dolphins and other creatures, including the Chinstrap penguin, to promote an antinomian theory that unnatural sexual activity is okay.  Specifically, I allude to its article published on February 7, 2004 under the belabored title, “Love That Dare Not Squeak its Name.”  First of all, penguins do not “squeak.”  That is the sort of stereotyping that The New York Times general eschews, save in the instances of supply-side economists, black conservatives, and practicing Christians.  Penguins make various sounds: the African, Humboldt Galapagos and Magallanic penguins make a braying sound very much like donkeys, while the Yellow-eyed penguin trills, the King penguin sounds like a trumpet, and our immediate concern, the Chinstrap, has a shrill voice almost like a scream.  None of them, dear editors of The York Times, squeaks.  A simple trip to the Central Park Zoo would confirm this, and if those editors had made the trip, they would not have made their big mistake:  the announcement that some Chinstrap penguins are homosexual.

Polemicists exaggerate statistics as a matter of policy and The New York Times devotes its front page, “Style Section” and even obituaries to creating the illusion that there are far more, “non- heterosexuals,” than there really are.  Like the quest for the “gay gene” which, like the “missing link” is, as Chesterton pointed out, missing, a constant effort is afoot to find rampant unnatural activity in nature to justify it as a norm.  This is why “The Grey Lady” (or, “The Grey Person”) trumpeted like a King penguin a claim that two male Chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo, were attracted to each other. They claimed that Roy and Silo had been inseparable for nearly six years and rubbed their necks in “ecstatic behavior.” More than that, they eschewed female companionship...There was an added comment that Mr. Gramzay “never saw the pair complete a sex act, though the two did engage in mating rituals like entwining their necks and vocalizing to one another.”...

As members of the animal kingdom share with man to some degree the consequences of a fallen world, their behavior should not be taken as a model of prelapsarian perfection.  If, pace Cole Porter, even educated fleas do it, doing it a different way does not make it a right way. Even poor little lambs go astray.  Either accept that to go astray is not right, or you have to say that no one strays.  A few years ago in the San Diego zoo, an orangutan was upset by a woman’s hat and threw his own excrement at it.  This does not make him an arbiter of fashion, nor should dissolute penguins be cited as evidence in moral discourse.

Bonus for some continuity with yesterday's quote of the day (not a daily feature, incidentally) in that Fr Rutler also briefly bemoans the use of statistics to advance ideology. The whole column is worth reading, but I want to note a few things from the passage above. First, there is the assertion itself, summarized thus: if it is found in nature--in this case, if the beasts do it--then it is natural and thus normal and thus moral. Notice the string of assumptions here: that everything found in nature is natural, for one; that everything which is natural for the beasts to do is natural for men to do; that everything which comes naturally to men also is normal for men; and that anything which is normal is both moral and healthy.

This last point is questionable at best, as Fr Rutler notes: "As members of the animal kingdom share with man to some degree the consequences of a fallen world, their behavior should not be taken as a model of prelapsarian perfection."  So is the second assumption (anything which comes naturally for the beasts--or for a particular beast--is natural for men)--else we must justify anything from cannibalism, rape, and murder to spousal abuse and polygamy by noting that for some sets of animals, this is natural. Indeed, one of the comments on this post notes as much, stating tersely that "Ducks have forced copulation. Does that mean it's okay to rape people?" Elsewhere, we see similar questions [1] and comments [2].

As for the first assumption, it is reasonable to question just how common (or rare) a supposedly "natural" behavior must (or can) be. Several pairs of penguins in captivity have supposedly exhibited behaviors which are useful as propaganda for the homosexualist movement (though never before this last decade, apparently). But it was almost immediately after the first pair that this was trumpeted as "proof" that homosexuality is normal. Setting aside the question as to whether homosexuality itself is in fact natural, it is worth asking why a single pair of penguins living in an unnatural environment constitutes sufficient proof of anything's being "natural" let alone "normal," to say nothing of proof concerning "natural" and "normal" for men.

All things may be made clean in Christ, but not every means can be used to justify an ideology's ends. It doesn't stop them from trying.



---Footnotes---
[1] Question: "If I read the article correctly, it would appear all these "homosexual" penguins are found in captivity. Has this behavior been found to the same degree in the wild? Has this behavior been compared to humans "in captivity" - ie prison? Or am I just making a faulty generalization?"

[2] Comment: "Is it too obvious to point out that what is NOT observed among non-human animals is the very thing at the center of homosexual relationships - sodomy. The ridiculous homosexualizing of animal behavior withers under this fact."