Pierre Manent on Western Civilization

From an interview quoted at First Things:

"We do not know when the trumpet will sound. I cannot answer you in the name of some “expertise”; I can only answer “by hope.” Christian hope is based on faith. I believe that, amid the crumbling of Western civilization, which has begun, the supernatural character of the Church will become, paradoxically, more and more visible. The hatred of the world will turn against it more and more clearly. More clearly than ever the fate of all will depend on the “little flock” of Christians."

On Twice A Year Catholics

"Judge not, that ye be not judged."

But does that mean I cannot think? I find it impossible not to think of twice a year Catholics when I am at Christmas Mass, and it is obvious that many of the congregants are unfamiliar with the Mass; and that many of them obviously have no respect for the Mass. Standing with their hands in their pockets, surreptitiously checking their iPhones, chatting with each other like they are at a pub. And of  course everyone goes to Communion, during which it is best to keep one's head down in prayer so as at least to avoid seeing how they take Communion.

Do not judge. I think that does not mean I must pretend I do not approve of such behavior. It means that it is not my place to condemn anyone for their behavior. That is the prerogative of God.

We are all sinners. Discovering the reality and nature of our own particular sins is a necessary process on the way to becoming closer to God. Although we are not to condemn others for their sins, it is generally easier to see sins in others rather than ourselves. But in seeing those sins, perhaps we can recognize the same sins in ourselves.

Consider a man, a father, who is divorced and sees his daughter at Christmas. At that time he gives her gifts, talks with her, plays with her, hugs and kisses her. He tells her how much he loves her. But after Christmas and into the New Year, the daughter calls and emails her father but gets no response. In fact this continues throughout the rest of the year; she regularly calls, leaves messages and gets no answer. Then at Christmastime the next year, her father again shows up with gifts, talks with her, plays with her, hugs and kisses her and tells her he loves her. He says he is sorry he didn't return her messages but he was very busy. But he is here now. Surely she understands. And this goes on year after year.

What is the daughter to make of this? Might she think her father is simply a liar and is using and cheating her, showing up once a year to get good feelings about pretending to be the father he is not? Might she not demand that he at least show her enough respect to be honest about their relationship? Instead he forces her to be complicit in the lies he tells himself. This is worse than indifference, for were he indifferent they would at least understand each other in their lack of a relationship. Her dignity would not suffer annual humiliation at his contrived intimacy.

What is Communion but a particular and deep form of intimacy that God has granted us? To take Communion indifferently or by rote or merely as just another part of the Christmas season, is to hug your daughter once a year at Christmas. Traditionally the Church has demanded of us that we make ourselves worthy of the Sacrament of the Mass through prayer and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Like all the Church's rules, this is for our own benefit so we don't find ourselves taking hugs from God without the prior respect for God that makes such intimacy true rather than a lie.

So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. (1 Cor. 11:27)

It is not for me to condemn once or twice a year Catholics. But I can learn from them the danger of taking Communion lightly, and renew my resolve to prepare myself properly for Mass.

Christianity and Disproof

Jerry Coyne, on p. 61 of his Faith vs Fact, asks the question:

It's a useful exercise to ask religious people what it would take for them to either abandon the "nonnegotiables" of their fath - like the view that Jesus was divine or that the Quran is the world of Allah - or to give-up on their faith entirely.

That's easy and well-known: Were the corpse of Jesus to be discovered, Christianity would be decisively disproven. And it's not so ridiculous as it might sound: We have in fact found the tombs of victims of Roman crucifixion.

Were the tomb of Mary to be discovered, especially with a body in it, that would disprove Roman Catholicism since the Church has taught the Doctrine of the Assumption authoritatively, but it would not necessarily disprove Christianity as such. But I would have a hard time continuing in Christian belief in such an event since my own faith is based on the historical witness of the Church.

Dawson on Barbarism

"We have learnt that barbarism is not a picturesque myth or a half-forgotten memory of a long-passed stage of history, but an ugly underlying reality which may erupt with shattering force whenever the moral authority of a civilization loses its control."
 -  Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (1950)

Dawson wrote those words in the wake of the barbarities of the Second World War. It is something we should remember as we deal (or avoid dealing) with the barbarities of radical Islam. Refusing to name evil for what it is by, for instance, merely talking about "extremism" and avoiding any mention of Islam in connection with contemporary terror movements, corrupts the moral authority of our civilization. For truth is the foundation of moral authority, and as we cede the latter we invite that ugly underlying reality to erupt - with shattering force.

Suicide by Pope?

The Maverick Philosopher asks:

"No doubt you've heard of suicide by cop.  Is the Catholic Church committing suicide by pope?  Francis the Foolish is now regularly coming out with silly statements.

 

This post is a stub. Perhaps I will finish it later.  Or you can take the ball and run with it. "

 

If the Catholic Church is what it claims to be - divinely authorized by Christ Himself and in fact the Body of Christ - then it cannot possibly commit suicide by Pope or any other means. The Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.

 

If it can commit suicide, or if a Pope could inflict fatal damage on it, then the Church is not what it claims to be and deserves to disappear from history. In such case a foolish pope is simply doing everyone a favor, including Catholics, by exposing a grand historical lie for what it is.

 

In either case there is nothing to fear from a foolish Pope.

Pope Francis and the Narrow Focus

So everyone is all abuzz about an interview with Pope Francis published by America. The New York Times take is here.

As usual, there is both more and less here than meets the eye. There is less in the sense that the Pope is not changing any doctrine or advocating the same. There is more in the sense that I don't think the NYT really understands what the Pope is getting at.

The issues mentioned by Francis - abortion, gay marriage and contraception - are peculiar obsessions of the Catholic Church in the West, particularly the United States. From a global perspective, the great challenges facing the Church are the persistent persecution of the Church in Africa and the Middle East, and the millions of people living in desperate poverty and hopelessness. You don't care much about gay marriage either way when your church has just been burned down or your kids have nothing to eat. And you don't start experimenting with gay marriage unless you are so wealthy and bored that you've got nothing better to do.

I think what Francis has done is give a subtle rebuke to Western Catholics for their self-obsession, and indicated that his priorities are not his priorities. It's not "all about us" anymore. Pope Francis is no more in favor of gay marriage than was Benedict XVI; the difference is that he's not going to give the West's obsession with boutique issues like gay marriage significance by spending time on it. Gay marriage is a rich nation's problem not a poor nation's.

That is what the NYT misses. It thinks the Pope is finally starting to think like it does. In fact, the Pope thinks the NYT's obsessions are so trivial as to be not worth bothering about. The "narrow focus" the Pope is rejecting is the narrow focus of the West on itself, as epitomized by the NYT.

Derbyshire on Scruton on the Church of England

From John Derbyshire's review of Roger Scruton's The Church of Somewhere:

Not all the mockery is well-founded. Roman Catholics jeer that the Church only exists because Henry VIII wanted a divorce. There is much more to be said than that. Henry's father had become King after decades of strife over who should succeed to the throne. Henry wanted to ensure a clear succession, for the peace of the nation, but his wife was barren. Scruton: "The refusal of the Pope to grant an annulment of Henry's first marriage was experienced by the King as a threat to his sovereignty." Henry was driven by rational statecraft, not — or not only — by sexual boredom.

So, the Roman Catholic jeer about the genesis of the Church of England in Henry VIII's desire for divorce is false because, for reasons of statecraft, Henry VIII wanted.... a divorce.

Derbyshire is my candidate for the most compulsively readable yet frustrating author on the web.

Jeff Jacoby on Papal Infallibility

Jeff Jacoby has an opinion piece in the Boston Sunday Globe today entitled "Supreme - but not infallible" which gives his take on the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall so I can't link to it here. But I can quote enough from the article to show that Jacoby misunderstands the doctrine.

Jacoby himself quotes several times from Lord Acton, a 19th century critic of the doctrine when it was affirmed at the First Vatican Council. "There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it" says Acton. But of course Papal Infallibility has nothing to do with sanctification, and the quote reveals the typical basis of the misunderstanding, which is to mistake the doctrine as being primarily about the Pope when it is really primarily about Jesus Christ. Paragraph 890 of the Catechism reads:

The mission of the Magisterium is linked to the definitive nature of the covenant established by God with his people in Christ. It is this Magisterium's task to preserve God's people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error. Thus, the pastoral duty of the Magisterium is aimed at seeing to it that the People of God abides in the truth that liberates. To fulfill this service, Christ endowed the Church's shepherds with the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals. 

 What is a "charism?" It is a gift from God, a grace; the infallibility of the Pope is therefore a gracious act of God primarily, and only secondarily an act of the Pope.

Jacoby compares the authority of the Pope with authority found in Judaism:

But infallible? As an observant Jew, I come from a religious tradition that has always expressed a very different view of religious leadership and authority. In normative Judaism, not even the greatest leader, the wisest sage, or the most renowned rabbi is infallible. The Great Sanhedrin of Jerusalem was the supreme legal and religious authority in ancient Israel: its 71 justices were required to be men of humility, integrity, and compassion, known as much for their scholarship in religious matters as for their wide-ranging knowledge of science, mathematics, and languages. Their credentials were stellar, and their rulings were final.

The appropriate Judaic comparison with the Pope is not the Great Sanhedrin, however, but with Moses being given the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. It would be an obvious mistake to suppose that those who hold the Ten Commandments infallible are guilty of supposing Moses to be some sort of superman or "sanctified." For Moses is merely the messenger, and whatever his personal sins and limitations, they are irrelevant to the status of the Ten Commandments, the author of which is God. Similarly, when the Pope pronounces authoritatively from his office on matters of faith and morals, it is not he who is the author of the opinion, but God, and God is not fallible despite the flaws of his servants. Whether the Pope is a great leader or the wisest sage has nothing to do with it.

Jacoby also quotes Acton's famous aphorism about power: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." With respect to the Pope, this is a confusion of power with authority. For the doctrine of Papal Infallibility is actually a limit on the power of Popes; the current Pope is bound by the infallible pronouncements of all previous Popes. Those who say that the essence of Protestantism is that it makes every man his own Pope haven't quite gone far enough. The ordinary Protestant is not bound by the decisions of any other Protestant or even his own prior decisions, as the Pope is bound by all prior Papal pronouncements, his own as well as others. Protestant Pastor Joe may get up one day and after reading his Bible one more time, decide that John 6 really does mean that Christ is literally present in the Eucharist, and may preach that from his pulpit that evening. But Pope Francis can never get up one day, read his Bible to the effect that the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist is hooey, and preach the same that evening, for the doctrine of the Eucharist is settled and unchanging, no matter how wise or profound a skeptic of the doctrine may be.

The article ends with Jacoby telling us that

Pope Francis is described by those who know him as modest and self-effacing, committed to a church "that does not so much regulate the faith as promote and facilitate it." You don't have to be Catholic to pray that the cardinals have chosen well, and that the 266th pope will lead with wisdom, honesty, grace and an understanding heart. Ultimately it is those qualities, not "infallibility", on which the success of his papacy will depend.

Infallibility is another name for the promises Christ has made to the Church to be with her always; if the success of the papacy does not depend on it, then it doesn't depend on Christ or, in other words, it isn't what it claims to be and is really just another man-made institution. In that case, it really does come down to the personal qualities of the Pope. But, then, how could the Pope be wise and gracious if he is gravely mistaken about the very nature of his office?

The Pope and Conservatism

The Maverick Philosopher has a post here on the recent election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis. He notes that people drawn to religion tend to be of a conservative bent and that conservatives don't like change, tolerating it only when necessary. In his view, "The Church ought to be a place of stability and order, an oasis of calm, a venue where the ancient is preserved as a temporal reminder of the eternal." The Mav is not at all approving of the election of Pope Francis.

I am certainly of a conservative bent, and am sympathetic to preserving the ancient, but this misses the essence of Christianity. Christianity is not primarily about the eternal, or remembering the eternal, but is the news that the eternal has broken into the temporal in a decisive way. This gives the Catholic Church a fundamentally revolutionary nature despite its ancient Sacraments and rituals. Or, rather, the Catholic Church embodies the paradox of ancient rituals in service of ongoing revolution. Chesterton captures this perfectly in his description of Christianity as the "Eternal Revolution."

The mission of the Church is to preserve and proclaim the Gospel to the world, and to provide the concrete encounter with Christ in the Sacraments. The conservative aspect of the Church comes from the fact that it is the authorized proclaimer and interpreter of the Gospel, but is not its author and has no authority to modify or "improve" the Gospel message in any way. Christ established the means of transmission of the Gospel through a Church founded on twelve hand-picked apostles, the successors of whom are the bishops, and the Church has no authority to modify this structure (by making the Church a democracy, for instance, or making the authority of bishops subservient to biblical scholars).  The revolutionary aspect of the Church comes from the fact that the Church is charged with challenging the world (and itself) with the Gospel, as Christ challenged the world when he walked the Earth. The paradox of this revolutionary challenge is that it loses its force as it is routinely proclaimed; the words are worn down to nubs and gradually lose their ability to effectively communicate, and the Church, despite itself, settles into a worldly conservatism that has nothing to do with the genuine conservatism of the Gospel. At such times a radical personality is called for, one who renews the Gospel challenge, with words, yes, but words proclaimed in new ways and also, and perhaps more significantly, with his actions - a St. Francis.

Our new Pope seems to capture this truly Catholic paradox of the Eternal Revolution. The progressive types aren't even writing their usual false hopes that the new Pope will change basic doctrine on abortion or married priests, as Francis has been rock solidly orthodox on doctrinal matters. On the other hand, Francis's ascetic life, obvious humility, and public eschewals of the perquisites of status are an existential rebuke to our indulgent, celebrity obsessed and self-absorbed culture. Just the man the times call for, it seems.

The Pope and the President

The contrast between our new Pope and the current President is hard to miss. Francis is a man who eschewed the episcopal palace in Buenos Aires in favor of a small apartment, road the bus around town instead of a limousine, did his own cooking in his apartment, and frequently wore the simple cassock of an ordinary priest. Barack Obama, famous for the crease in his tailored pants, has given new meaning to the Imperial Presidency with his lavish lifestyle, hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities, and 40 car motorcades to go golfing with Tiger Woods. Not to mention his patent disdain for the common people ("bitter clingers") he supposedly champions.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, of course, has embraced a specific religious calling that involves simplicity and sacrifice that Obama has not. Nonetheless, the office of the President of the United States was created in specific contrast to the prerogatives of the European royalty against which Americans originally rebelled. The Presidency was supposed to be a secular office of limited power and perquisites, elected to perform certain specific functions necessary to the maintenance of a free republic. It has now been transformed to the point that, as Mark Steyn notes, the yearly maintenance of the Presidency costs more than that of all European royal houses put together.

There is a reason the Catholic Church has endured for more than 2,000 years, and the secular democracies of Europe and, now, the United States, may be entering their twilight years after no more than 200. The broken nature of man, a consequence of original sin, is a fact for secular democracies as much as it is for the Church, even if the former do not acknowledge it; and the only cure for original sin is submission to the Divine Physician.

The great puzzle for secularists is why the Church hasn't disappeared after its many failures and scandals. The reason is that the Church is under no illusions about the fallen nature of man, and does not hope in itself in the manner of a political institution, but places its Hope in the Savior, who promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. So when yet another scandal occurs, as in the recent Vatileaks brouhaha, the Church does not lose hope, but finds that God has raised a simple priest from Argentina to reform it. In contrast, our nation seems unable to correct itself from the path of spending, debt and crushing government regulation that is driving us to ruin; at a time when we desperately need a man of virtue to restore simplicity, transparency and frugality to our government offices, we put in place a man who seems to think of himself as Good King Barack the First, and us his subjects who should be duly awed.

Catholicism and Soccer

Nicholas Farrell asks why Catholic countries are so good at soccer:

"The Holy Roman Church of Football":

"Maybe it is because Catholics prefer sport to work and that is where they direct their energy and passion. For as Weber wrote and my wife Carla confirms: To Catholics work is an obstacle, not a means, to salvation."

Or, in other words, Catholics work to live rather than live to work.

The Church and Fallibility

Imagine someone hearing of Christ and his claims to be the Son of God, and goes to listen to him. Later, a friend asks him what he thinks, and he says:

"Well, I am convinced he is truly the Son of God, but I can only accept 99% of what he ways. 1% of it I find morally repugnant."

This is essentially what people are saying when they say "I'm Catholic but I think the Church is wrong about X." The Catholic Church holds itself to be authorized by Christ Himself to speak with His voice, guided by the Holy Spirit. If you think it can be mistaken on a matter of faith and morals, then it means you either think God can be mistaken about such things, or that the Catholic Church doesn't really speak with His voice. Either way, your difference with the Church's understanding of itself is not trivial but fundamental. It doesn't matter whether you disagree with 1%, 10% or 100% of the teaching; the logic follows no matter the percentage.

Suffering

These posts (here and here) at the Secular Right blog, and recent family events, have led me to reflect on the meaning of suffering. What I write below is not particularly original, but having read similar things for many years, it is only now that I am truly beginning to understand what was meant.

The first thing we must understand about suffering is that it is unavoidable to some degree. The question then, is not whether we need to seek out suffering, but how we handle the suffering that life inevitably inflicts on us. Of course everyone agrees, secular and religious, that suffering should be minimized to the extent reasonably possible. The Catholic Church is the sponsor of hospitals and relief agencies throughout the world. I read somewhere that the Church is the single largest organized provider of such services; I don't know if this is true, but there is no doubt that the Church actively supports such activities in a big way. Clearly then, when the Church asks us to do things like "embrace suffering", she doesn't mean that we should needlessly endure suffering.

Despite our best efforts, however, some suffering in life is inevitable. In fact, quite a lot is inevitable. The basic metaphysical fact that our being includes a body that can be damaged means that suffering is a possibility in our existence; even if such physical suffering never becomes actual, its possibility causes anxiety which is itself a form of suffering. So as soon as we come into the world, we begin to suffer in one way or another. How shall we respond to the suffering that is unavoidable? This is the question of suffering that we all must face, religious or secular.

Furthermore, it is not obvious that avoiding suffering is the greatest good; there may be goods that we can obtain only through suffering, but that are worth obtaining even through suffering. In fact, it is obvious that there are such goods. Every child who endures vaccination shots has experienced this truth. And every parent who disciplines a child, even though such discipline causes suffering, knows that the suffering is worth it. (Both for the parent and the child. Remember "this hurts me more than it hurts you?") So the principle that "suffering should be minimized to the extent reasonably possible" takes a lot of unpacking, since it must involve a judgment with respect to goods obtainable only through suffering, and the degree of suffering that is reasonable in attempting to attain them.

My problem with the typical secular approach to suffering, as illustrated in the two posts linked to above, is that it never addresses this question, or even seems to be aware of it. In Andrew Stuttaford's post, he quotes a father grieving over the death of his daughter, a father who rages against what he takes to be the religious interpretation of suffering. I will not take issue with a grieving father, but I only note that Stuttaford offers no alternative interpretation of suffering. He simply agrees that the religious interpretation is unacceptable and moves on. In other words, he avoids addressing the question of suffering head on.

Is it merely accidental that Stuttaford quoted a grieving father in his post? If we begin to understand what Christ teaches us about suffering, we will see that it is not. For love is one of those great goods that is not obtainable without suffering. This is one of the meanings of the Cross. We live in a world where everything born must suffer and die; therefore, as soon as we love, we are presented with the fact that what we love will decline and disappear in one way or another. This knowledge in itself causes suffering, something every father or mother knows. As soon as a child is born, we are already anxious about all the things that can go wrong for him. And the more we love the child, the more anxious we become.

If we embrace love, then, we must also embrace the suffering that accompanies it. If we wish to avoid suffering, we must also avoid love. We see this happening in the fact that people no longer have love affairs, but "relationships." A relationship is understood to be an essentially temporary thing, makeable or breakable by either party at will, and so successfully avoids the deep entanglement  - and suffering - that a genuine love affair would involve. But if we wish to have real love affairs, and to love deeply, how can we deal with the suffering that we know must come our way?

This is what Faith and Hope are about, the two theological virtues supporting the supreme theological virtue of Love. Christ loved greatly and so suffered and died on the Cross; but that is not the end of the story. The Resurrection shows the far side of suffering when suffering is undergone in union with Christ. In Christ, there will be life and love when all appears hopeless, destroyed and finished. The key word is appears; for in this life, there is no "proof" that we will be experience a resurrection after suffering; all we see and know is the suffering and its apparent finality. But Christ reveals that suffering and death are not necessarily final; in Faith, we embrace the possibility through Him that it is not final, and through Hope, find the strength to face the suffering that will come our way through love. This is what Christians mean when they talk about "embracing suffering." It means not turning away from the suffering that love brings, but facing it and enduring it through the strength of Christ, for our own strength is not sufficient for the journey.

Absent a connection to Christ, how will we endure suffering? We all have greater or lesser natural gifts in this regard, but natural gifts are different in kind from the divine gifts flowing from Christ. Without Christ, we are simply unable to endure the suffering true love entails. So we find ways to avoid it: At the end of life by embracing suicide, or at the beginning of life by embracing abortion, and in the middle of life by avoiding the deep commitments true love involves.

John Paul II, Youth and Hope

 An impression John Paul II always made on me, even in his last days, was that he was essentially a young man. I've not encountered anyone else who has made such an impression, and I've pondered off and on for years what could be the source of this impression.

The youthfulness of JPII is different than, say, the boyishness of Robert Redford or Brad Pitt. It expresses something deeper, as though JPII expressed throughout his life the essence of what it means to be young . Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that JPII expressed the virtue of youth, or the virtue that is best expressed through youth. The most apt comparison I can think of is the wizard Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf expresses the essence or virtue of what it means to be old; in Gandalf's case, that virtue is obviously wisdom. Wisdom is the prerogative of age, and the wise man is essentially old, as Socrates is already old when he appears in Plato's dialogs. And so when we imagine Gandalf, we imagine him as eternally old. We can't imagine Gandalf a young man.

The virtue of hope is essentially expressed through youth, and I think it is because JPII so thoroughly embodied hope that he struck me as essentially young. Hope expresses confidence with respect to the future (although not in the future; we hope in God for the future).  With respect to the future we are all young, so hope is the virtue of the young. If one has hope, even if he is 90 years old and physically decrepit, he is young.

I wonder if our culture's worship of youth is an expression of despair; we are without hope and so long for the one period of life when hope, or the appearance of hope, was a possibility. But as Kierkegaard pointed out, such "hope" is not genuine but an aesthetic suspension of the self in possibility. As long as we have the possibility of becoming many things, but have not yet become any, the illusion of hope is before us. But as soon as any possibility is actualized, it must be at the expense of other possibilities ("opportunity cost", although Kierkegaard didn't call it that) and the pseudo-hope of youth disappears. So the aesthetic self chooses to remain in the realm of possibility, not really becoming anything at all, and so retains for itself the illusion of hope; but it is only an illusion and nothing but a yet deeper expression of despair.

JPII appears youthful even in old age because he was the apostle of hope. True hope is not intoxicated with possibility, nor does it suspend itself in the possible without ever becoming actual. True hope is anticipation of what is to come on the far side of actuality; it is longing for the consummation of possibility in actuality. John Paul II was one of the most actual men who ever lived. I'm tempted to use the word commitment with respect to him, but commitment has a voluntaristic tint to it that reflects more our modern subjectivist orientation than what JPII was about. Submission may be a better word because it has an objective orientation; we submit to things that are outside of and greater than ourselves; we "commit" to "values" the significance of which is grounded in our own will. True marriage is a submission rather than a commitment. John Paul II's life was animated by a deep submission to God, and so was grounded in true hope for what will come on the far side of that submission.

The Approach to Saints

What's most interesting about Andrew Stuttaford's comments concerning St. Thomas More and the Pope is what it reveals about the difference between the atheist and Catholic approaches to the saints. Stuttaford seems most concerned to arrive at a measured evaluation of the person Thomas More. To this end, he calls on the British biographer Peter Ackroyd to provide balance to the Pope's comments. But he seems to have missed entirely what the Pope is talking about.

Benedict is not concerned to burnish the reputation of St. Thomas as a "fighter for freedom of conscience", as though the saint's importance can be found in laying the groundwork for the First Amendment. In fact, the worldly reputation of More is of no concern to Benedict, as it was of no concern to More. Indeed, More was not fighting for any worldly goal, freedom of conscience, or otherwise. His great witness was to the fact that there are some things that transcend worldly goals, and are not negotiable in their terms.

The secularist cannot see that the appreciation of a saint is not about a careful weighing of the plusses and minuses in his life. It is about the window into the transcendent that the saint reveals; sometimes in the broad manner of her life, as in St. Therese of Lisieux; but sometimes also in a moment of dramatic crisis, as in the life of St. Thomas. Thomas was a man immersed in the cares, problems and compromises of his time; the secularist wants to judge him in terms of his decisions on these worldly matters. But the important thing about Thomas is that, despite his immersion in the world, he never became of the world, which the secularist is by definition. This is why St. Thomas is important to Benedict, and why he should be important to us. 

Is the "priest shortage" a blessing?

I sometimes wonder if the so-called "priest shortage" in the American Church is not a blessing. We have a presumptuous attitude to the Eucharist in this country: Everyone takes Communion and hardly anyone goes to Confession. But then it is a very dangerous thing to eat of the Body and Blood of the Lord unworthily: See 1 Corinthians 11:23-27. Perhaps the declining number of priests is God's merciful way of helping us avoid such a serious sin...

That, by the way, reveals something about the nature of the priest shortage. There is no shortage of priests when I (not frequently enough) go to Confession. Usually there is no line and, sometimes, the priest is startled to see someone show up. So as far as the Sacrament of Confession goes, there is no shortage. In fact, we've got more priests than we need. Now we should not be taking the other Sacraments like Marriage or the Eucharist unless we are first taking the Sacrament of Confession. So, really, there is no shortage for those Sacraments either, for only as many Catholics going to Confession should be going to Eucharist. Again, I wonder if the "priest shortage" is God's way of guiding us into a right approach to the Sacraments, his way of putting an end to the abuse of the Sacraments.

Chesterton on Thriving Religion

One of my favorite pastimes is reading at random through Chesterton's old Illustrated London News columns, which have been collected by Ignatius Press. They are always worth reading for the style, and every so often you come across a gem... like his column for January 11, 1908, "The Survival of Christmas."

Just like today, the skeptics back in 1908 were predicting the imminent demise of Christianity, including the celebration of Christmas.

I have been reminded of all this by the inevitable discussions in the current papers about whether the keeping of Christmas is destined to die out, whether Christmas itself will disappear.

GKC immediately answers with one of his trademark paradoxes:

Of course, Christmas will not disappear. Christmas is one of those very strong things that can afford to boast of its own approaching disappearance.

Chesterton never writes like this merely to be clever. He uses the startling paradox as a way to shake the reader out of his common (and probably modernist) preconceptions, and open him to a deeper point. The point in this column is, I think, the supernatural life that animates the Christian religion.

How is this supernatural life made manifest? One way might be the way of direct supernatural glory, as in the voice of God emanating from a burning bush or the Lord transfigured in a supernatural light. But there is another way, a via negativa, that reveals supernatural life paradoxically in that which should die, but doesn't. The supreme example is, of course, Christ, who should be dead and buried forever in His tomb, but nonetheless appears alive in the Resurrection. Christ sets the pattern for everything Christian. The Christian can boast of the impending demise of Christmas because, by all natural reason, it should disappear, as all natural traditions inevitably disappear; yet the Christian knows through faith that Christmas will never disappear because its life is not really that of a natural tradition, despite appearances. In general, Chesterton tells us in a wonderful turn of phrase, Christianity "could thrive as a continual failure." (Chesterton speaks here in terms of Christianity rather than the Catholic Church because this was written prior to his conversion.) It is this thriving in failure that paradoxically reveals the hidden supernatural life in the Church.

What is the consequence of this supernatural life? The philosopher seeks happiness, but Christianity, Chesterton says, asks a man not if he is happy, but if he is alive.

Philosophers are happy; saints have a jolly time. The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one's heart or thickening one's head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence. This is why religion always insists on special days like Christmas, while philosophy always tends to despise them. Religion is interested not in whether a man is happy, but whether he is still alive, whether he can still react in a normal way to new things, whether he blinks in a blinding light or laughs when he is tickled. That is the best of Christmas, that it is a startling and disturbing happiness; it is an uncomfortable comfort. The Christian customs destroy the human habits. And while customs are generally unselfish, habits are nearly always selfish. The object of the religious festival is, as I have said, to find out if a happy man is still alive. A man can smile when he is dead.

That last image of the smiling dead man is one of the elements that makes Chesterton so worth reading. Chesterton is sometimes accused of being glib or superficially clever, or dismissed for not brooding on the darker side of life as is the modern fashion. But the image of the smiling dead man is as horrifying as anything in M.R. James, and all the more effective for coming on the reader all of a sudden; at least in James, we expect and are indeed hoping for the disturbing specter. This dark undercurrent is a subtle but pervasive presence in GKC's writing, and is worth more than thousands of pages of existential angst from someone like Sartre.

Only the Holy Spirit Can Save the Church

Peggy Noonan has an article today in the Wall Street Journal, entitled How to Save the Catholic Church.

There is only one Person Who can save the Church - the Holy Spirit. If the Church is not guided and protected by the Holy Spirit, then she won't and shouldn't survive, for she is a fraud. If she is guided by the Holy Spirit, then why doesn't Ms. Noonan mention Him? Her article bears no reference at all to the transcendent. The sort of worldly thinking it embodies is nothing but a temptation.

It is naive to think that shuffling personnel and bringing in "new blood" will "fix" the problem in the Church that led to the scandals. Is the younger generation somehow protected from sin in a way that the older generation was not? The only thing bringing in new blood will do is bring in new sins. Ironically, it's worldly thinking that got the Church in trouble in the first place. Bishops treated grievous sins against nature as matters for therapy or, as Noonan mentions, "quirks." The answer isn't to work better to get the worldly thinking right, as though the problem is purely one of organization, but to recognize once again the truly horrible power and reach of sin, and that only through the power of the Spirit can we ever face it.

The Leaky Ship

A man sits along a wharf watching the ships come in. He sees an old sailing ship limp into port, a ship clearly hundreds of years old and in poor condition, so poor that the man wonders about its seaworthiness. It ties up to the pier and the crew disembarks; there appears to have been no passengers.

A crewman walks by. The man asks him, "What is this ship, and why do you have no passengers?"

"This ship is the Richard Charles," the crewman answers. "We never carry passengers into this port," he continues. "Only out."

"And to where do you sail?" the man asks.

"Across the sea," comes the enigmatic answer.

"I am not sure I would chance the sea in such a ship."

"Oh, we have made the voyage hundreds of times, and have always arrived safely. Perhaps you might wish to inspect the ship more closely?"

The man has no desire to go on a voyage, but is curious about the ship. He accepts the crewman's invitation. As he comes closer, he notices that the ship is in even worse shape than he thought. There are holes in the sails, the rigging is ragged, the paint chipped and there are obvious cracks in the hull. The crewman leads him belowdecks, and the man sees holes through which water is pouring into the ship. Several crewman are at work patching them, but with a leisure that belies the seriousness of the situation.

"Hadn't we better help them, before the ship goes down?", the man asks. "Where is the rest of the crew?"

"We need not worry; the ship may leak, but it will never sink," answers the crewman. "Let us continue our tour."

The man finishes his tour, and on his way out, takes a closer look at one of the holes. It is not recent; in fact it is so worn that there is no doubt that it has been there many years. Has water been pouring into the ship for all that time?

Back on the pier, the man notices that the ship has not settled at all in the water since he boarded it. The crewman again asks him, "Would you like to travel across the sea with us?"

"The ship will not sink?"

"No; the ship may leak and the voyage may be rough, but I can promise you that the ship will never sink and that we will succeed in the voyage."

The man believed him.

The Tipping Point

I generally don't write about politics on this blog, but last night's events are too much to ignore. John Derbyshire is at his best writing about moments like these.

I tend to share Derbyshire's political pessimism, but not his general pessimism, since I believe the world is in the hand of a God Who has already saved it. God has promised that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against His Church, which is the only reason it is still around after two thousand years, but He has made no such promises regarding any particular political arrangements, including the arrangements detailed in the U.S. Constitution. They will come and go like any other political arrangements and, as Derbyshire points out, the normal political situation for humanity is rule by imperial despotism. We are slowly but surely headed back to this natural state of affairs. Conservatives will continue to manage some tactical victories, as the Wehrmacht continued to do against the Red Army after the Stalingrad debacle, but the strategic war has been lost.

The reason our constitutional arrangements are doomed is that they take for granted that the focus of citizen's lives will be something other than government. Government is an evil, albeit a necessary one, that establishes the framework within which individuals may pursue the true meaning of their lives, a way discovered by themselves and left unspecified by government. The main purpose of government is to protect the freedom within which the individual pursuit of meaning may occur. Conservatives tend to live according to this model, and do not like spending their time or energy thinking about government, since the focus of their lives is somewhere else (e.g. their family, their Church, their business..) I count myself in this group.

But there are always people for whom the improvement of the world through government action provides the primary meaning of their lives. Government, for them, is not a secondary thing to which we must devote some time before getting on with the primary things, but the primary thing itself. These people never get tired of trying to expand the size and scope of government, no matter how many defeats they may suffer, since the battle itself is primarily meaningful for them. Not so for their conservative opponents. The conservative congratulates himself on a tactical victory in holding back the incipient forces of government despotism, then returns to his Church, his family, and/or his business. Soon the "progressive" forces are back, with a new and even bolder plan to expand the government, based on the lessons learned from their prior defeat. Meanwhile, the conservative has not been planning how to defeat the next progressive assault on liberty, since he does not see the point of his life in battling progressives, but in getting on with his personal adventure in family, Church or business. This time the conservative loses the battle, and government expands accordingly. The conservative goes back to his life, and soon the progressives are back with yet another attempt at the expansion of government at the expense of liberty, and on and on...

This is why conservatives occasionally slow down the progressive destruction of liberty, but never roll it back. To roll it back would require a dedication to government on the order of a progressive, a lifetime commitment to actively counterattack the progressive Leviathan that matches the progressive dedication to feed the Leviathan. But the conservative is just the man who finds the meaning of his life in something other than the government and its workings. The conservative will never match the progressive passion when it comes to government, and when he tries, he finds himself becoming what he hates, as the Republicans became increasingly indistinguishable from Democrats the longer they stayed in power in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

I believe the Obama progressives know this, and understand that ObamaCare will never be rolled back by conservatives, because conservatives will never match the lifelong passionate commitment of progressives to sustain it. There will be a backlash against Obamacare in the 2010 elections, for sure, but soon after that, when it becomes clear that Obamacare is something that will take a long time of dedicated commitment to reverse, people will learn to live with it. It doesn't really matter what its costs or benefits are. The question is whether you will change the focus of your life away from your family and Church to the mission of rolling back Obamacare. The answer of most conservatives will be: No. Government and its workings is not the point of my life, and I will not make it the focus of my life, for then I will have lost in an even more fundamental sense.

This is the fatal paradox for conservatives, which is that preserving a political regime based on freedom requires a distinctly unconservative commitment to politics. It's why the natural political state of man is despotic rule.