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.

Mark Steyn misses the boat

It's not like the great Mark Steyn to miss the obvious. But he does just that in his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. On page 143, he discusses the famous "Christmas Truce" that spontaneously occurred on the Western Front in 1914:

One of the most enduring vignettes of the Great War comes from its first Christmas: December 1914. The Germans and British, separated by a few yards of mud on the western front, put up banners to wish each other season's greetings, sang "Silent Night" in the dark in both languages, and eventually scrambled up from their opposing trenches to play a Christmas Day football match in No Man's Land and share some German beer and English plum jam. After this Yuletide interlude, they went back to killing each other.

The many films, books, and plays inspired by that No Man's Land truce all take for granted the story's central truth: that our common humanity transcends the temporary hell of war. When the politicians and generals have done with us, those who are left will live in peace, playing footie (i.e. soccer), singing songs, as they did for a moment in the midst of carnage.

Steyn mentions the carols and the day, but misses their obvious significance. The truce didn't happen because of common humanity, but common religion. If the truce happened merely because of common humanity, then it might have occurred on any day... but it happened on Christmas Day. And they might have sung any old songs, but they sung Christmas carols.

If "common humanity" had anything to do with fostering peace, then men would not make war in the first place. Common humanity, in fact, is the primary cause - maybe the only true cause - of war, c.f. Cain and Abel.

God, Faith and Limited Government

Faith is necessary to believe in limited government. For limited government means that, for significant elements of our common life together, no one is in charge. How do we know that disaster will not ensue? This is where faith comes in.

One of the traditional notions we have lost is the doctrine of Providence. Belief in Providence is the belief that, even though it appears that no one is in charge, Someone really is. Disaster will not ensue. Since we are assured through our faith in God that disaster will not ensue, or, at least, that disaster will never be quite so bad as it appears, we may safely create zones of freedom in which no one is (apparently) in charge.

When the common belief in Providence is lost the world becomes a much scarier place. Now potential catastrophes reveal themselves as possible and even probable eventualities - from global warming to collisions with asteroids. Freedom that was once the expression of a mysterious Providence working itself out through history becomes a blind stumbling in the dark that will encounter catastrophe eventually - "if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit."

It's not just the fear of catastrophic anomalies like a killer asteroid that reflects the loss of belief in Providence. It is also the belief in slow, creeping doom of the kind expressed in John Derbyshire's We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism. Derbyshire is both a (secular) conservative believer in limited government and convinced, for a variety of reasons, that our present civilization is doomed. His response is essentially Epicurean: He advises seeking "private contentment in the present as the earth-pile rises." In other words, accept your fate and enjoy yourself while you can.

It is only scholarly, detached types like Derbyshire who will be satisfied with such a counsel of despair. People will look for hope. There are two alternatives: One is to recognize that the problems Derbyshire details in his book are not all intractable. In fact, many of them, like our failure to control our southern border, are susceptible to straightforward solution. An authoritarian government could solve the problem directly. But our republican system has not yet developed the will to act decisively with respect to immigration; and it may not do so before it is too late. An obvious alternative is to sacrifice certain republican principles to do what it takes to forestall our doom. In fact, we are not doomed; we are only doomed if we maintain the commitment to limited government even in the face of predictable, but avoidable, catastrophe. We can put someone in charge to deal with the problems before it is too late. Thus Derbyshire's conservative doom is, in the end, not really different from left-wing scaremongering of the type seen in global-warming hysteria. The difference is that the left-wingers take the obvious next step that Derbyshire doesn't: If society in its freedom cannot avoid putting so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it puts civilization in danger (the left-wing case), or cannot deal with immigration or the terrorist threat (the right-wing doom case), then freedom must be curtailed to the extent necessary to ensure the survival of civilization (the left-wing solution that is nonetheless implicit in Derbyshire's right-wing doom.)

The other alternative is to recover the traditional doctrine of Providence; and find hope in the faith that Someone is already in charge, and even if things don't look rosy, as long as we remain confident in faith no disaster that we cannot survive will occur. We can support freedom because we are not "doomed"; we are only doomed in the eyes of a blinkered, worldly viewpoint that cannot live in the mystery of a Will greater than its own.

It is the doctrine of Providence that is necessary to limited government.

The Leisure to Be Dead

One of the pleasures of reading the old writers of the supernatural is that, even if a story doesn't wind up being as scary as you hoped, you will invariably be treated to some wonderful examples of style. This was the case in Ambrose Bierce's "A Jug of Sirup" (from Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce).

Bierce develops an entire story from one captivating turn of phrase: "... well within a month Mr. Deemer made it plain that he had not the leisure to be dead." The irony of the story is that Mr. Deemer does not have the leisure to be dead because he never had (or permitted himself) the leisure to be truly alive. In fact, his ghostly appearance is little different than his living appearance: In both cases, he is utterly absorbed in the clerical work of running his general store. The story has a comic element in the mob that storms the store when it becomes known that a specter is appearing within. No one paid much attention to Mr Deemer when he was alive; now that he's dead, people fight for the chance to get a glimpse of him, a glimpse that is indistinguishable from the thousands of glimpses they had of him while he was alive. The crowd has no time for the substantial appearance of an ordinary man; it is only when he is a shadow of his former self that he generates any interest. Why do men prefer the ethereal to the substantial? Perhaps this is a form of original sin, since to prefer evil to good is to prefer the less substantial to the more substantial.

The deadly sins kill supernatural life, so the man who succumbs to a sin like sloth (as Mr. Deemer has) is already dead in the only way that matters. When he finally dies a bodily death, his existence is not substantially changed; for him, perhaps, he does not even notice that he is dead. The story shows two forms of sloth: The man entirely immersed in the cares of the world (Luke 10:41-42), and the crowd captivated by the phenomenal at the expense of the enduring.

Fixing What Isn't Broken

Enough with philosophy, let's talk about something important: The travesty that is the new packaging for Fig Newtons.

I've been eating Fig Newtons for more than forty years, and as anyone who knows me knows, there isn't much about food I'm passionate about other than Figgies. I am proud to be the inventor, as far as I know, of the excellent combination of Fig Newtons and Cheese. Anyway, Fig Newtons have had the same packaging for as long as I can remember, and there wasn't a thing wrong with it.

But I suppose the new MBAs at Nabisco needed to justify their existence by being "innovative", so they innovated a major backwards step in the Fig Newton experience. Why did they have to pick on my poor Figgies? Could they have at least thought a little before destroying the packaging?

The first time I saw the new packaging, I got a sick feeling in my stomach; the same feeling I got when I first encountered "fat-free" Fig Newtons. And just as my early-warning radar was right with respect to disgusting fat-free Figgies, so it was with the "improved" packaging. The stupid rip open, allegedly resealable top is too sticky and gloms onto my hand when I'm reaching for a cookie. The opening itself is too small, so I have the choice of either destroying several cookies to make room to reach the others, or ripping the packaging so the reseal is broken. The old Fig Newton "stacks" were handy to carry around; a stack was just the right size for a teenage snack (or a 40-year old snack, for that matter). The stack packaging could be manipulated with one hand, so you could handle the cookies and the TV remote at the same time. The packaging was about as efficient as possible since it barely took more space than the cookies themselves. Now I've got to deal with the decision of carrying around a handful of free-floating cookies or the entire monstrosity of packaging.

This is not progress.

Clive Cussler

I used to read Clive Cussler novels back in high school, and happened to see one of his latest, The Navigator (The Numa Files), while walking through the library the other day. So I checked it out to see how Cussler has stood up over thirty years. One Cussler pleasure I had forgotten was the occasional unintentional hilarity of sentences like this:

"The small-arms fire was constant but sporadic."

Logical vs Metaphysical Necessity

One of the problems I have with analytical philosophy is the tendency to fail to distinguish between logical and metaphysical necessity. Or, more precisely, it is to invert the priority of being and logic.

The Maverick Philosopher wrote a post the necessity of God that exemplifies this tendency.

The MP refers to "philosophers in the tradition of Anselm and Aquinas" who define God as a necessary being, and he takes them both to mean the same thing - logical necessity. But St. Thomas rejected Anselm's Ontological Argument precisely because he understood the necessity of God to be a metaphysical necessity, not a logical necessity.

Logical necessity refers to the relationships of the terms of propositions to each other. Thus a "logically possible world" is one that involves no propositional self-contradiction. No logically possible world can contain married bachelors, because bachelors are by definition not married. But there is no self-contradiction in supposing that a body can be at two different places at the same time; for example, that you could be in Boston and Binghamton simultaneously. That it is not possible for you to be in both Boston and Binghamton at the same time is a consequence of your incarnate nature; it is the nature of bodies as such that they occupy one and only one place. It is a metaphysical necessity. Thus "John is in Binghamton and in Boston" is logically possible, but metaphysically impossible.

When Thomists discuss the necessity of God, they mean that God is metaphysically necessary, not logically necessary. There is no logical contradiction involved in denying the existence of God. But it is to assert a metaphysical impossibility. The Thomistic arguments for God are all different ways of revealing this metaphysical necessity.