Catholic Metanarrative

Article: The Humility of Science, the Arrogance of Scientists

2012-02-01T14:49:00.001+08:00

ANTHONY ESOLEN

I have no intent to demean scientists. I wish merely to see them for what they are, and to see their work for what it is, and to protect the polity from placing too much trust in their unacknowledged priesthood.

According to Aristotle, the nature of investigation and the proofs we assert depend upon the object. That is, we do not look for mathematical demonstration when the object of our study is not a mathematical object. It is even a reduction to dissolve a simple inanimate thing, like a quartz crystal, into a mathematical model, as useful as that reduction may be for certain practical purposes. That is because of the irreducible particularity of created being — that a crystal is not any crystal, but this one, both like all others and unlike, a unique manifestation of the crystalline essence. If the particularity or thisness of an inanimate object escapes us, then all the more must the particularity of personal being transcend any generalizing analysis.

We are, as Hans Urs von Balthasar points out in The Truth of the World, far more than objects about whom true statements may be made. We are ourselves the receivers and the proclaimers of truth; and in no two persons is the same truth made manifest in the same way. Just as amoment of truth-receiving or truth-telling is unique and unrepeatable, since never again will a truth be shown in the world in quite the same way, so too the persons, the truth-bearers, are unique and irreplaceable. There is simply no way a general statement can capture the fullness of the moment when John, a student of mine, comes to the awareness that goodness is independent of opinion, even his own opinion; when he gathers into his own subjective being, in his intensely personal way, a truth whose roots extend deep into the mystery of being itself.

When I consider how my mind was spent, when I was young and full of foolish pride, on proving how all things were filled with numbers, the philosophical naivete of it all is now for me a most acute embarrassment. Mathematics, and the sciences that employ mathematical tools, bring us to a fine field of truth, and we should be grateful for that truth. Without it we could not live in the comfort that we have wrung from our domination of the natural world. We would be bound in our travels to the legs of horses, or the winds at sea. We could not fly. And yet — to quote that young philosopher Francis Marion Tarwater in Flannery O'Connor's story, "Buzzards can fly." A physicist can tell me how a winged object can stay in the air. But he cannot, insofar as he is a physicist alone or even a biologist alone and not also a man like all other men, tell me about the beauty or the nobility of the buzzard, much less about the beauty or nobility of Francis Marion Tarwater.

There are, in short, things that the natural sciences cannot do, all kinds of things indeed, and among them the most important things in life. They can tell me how water flows through a pipe — more or less, for even that is subject to the mysterious indeterminacies of feedback loops and turbulence. It is a fine thing to know how water flows through a pipe. If I want to drain the sodden backyard, I would surely hire someone with knowledge of hydraulics. It is a fine thing to know that the coal I hold in my hand, with the fern-fossil bravely imprinted upon it, is thousands of years old, and is of the same basic stuff as diamond. And yet I cannot exhaust the coal by calculating the calories it will produce when it is burnt, nor can I tell, by consulting a geologist, whether I should buy that diamond and give it to my wife.

There are, in short, things that the natural sciences cannot do, all kinds of things indeed, and among them the most important things in life.

We often hear that it is ignorant people who are "opposed to science," because they oppose this or that thing that scientists wish to do, or because they withhold their assent to this or that proposition that scientists claim to have proved. As to the latter, it surely is not a mark of foolishness to be circumspect about all grand claims. I recall, in my own lifetime, a nice variety of scientific claims, such as that the world was going to suffer a new ice-age because of the albedo effect, caused by particulate matter in the atmosphere; that we were going to suffer terrible famines due to overpopulation; that fully twenty percent of the male population were homosexually oriented; that butter was bad for your health; that vitamin C could cure the common cold; that "cold fusion" had been achieved; that DDT would destroy all aviary life on the planet; and so forth. The history of science is not a story of slowly and neatly accruing truth, but of periods of modest progress punctuated by tumults and revolutions, when everything we thought we knew is turned inside out, subject to dismissal or to radical reinterpretation.

So, yes, scientists err. But there's more. Scientists are human, just as we are. They set up idols to worship. They make unto themselves (or of themselves!) graven images. They forget the Sabbath. They dishonor their parents. They kill and steal and fornicate. They cheat, they slander, they detract, they deceive themselves. They covet — indeed the whole scientific culture seems built upon a network of covetousness. They fall victim to all of the deadly sins, especially pride, envy, and avarice.

Scientists gave us an innocent Einstein, a compromised Oppenheimer, and a monstrous Mengele. Scientists have brought us great good, and, yes, some great evil. Scientists, like every other group of people in the last misbegotten century, wore robes streaked with blood. Scientists infected unsuspecting women in Central America with syphilis. Scientists experimented upon black men at Tuskegee. Scientists ignored the dangers of thalidomide. Scientists falsified evidence in order to promote the legalization of abortion. Scientists ignored the connections between artificial estrogen and cancer. Scientists press on, now, for human cloning, not because it should be done, but because it can be done. Scientists belittle forms of knowledge that do not fall within their purview; they are, as a group, no better read in the humanities, no more broadly educated in philosophy or theology, than, say, a comparable group of lawyers or politicians.

Why, then, should I trust scientists, simply? What great moral wisdom do they possess — or what great moral wisdom should we expect them to possess, when they are made much of, when their competition is notoriously vicious, and when they are encouraged to assume that theirs is the only knowledge possible, or worth possessing? Is that fine preparation for a wise man? I can readily concede them the virtues of industry and native intelligence, but what of those more profound virtues that make for a truly good human life? What of the cardinal pagan virtues, temperance, courage, justice, and wisdom? What of humility, kindness, innocence?

Why on earth should I grant a moral or political carte blancheto a group of people who already possess great prestige and influence and wealth? Even when scientists are arguing about the facts of a matter — anthropogenic global warming, for instance — they are just as prone to intransigence, to partisanship, to passion and pride, as are farmers arguing for cheap silver coinage or industrialists arguing for a protective tariff. It was Galileo the deeply flawed man, and not some fictional Galileo the Pure Searcher for Truth, who attempted to prove the geocentric system by half-deliberately misinterpreting the motion of the tides.

For these reasons — the historical fact that scientists are no better or no worse as human beings than generals or judges or plantation owners, and that scientists themselves are often quite wrong — I believe it is absolutely necessary for civilians to oversee scientific research, not to intrude themselves into the small details of every experiment, but to set the broad parameters of what should be done and what should not be done, what does conduce to the common good and what does not. I trust Patton to prosecute a war, but not to determine when a war ought to be fought. I trust the judge to interpret the language of a law, not to write the law himself. I agree with William F. Buckley, who famously quipped that he would prefer to be governed by the first hundred persons in the Cambridge telephone directory than by the faculty at Harvard. I'll adapt that preference thus: I would expect to find less moral wisdom among the harried and narrowly focused laboratory workers at any institute of science, than in the plumbers, carpenters, and janitors who construct and tend the room wherein the scientists work.

I have no intent to demean scientists. I wish merely to see them for what they are, and to see their work for what it is, and to protect the polity from placing too much trust in their unacknowledged priesthood.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Anthony Esolen. "The Humility of Science, the Arrogance of Scientists." Crisis Magazine (January 26, 2012).

Reprinted with permission of Crisis Magazine.

Crisis Magazine is an educational apostolate that uses media and technology to bring the genius of Catholicism to business, politics, culture, and family life. Our approach is oriented toward the practical solutions our faith offers — in other words, actionable Catholicism.

THE AUTHOR

Anthony Esolen is a professor of English at Providence College, where his classes are featured in the college's Western Civilization Core Curriculum. He is the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Ironies of Faith: Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, and is the translator of several epic poems of the West, including Lucretius' On the Nature of Things: de Rerum Natura, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and the three volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy:Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Anthony Esolen has published many scholarly articles and essays, including several on Renaissance literature. A graduate of Princeton and the University of North Carolina, Esolen is proficient in Latin, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, French, German and Greek. He lives in Rhode Island with his wife Debra and their two children. Anthony Esolen is a member of the advisory board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

Article: Grace of the Childlike

2012-01-28T08:21:00.001+08:00

DOM ANSCAR VONIER, O.S.B.

Now what are we to understand by that wonderful thing, spiritual childhood, the one attitude which makes the kingdom of heaven possible?

... We must be converted and become as little children. Our minds must be pure and unsophisticated and natural. We must be converted and get rid of all those accretions which come to us from false training, from false traditions and standards, rid all that hardness of heart which is the natural condition of the human race.

We must become cheerful, ready to receive things much greater than ourselves. We must have the wonderful gift of loving goodness. We must, in one word, be capable of admiration. We must feel elation when we see something that is perfect instead of taking it to pieces and criticizing it, looking at it in a grudging and ungenerous way.

Instead of that, let us be like children clapping their hands and giving vent to their joy in shouts and laughter; they have no reserves, no critical attitude, they have not been embittered yet, their hearts have not been soured; they have still the first, natural faith in goodness and then, through baptism, they have the supernatural faith in it, they admire it, unless, of course, they belong to that pitiable class of little ones who have no real childhood. But the ordinary happy child, who has the privilege of a good mother, has the gift of admiration, and keeps it till the blight of society falls on his mind and darkens it.

This, then, ought to be our great Christian mentality; a readiness to admire the things of God, a readiness to admit that he does great and marvellous things, that he is great in nature; great in heaven, great in grace, that he is the Creator of earth and heaven; that, in the words of our Blessed Lord, heaven is God's throne and earth his footstool; that there is nothing in the vast universe which is not the handiwork of God, and that therefore it is full of endless glories, possibilities and marvels.

We have but one thing to do — a very easy thing at first sight — just to admire it, so love it for its beauty and riches, to clap our hands in our surprise at its glories and its mysteries. This is part of the great natural goodness of creation which we accept everywhere, and we should just admire, as children admire.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B. "Grace of the Childlike." excerpt from The Art of Christ: Retreat Conferences (Burns, Oates & Washbourne, Ltd., 1927).

The Art of Christ: Retreat Conferences is out of print and in the public domain.

THE AUTHOR

Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B. (1875–1938) was the abbot of Buckfast Abbey in Devon, England and the most gifted dogmatic theologian writing — and preaching — in England during the inter-War years. By an unexpected blessing, the English Catholic Church had in its midst a German monk of outstanding competence and spiritual nobility. He is the author, among other books, of A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, The Life of the World to Come, The Personality of Christ, and The Human Soul and Its Relations with Other Spirits.

Article: What Teachers Mean

2012-01-28T08:20:00.002+08:00

FATHER JAMES V. SCHALL, S.J.

What are students and what are professors or teachers?

On coming to a university, the student will hear of the names and characters of the teachers who are there. Most student bodies will have a kind of underground evaluation of the characters and effectiveness of teachers. These can be unfair but often they serve as a good guide as in the phrase the proof of the cook is in the pudding. Furthermore, every university will have good teachers if they can be located. Good teachers are the most important thing that a student can find. As I said, sometimes these teachers will not be living, but living teachers can take us to them. A teacher is someone who takes us to what is worthy of knowing. Both Augustine and Aquinas have written much on teaching and learning. The biblical account of Simon Magus warns us about unworthy teachers.

But finding a good teacher, even if he is not in one's own university or one's own time, even if he is not really a professional "teacher," is a great blessing. He can lead us to things that we otherwise would not have known or encountered. Both the teacher and the student are directed to something beyond themselves. They are not in competition. Both are judged by the same criterion. If we can assist someone in finding something that he might not otherwise find, then we do what a teacher really, at his best, does for us. And good teachers should help us to delight in knowing. As I like to put it, even if the teacher is teaching us about slimy bugs, he can teach us something about everything if he sees the mystery that is also present in all things, even the tiniest.

For his part, the students need to be what is called "docile." That is, he needs to be willing to learn. He needs to be what I like to call "eminently teachable." To be "teachable" means that we are ready to read or consider what we do not know or never heard of before. The canon of books, of which Bloom spoke, referred to books the not reading of which will make us miss something important to our being. We cannot read everything of course. It is all right to realize this, even though the fact is obvious. The numbers of worthy things to read and to know far surpass the ability of any one person.

Yet, we read what we can. Given a choice, which we always have, there some things more worth reading than others. But if we are fortunate enough to be stranded on the proverbial desert isle with only two books, Shakespeare and the Bible, we will in fact not miss much of what is humanly important if we read them, granted that it would also be useful to have a book on how to make a boat.

The teacher, as Aquinas tells us, is to "hand over" what he had himself pondered and contemplated in his own soul, in the time, as Cicero said, he was himself alone. Leo Strauss talked of finding those "teachers" who were not themselves taught. He was referring to people like Socrates and Christ, to people who never wrote a book, yet whose lives were such that the world was changed because of them. Such teachers, of course, needed those who listened to them, who wrote about them.

We know that the only way we have to the minds of most human beings is through what they write. But we also need to know the importance of conversation. Truth ultimately exists not in books but in conversation, in actively making alive in our souls what we know and that we know. Aristotle told us also that this is what friendship at its best was about. This is why reading what Aristotle says in his Ethics on friendship is almost always for a young man or woman an eye-opening affair.

Thus, we have teaching, learning, and books, we have conversation. We have souls that want to know. C. S. Lewis, in a famous quip, had a young devil being given a piece of advice by an older devil on how to prevent young atheists from losing their faith in atheism. He told him that the "young atheist can never be too careful of what he reads." That is to say, of books that tell the truth, we will find that they are attractive to us, that they in fact call us out of ourselves. One of the things that I have always been struck by in Aristotle was his attention to the relation of virtue and truth. The very reading of Aristotle is ever a first step into almost anything that makes sense. If there is, as I have said, no university without the constant reading of Plato, so there is none without the constant reading of Aristotle.

Eric Voegelin, in a remarkable book of his conversations, once stated that "No one is obliged to participate in the crisis of his time. He can do something else."

But the entire Aristotelian understanding of the human soul had to do with what is of concern to us here, with our being free to know what is. The very meaning of "liberal arts" had to do not only with a subject matter but also with a condition of soul that was free to see beyond itself. Aristotle warned us that we would spend our lives justifying our actions in terms of what we chose for the purpose of our actions, a purpose he called happiness.

If we chose as our purpose money or pleasure or honor, the main alternatives of man over time in all places, we would not be free to see what the world is about or ourselves in it. For this we needed virtue, to be temperate, just, brave, generous. We were ourselves a kind of inner kingdom that we needed first to rule. If we failed here, we would probably never really understand what our lives were about.

All the way through the literature of most lands and cultures has been the suspicion that, if the world were "perfect," it would be somehow boring. Hegel once remarked that a happy country had no history. He meant of course that what makes drama and headlines are the tragedies, the wars, and the disasters. One of the greatest books I ever read was Hilaire Belloc's Four Men. It was a walk through his native county of Sussex in England. I bring this wonderful book up here because it is something of a contrast with the idea of a happy country has no history. It is a book about the love of land and friend, the finiteness of our short lives in this world, the laughter and joy that is no doubt there, yet the sense that we too are "wayfarers and pilgrims" if we would really understand ourselves.

To know such things, I think, is also something that we will only fleetingly "study" in our institutions, but which will be and are at the heart of our very lives. The fact is that we want to know what Josef Pieper called "the truth of things." We are interested in what we should and might be because we are interested in what we are. By the very fact that we exist and know that we exist as human and knowing beings, we have already embarked in an adventure the meaning of which we must ponder both with the help of our own experience and with the conversations we have with our friends.

But along the way, we will be "educated." We will receive degrees. We will accumulate books. We will wonder about what is. Criticisms of modern education have no other purpose but to be sure that we have a fighting chance to know what it is all about in a world with so many diverse, confusing, and, yes, erroneous ideas of what man is, what the universe is, and what God is. But we think that we have a chance. We are not alone. It does not take many bad turns before we know that we have taken a bad turn. And it does not take too many encounters with books and writers who tell us the truth before we begin to see that we are not imprisoned in our times.

Eric Voegelin, in a remarkable book of his conversations, once stated that "No one is obliged to participate in the crisis of his time. He can do something else." We do not doubt that the times manifest a profound crisis the dimensions are often hidden to us. Much of what I myself have written is designed to call our attention to the origins of some of them. We can find a way, but we need to know where to begin, what we must know. We need to find teachers and books. We need to think. It is not, in principle, a bad thing to be exposed to intellectual and moral disorders if they incite us to wonder about the right order of our lives and our cosmos. Hopefully, reflection on the "strangest object" in the universe — man — calls our attention to the things we ourselves did not find studied in college.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father James V. Schall, S.J. "What Teachers Mean." Crisis Magazine (January 17, 2012).

Reprinted with permission of Father George W. Rutler and Crisis

THE AUTHOR

Father James V. Schall, S.J., is Professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown University and the author of many books in the areas of social issues, spirituality and literature including The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical & Political Essays, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing; Roman Catholic Political Philosophy; The Order of Things; The Regensburg Lecture; The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking; Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes; Another Sort of Learning, Sum Total Of Human Happiness, and A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning.

Article: Honouring Scientist Priests

2012-01-28T08:20:00.001+08:00

FATHER GEORGE W. RUTLER

While priests are dedicated to theology as the "queen of sciences," some of them have contributed to the material sciences as well.

Roger Bacon, O.F.M.
(c. 1214-1294)

A rich experience in my life was knowing Father Stanley Jaki, the Benedictine priest and physicist who did much to explain the dependency of modern physical science on Christianity's perception of the universe. He received the Templeton Prize, a monetary award larger than a Nobel Prize, for explaining how the scientific method issues from the Judeo-Christian concept of a benign and ordered universe.

While priests are dedicated to theology as the "queen of sciences," some of them have contributed to the material sciences as well. Some days ago Google rightly honored Nicholas Steno whose research in stratigraphy earned him the sobriquet "Father of Geology." Google did not mention that he was a convert to Catholicism in 1667 and only ceased his research due to pastoral obligations when he became a bishop in 1677. His scientific achievements were not as important as his heroic virtue, for which Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1988.

The scientific lobe of my brain is lax, and buttoning my cassock is a complex challenge, but I enjoy thinking of my fellows in the priestly fraternity who advanced our knowledge of God's creation. As a student, I practiced the piano on the site where the Franciscan Roger Bacon,Doctor Mirabilis — "Wonderful Teacher," explored mathematics, optics and astronomy in the thirteenth century. His own teacher is thought to have been Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln who gave the basic structure for scientific experimentation. In the sixteenth century, Ignazio Danti, an Italian bishop, made discoveries in engineering, cartography, hydraulics and astronomy. On his heels came a French priest, Marin Mersenne, a friend and fellow student of Descartes. He pioneered attempts at a formula representing all prime numbers and established an international scientific congress. His contemporary, Father Jean-Felix Picard, is known as The Father of Modern Astronomy and was the first to measure accurately the size of our planet.

The nineteenth-century Augustinian abbot Gregor Mendel fathered modern genetics, discovering dominant and recessive genes as a high-school teacher. His contemporary, a missionary priest named Armand David, specialized in zoology, botany, geology and paleontology in China where he discovered, among other things, the Giant Panda. An American son of Belgian immigrants, Father Julius Nieuwland, invented the first synthetic rubber material by first polymerizing acetylene into divinylacetylene. Belgian native Father Georges Lemaitre proposed the Big Bang Theory which he called the First Atomic Moment, and influenced Einstein. Still living is Father Michal Heller of Poland, whose research in general relativity theory and quantum mechanics was recognized, like Father Jaki's, with a Templeton Prize.

The liturgical season of Ordinary Time witnesses to the creation ordered by our Creator, the Father of all thought: "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; and before you came forth out of the womb, I sanctified you" (Jeremiah 1:5).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father George William Rutler. "Honouring Scientist Priests." From the Pastor (January 22, 2012).

Reprinted with permission of Father George W. Rutler.

THE AUTHOR

Father Rutler received priestly ordination in 1981. Born in 1945 and reared in the Episcopal tradition, Father Rutler was an Episcopal priest for nine years. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1979 and was sent to the North American College in Rome for seminary studies. Father Rutler graduated from Dartmouth, where he was a Rufus Choate Scholar, and took advanced degrees at the Johns Hopkins University and the General Theological Seminary. He holds several degrees from the Gregorian and Angelicum Universities in Rome, including the Pontifical Doctorate in Sacred Theology, and studied at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In England, in 1988, the University of Oxford awarded him the degree Master of Studies. From 1987 to 1989 he was regular preacher to the students, faculty, and townspeople of Oxford. Cardinal Egan appointed him Pastor of theChurch of Our Saviour, effective September 17, 2001.

Since 1988 his weekly television program has been broadcast worldwide on EWTN. Father Rutler has published 17 books, including: Cloud of Witnesses - Dead People I Knew When They Were Alive, Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections, A Crisis of Saints: Essays on People and Principles, Brightest and Best, Saint John Vianney: The Cure D'Ars Today, Crisis in Culture, and Adam Danced: The Cross and the Seven Deadly Sins.

Article: Generosity

2012-01-28T08:18:00.001+08:00

DONALD DEMARCO

It is greed that impoverishes us, not generosity.

It belongs to the nature of giving that a gift be given to another. Strictly speaking, one cannot give a gift to himself. The highest gift we can give to another is the gift of ourselves.

Giving ourselves in this way epitomizes the virtue of generosity. The perfect example of generosity is God the Creator. By means of His generosity, He generates man in His image. For Christians, God's gift of Himself through Christ represents the ultimate form of generosity, and serves as a model for all human generosity.

Because God creates — or generates — man in His image out of His own generosity, a dynamic impulse toward generosity is implanted in the depth of man's being. As a consequence, to live authentically means to give generously. Personality and generosity, therefore, are virtually synonymous. To live authentically is to give generously of oneself. The great Thomistic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, underscored this unification of personality with generosity when he wrote: "Do not heroes and saints impress us as men who have reached the heights of personality as well as generosity?"

Gotta Give

When a person is in touch with the depths of himself, he realizes that at the very center of his being, coincidental with his existence, is the impulse toward generosity. To be is to give; to be fulfilled is to have given generously. The very meaning of life is inseparable from generosity.

Everyone recognizes that generosity is more admirable than greed, and more beautiful, more original, more authentic, and more humane. The fact that greed is as common as it is indicates that human beings can be estranged from themselves while trying to live a life that is alien to them.

Since the time of Socrates, philosophers have been reiterating the essential importance of distinguishing between the order of being and having. Martin Buber wrote beautifully about the "I-Thou" relationship that cultivates our being, or our humanness, and the "I-It" relationship that allows us to have those things that allow us to live. Without "I-It" we cannot live, but without "I-Thou" we cannot be human. Things cannot humanize us, only generous love can.

Greed, the antithesis of generosity and the negation of personal being, enters the picture when our attachment to the things we can have displaces our awareness of our own being. But no amount of having can ever make up for a neglect of being. A form of frenzied addiction ensues when a person believes that if he could only have more of something, he would be able to quench his thirst. Unfortunately, the logic of greed is such that the appetite grows on what it feeds. This is the diabolical phenomenon that Shakespeare describes in Macbeth when he has Malcolm say: "[M]y more having would be a sauce to make me hunger more."

I Want More!

Nothing exceeds like excess! Greed becomes more avaricious the more it has. This paradoxical effect is connected with the fact that a person becomes increasingly frustrated the more he ignores his own fundamental capacity for generosity.

The Many Faces of Virtue
by Donald DeMarco

Literary characters such as King Midas, Silas Marner, Ebenezer Scrooge, and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, are driven by greed in such a way that the more greedy they become, the less human they appear. The conversions of Midas, Marner, Scrooge, and the Grinch are, in effect, returns to humanity, and are met by readers with great jubilation. Generous people are not only more likeable than their greedy counterparts, but they appear to be more human, more real.

A wealthy man can easily become a displaced person, alienated from himself, if he takes his riches too seriously. Plato warned long ago that we should bequeath to our children not riches but reverence. Sigmund Freud explained that wealth never makes a man happy because it does not correspond to a basic human drive. None of us comes into the world with a desire to make money. The impulse to have does not originate in our being.

On the other hand, a poor man, who is in touch with the fundamental generosity of his existence, can be productive, happy, and at peace with himself. It is more blessed to give than to receive; but it is far more blessed to give than to take. In the final analysis, we cannot take with us what we have. Greed is an affliction of the dispossessed. Generosity is the plentitude of the self-possessed.

Temperance

To the calculating mind, being generous seems to be costly. To the generous heart, being greedy seems incomprehensible.

Maurice Sendak has written a charming little book for children called Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or There Must Be More To Life. In the story, the owners of Jennie the dog have given her everything. Yet she decides: "There must be more to life than having everything." She leaves home and loses all she has, but instead becomes the leading star of a theatrical production, to her great contentment. The point is made only too clear, even for ten-year-olds, that happiness depends not on how muchwe have, but on who we are. Being is more primary thanhaving. And at the center of our being is the divinely implanted impulse to give and to be generous.

To the calculating mind, being generous seems to be costly. To the generous heart, being greedy seems incomprehensible. It is greed that impoverishes us, not generosity. True generosity, indeed, enriches us a hundredfold. There is a superabundance within each of us. Not to release it costs us who we are. Nothing, therefore, is more costly than greed; nothing is more rewarding than generosity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Donald DeMarco. "Generosity." from The Many Faces of Virtue (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2000): 181-184.

This article is reprinted with permission from Emmaus Road Publishing and Donald DeMarco.

THE AUTHOR

Donald DeMarco is adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut and Professor Emeritus at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo Ontario. He also continues to work as a corresponding member of the Pontifical Acadmy for Life. Donald DeMarco has written hundreds of articles for various scholarly and popular journals, and is the author of twenty books, including The Heart of Virtue, The Many Faces of Virtue, Virtue's Alphabet: From Amiability to Zeal andArchitects Of The Culture Of Death. Donald DeMarco is on the Advisory Board of The Catholic Education Resource Center.

Article: The Liturgy Source of Life, Prayer and Catechesis (CCC 1071-1075)

2012-01-27T15:46:00.002+08:00

By Don Mauro Gagliardi

ROME, JAN. 25, 2012 (Zenit.org).- Numbers 1071-1075 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) treat sacred liturgy as source of life, as well as its relationship with prayer and catechesis. The liturgy is source of life first of all because it is the “work of Christ” (CCC, 1071). In the second place, because “it is also an action of his Church” (Ibid.). But, which is the preeminent of these two aspects? Moreover, what does the word “life” mean in this context?

Vatican Council II responds: “From the liturgy, hence, and particularly from the Eucharist, grace flows in us as from a source, and obtained with the greatest efficacy is the sanctification of men in Christ and the glorification of God, to which all the other activities of the Church tend as to their end” (Sacrosanctum Concilium [SC], 10). Understood thus is that, when the liturgy is called source of life, from it grace flows. Already answered here is the first question: the liturgy is source of life primarily because it is the work of Christ, Author of grace.

A classic principle of Catholicism, however, states that grace does not take away nature, rather it implies and perfects it (cf. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 1, 8 ad 2 etc.). Given this, man also cooperates in liturgical worship, which is the priestly action of the “whole Christ,” namely the Head, which is Jesus, and the members, who are the baptized. Thus the liturgy is source of life also in as much as it is action of the Church. Precisely in so far as work of Christ and of the Church, the liturgy is a “sacred action par excellence” (SC, 7), it gives the faithful the life of Christ and requires their conscious, active and fruitful participation (cf. SC, 11). Understood here is the bond between the sacred liturgy and the life of faith: we could say “from Life to life.” The grace that is given us by Christ in the liturgy calls for vital involvement: "The sacred liturgy does not exhaust the entire activity of the Church” “ (SC, 9), in fact “it must be preceded by evangelization, faith and conversion. It can then produce its fruits in the life of the faithful” (CCC, 1072).

It is no accident that at the moment of bringing together in one volume the writings of J. Ratzinger, entitled “Theology of the Liturgy,” thought was given to expressing one of the fundamental intuitions of the author, adding the sub-title: “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence.” It is a translation in theological terms of what Jesus said in the Gospel with the words: “apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). In the sacred liturgy we receive the gift of the divine life of Christ without which we cannot do anything valid for salvation. Hence, the life of the Christian is nothing other than a continuation, or the fruit, of the grace that is received in divine worship, in particular, the Eucharistic.

In the second place, the liturgy has a close relationship with prayer. Again, the focus of understanding of this relationship is the Lord: “The liturgy is also a participation in Christ’s own prayer addressed to the Father in the Holy Spirit. In the liturgy, all Christian prayer finds its source and goal” (CCC, 1073). Hence, the liturgy is also source of prayer. From it we learn to pray in the right way. As the liturgy is the priestly prayer of Jesus, what can we learn from it for our personal prayer? In what did the Lord’s prayer consist? “Fundamental to understand Jesus are the recurrent references to the fact that he withdrew “on the mountain” and prayed there entire nights, “alone” with the Father. […] This “praying” of Jesus is the Son speaking with the Father which involves the human consciousness and will, the human soul of Jesus, so that man’s “prayer” can become participation in the communion of the Son with the Father” (J. Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, “Jesus of Nazareth,” I, Rizzoli, Milan, 2007, pp. 27-28 [our translation]). In Jesus, his “personal” prayer is not different from his priestly prayer: according to the Letter to the Hebrews, the prayer made by Jesus during the Passion “constitutes the Mass in action of the high priesthood of Jesus. Precisely in his crying, weeping and praying Jesus does what is proper to the high priest: He carries the suffering of being men lifted up to God. He bears man before God” (Ibid., II, LEV, 2010, p. 184).

In a word, Jesus’ prayer is a prayer of conversation, a prayer addressed to the presence of God. Jesus teaches us this type of prayer: “It is necessary to always arouse this relationship and to redirect it in continuation to daily events. We would pray that much better the more profoundly is the orientation of our soul to God” (Ibid., I, p. 159). Hence, the liturgy teaches us to pray because it re-orients us constantly to God: “Lift up your hearts; we lift them up to the Lord!” Prayer is to be turned to the Lord – and this is also the profound meaning of active participation in the liturgy.

Finally, prayer is the “privileged place of catechesis […] in as much as it proceeds from the visible to the invisible” (CCC, 1074-1075). This implies that the texts, the signs, the rites, the gestures and the ornamental elements of the liturgy must be such as to truly transmit the Mystery they signify and can thus be usefully explained within the mystagogic catechesis.

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Don Mauro Gagliardi is full Professor at the Pontifical Athenaeum “Regina Apostolorum,” professor at the Università Europea di Roma, Consultor of the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff and of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

Article: No Reason to Reject Standard Days Method

2012-01-27T15:46:00.001+08:00

WASHINGTON, D.C., JAN. 25, 2012 (Zenit.org).- Here is a question on bioethics asked by a ZENIT reader and answered by the fellows of the Culture of Life Foundation.

Q: The Standard Days Method (SDM) of Natural Family Planning (NFP) was introduced by Georgetown University and uses a bead counting method. Some Catholic doctors and priests have criticized the SDM for some/all of the following reasons:

1. It is not "natural" because a computer model was used to calculate the days of abstinence.

2. It is endorsed by USAID (which has links to abortion funding).

3. The original research paper left open the possibility of using a back-up method during the fertile period.

My question is: Can Catholic licitly teach and practice the SDM? -- Fr. JM, Southeast Asia

E. Christian Brugger offers the following response:

The Standard Days Method of fertility awareness is a newer and more precise variation of the older calendar ("rhythm") method that used the length of a woman's menstrual cycle to estimate when fertility was most likely to occur.

Promoters of the SDM state that the newer method is only reliable for women whose cycles range in length from 26 to 32 days. Women outside this range are encouraged to use another method. Those who fall into that range and who wish to avoid pregnancy are advised to abstain from intercourse on days 8-19 of their cycle. These are the days, according to the method, when they are most likely to conceive. SDM literature reports that when the method is used correctly it has a 95% rate of effectivity.

This is not so different from the older calendar rhythm method whose rate of effectivity, when used correctly, was 91%. The problem with the older method was that couples were required to carry out mathematical calculations that the SDM has built into its approach. So whereas the "perfect use failure rate" of the older method was 9% (91% success rate), few couples used it perfectly. The "actual use failure rate," because of the method's complexity, turned out to be 25%, which meant that couples trying to avoid pregnancy got pregnant approximately one in four times.

From the user's perspective, the SDM is much simpler. As stated above, it is limited to women with a specific and reliable cycle length. Once that is established, the days on which couples are advised to abstain are easy to determine. In some countries, a simple string of beads is used to assist women to count off the days of abstinence.

As for its ethical analysis, the SDM is simply a method of NFPassisting couples to regulate their fertility in ways consistent with the natural cycles of a woman's body and with moral norms taught and defended by the Catholic Church. Other methods include the Billings Ovulation Method, the Sympto-Thermal Method, the Creighton Fertility-Care Method, and Ecological Breastfeeding.

In the 1930s, the Catholic Church judged that NFP was a legitimate way for couples to regulate births. Pope Pius XI taught in Casti Connubii (1930): "Nor are those considered as acting against nature who in the married state use their right in the proper manner although on account of natural reasons either of time or of certain defects, new life cannot be brought forth;" and two years later (1932), the Sacred Penitentiary ruled that couples could legitimately "abstain from the use of marriage" during fertile periods for "just and grave causes." Together these were taken as an approval of the recently developed rhythm method. Since that time, the Catholic Church has repeatedly affirmed the legitimacy of recourse to NFP for "iustae causae" ("just causes") (e.g., by Popes Pius XII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, and in the Catechism of the Catholic Church).

Why then might some think that the SDM is a problem? Our questioner states three possible reasons. The first argues that the method "is not 'natural' because a computer model was used to calculate the days of abstinence;" therefore, the logic goes, it must be "unnatural"; since contraception is also 'unnatural,' the SDM must be similar to contraception.

But using a computer to determine facts pertaining to one's fertility cycle is no more intrinsically problematic than using a computer to determine any other facts about one's biology (e.g., blood type, glucose levels, or blood pressure). In this case, the facts are used to assist couples to carry out morally legitimate means of family planning. This enables couples to practice "responsible parenthood," which, the Church teaches, is a great human good (cf. Humanae Vitae, no. 10). And technology used at the service of the moral law and human good is not only legitimate, but praiseworthy. If however technology is used at the service of wrongful forms of family planning, then it is used wrongfully.

The second reason is that the SDM has been "endorsed by USAID (which has links to abortion funding)." This is true. Not only has the SDM been endorsed by USAID, the method was developed (at Georgetown University's Institute for Reproductive Health) by grants in part provided from USAID.

But the fact that USAID is involved in some illicit activities does not mean that everything it does is illicit, nor does it mean that everyone who cooperates with its activities is doing something illicit. By funding the development of a morally legitimate form of family planning, USAID, to that extent, carried out a good act. Using the knowledge derived from that funding is unlikely to enrich USAID and hence equip it to carry out future illicit activity. And that same knowledge is likely to assist large numbers of couples, especially in developing countries, to plan their families in an upright way. Morally conscientious people should encourage USAID to devote more resources to similarly legitimate activities.

The final reason is that some of the literature promoting the SDM has "left open the possibility of using a back-up method [of contraception] during the fertile period." This tells us two things: first, that some who promote the method do not think that contraception is wrong and believe that the SDM is just another form of ("natural") contraception. In this regard, they are in error. Contraception is wrong to use; and the SDM is not a form of contraception, since for a method to be contraceptive it must aim to render sexual intercourse sterile; and the SDM promotes abstinence, which is the avoidance of intercourse.

Second, it tells us that the SDM can be used wrongfully, as when one uses it in tandem with another form of contraception. But the fact that it may be used wrongfully does not mean that everyone who uses it does so wrongfully. Those couples who understand the integrity of marriage and the marital act, and who abstain from intercourse for just reasons using the SDM, and who do not have recourse to other morally illicit forms of fertility control, do nothing illicit.

Therefore, Catholic (and non-Catholic) married couples may practice and promote the SDM as a licit form of Natural Family Planning. This was affirmed in July 2011 in a pastoral statement by Archbishop Antonio Ledesma, S.J., of the Archdiocese of Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines.

* * *

E. Christian Brugger is a Senior Fellow of Ethics and director of the Fellows Program at the Culture of Life Foundation; and the J. Francis Cardinal Stafford Chair of Moral Theology at St. John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

Article: Requiem for the Third See of Christendom

2012-01-13T13:44:00.001+08:00

ROBERT SPENCER

Egypt today is the site of a persecution of the Church on a scale unseen in Western Europe since the darkest days of the French Revolution; the Coptic Church is fighting for its life under vicious and escalating attacks from Muslims.

Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria

A Muslim Brotherhood government is coming to power that promises to be more hostile. Yet in these dark days the Copts enjoy little support from Catholics who often only dimly understand the great debt we owe to the Church of Alexandria.

It was not ever thus. The Patriarch of Alexandria was once the third most-powerful prelate in the Church, after those of Rome and Constantinople; he was so designated by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The Lateran Council, moreover, was merely restating and ratifying — quite belatedly, for a variety of reasons — a canon of the fourth ecumenical council, the Council of Chalcedon, which was held over seven and a half centuries before it, in 451.

The Fathers of Chalcedon, for their part, were actually demoting the See of Alexandria from the second position that it had enjoyed before the Roman Emperors moved their capital to the new city of Constantinople, which accordingly became a great metropolis and a patriarchal see.

Constantinople, as a relative newcomer, initially drew upon the theological and liturgical traditions of two older patriarchal sees, Alexandria and Antioch. In theological investigation, Alexandria was unrivaled. The Church of Alexandria was the home of the Church's first great theological school, where students could learn from pioneering teachers of Christian theology such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen. No other Christian center, not even Rome, rivaled Alexandria's theological sophistication and depth, although certainly Alexandrine Fathers — most notably Origen himself — did not always maintain their speculations within the confines of Christian orthodoxy. At the same time, Alexandria was the cradle of Christian monasticism — although in that case, it was more a matter of saints such as Anthony the Great leaving the great city than learning anything in it.

From Alexandria came both the arch-heresiarch Arius, who denied that Christ and His Father were one in any meaningful sense, and his nemesis St. Athanasius (298-373), whose legacy includes the doctrines of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ — as well as many of the doctrinal formulations contained in the Nicene Creed. Alexandria also was the home of another Father and Doctor of the Church, St. Cyril, who presided over the third ecumenical council, held in Ephesus in 431. In order to safeguard the divinity of Christ and his unity as a single person who was both God and man, the Fathers of Ephesus, led by Cyril, declared Mary the Mother of Jesus to beTheotokos, bearer of God — not just the bearer of Christ, as she had been styled by Cyril's opponent, Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who was excommunicated and deposed.

After that, as was so often the case during the Christological controversies of the early Church, things get murky. An ecumenical council had declared Cyril's Christology affirming the unity of Christ the faith of the Church, but Nestorianism refused to die, and Eutyches, a monk of Constantinople, became the center of a new controversy when Flavian, the Patriarch of Constantinople, excommunicated him for refusing to confess two natures in Christ, divine and human.

It is tragic that the Church was rent by a schism that appears largely to have been a matter of terminology, of words and concepts understood in varying ways by the contending parties.

Eutyches — and many others — saw this as a Nestorian separation of the Christ whose unity of person had just been affirmed at the third ecumenical council. Finally, in 449 the Emperor Theodosius II convened a new ecumenical council, to be held at Ephesus as well. Theodosius initially asked the Pope, St. Leo the Great, to preside over the council, but Leo declined, as Italy was at that time being overrun by Attila the Hun and travel would have been hazardous. Then, recognizing the influence of Alexandria as a See and the revered Athanasius and more contemporary Cyril (who had died in 444) as the principal architects of the Church's Christology, Theodosius appointed Cyril's successor and protégé, Dioscorus, to preside over the council.

This new council of Ephesus declared that Christ had but one nature. Flavian was deposed and set upon by a mob; he died soon thereafter. The papal legates refused to accept the council's decrees and fled in fear for their lives. Pope Leo the Great also refused to accept the council, dubbing it a latrocinium — a synod of robbers — and appealed to the Emperor to have it overturned. Leo appealed in vain, but Divine Providence then intervened; Theodosius was thrown from his horse and died, and the new emperor, Marcian, agreed with Leo, annulled the second council of Ephesus, and called a new council at Chalcedon, across the Bosporus from Constantinople, in 451.

At Chalcedon, events unfolded in exactly the opposite direction as at the latrocinium. Leo's definition of Christ as one Divine Person in two natures, divine and human, was accepted by the council Fathers, who cried, "Peter has spoken through Leo!" Dioscorus was condemned and excommunicated — taking much of his See and Eastern Christendom with him.

It remains a point of controversy to this day, however, as to whether he was excommunicated for heresy or for his high-handed mismanagement of his See. Nonetheless, he and his followers were labeled Monophysites — those who held that Christ had no human nature or that His human nature was absorbed entirely into His divinity such that it did not perdure. Those to whom this label was applied, however, always rejected it.

Dioscorus considered himself to be carrying on Cyril's teachings. And maybe he was. Both St. Cyril and St. Athanasius had confessed "one nature" in Christ, which was just what had now been condemned at Chalcedon. But it is by no means clear that Dioscorus, any more than Athanasius or Cyril, meant this in a heretical way (that Christ had no human nature at all) rather than in an orthodox way (that His divine and human natures were fully united and inseparable). Ironically, Dioscorus even affirmed that "we do not speak of confusion, neither of division, nor of change" in Christ's nature — language echoed in the confession of faith of the council that deposed him, Chalcedon: "We confess that one and the same Christ, Lord, and only-begotten Son, is to be acknowledged in two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation." And the Church of Alexandria has through the ages celebrated the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil of Caesarea, which affirms that the Lord's divine and human natures "did not separate for a moment or the twinkling of an eye" — a statement that assumes that both exist.

And so the Church of Alexandria (aka the Church of Egypt, or "Coptic" Church, "Coptic" being the Coptic word for "Egyptian") and much of the Christian East, virtually half of Christendom at that time, went their own way, in schism with both Rome and Constantinople (both of which accepted Chalcedon). Dioscorus was declared a saint; his successor, Timothy, was known as The Cat, for he knew how to land on his feet in the treacherous theological disputes of the day.

Yet the Chalcedonians could not and would not forget them. A succession of Eastern Roman Emperors made numerous attempts to heal this schism, hoping to restore the unity of the Empire and make it easier for it to incorporate and hold areas of Asia Minor and points East that were populated by Christians who rejected Chalcedonian Christology. The Emperor Heraclius (573-641) was so anxious to heal the schism that he invented a new heresy, Monothelism, which tried to bridge the gap between Chalcedonian orthodoxy and the "Monophysites" by positing only one will in Christ, but an otherwise intact human nature.

As is always the case with theology cooked up in committees rather than conceived in the hearts and souls of believing people, this attempted compromise pleased no one, and the schism went on. It is tragic that the Church was rent by a schism that appears largely to have been a matter of terminology, of words and concepts understood in varying ways by the contending parties. For political reasons and because of the intransigence that was characteristic of the age, those parties were not interested in forming commissions for dialogue in order to arrive at a mutual understanding.

Not long after he became the Coptic Pope, in 1973, Shenouda and the Pope of Rome, Paul VI, made a momentous declaration.

Finally, when the Arab conquest subjugated and substantially reduced the Church of Alexandria, the entire controversy, and the once-vibrant See that had formulated so much of the Church's understanding of Christ, faded from Western memory. The Copts endured centuries of Muslim rule, their numbers steadily diminished under the pressure of the institutionalized discrimination that Islamic law mandates for Christians, and from which one can be freed simply by converting to Islam. A fraction of the Coptic Church returned to communion with Rome in 1741, and is known today as the Coptic Catholic Church, but most Egyptian Christians (who today still number as much as ten percent of Egypt's population) belong to the non-Chalcedonian Coptic Orthodox Church headed by Pope Shenouda III since 1971.

The title "Pope" doesn't mean that Shenouda is an antipope or a pretender to the See of Peter in Rome. The Patriarch of Alexandria, in fact, began using the title — which was originally derived from the Greek and Coptic words for "Father" and in itself denotes no claim to primacy over the whole Church — several centuries before the Bishop of Rome did. (That's why Eastern Catholic Churches generally commemorate the "Pope of Rome" during their Liturgical celebrations: they're distinguishing him from the Pope of Alexandria, a much more vivid personage in their world than in the Latin West, where the Roman Pontiff is the only Pope in sight.)

Not long after he became the Coptic Pope, in 1973, Shenouda and the Pope of Rome, Paul VI, made a momentous declaration. They affirmed a common faith in Jesus Christ, who "is perfect God with respect to His Divinity, perfect man with respect to His humanity. In Him His divinity is united with His humanity in a real, perfect union without mingling, without commixtion, without confusion, without alteration, without division, without separation." They quoted the Divine Liturgy of St. Basil of Caesarea: "His divinity did not separate from His humanity for an instant, not for the twinkling of an eye. He who is God eternal and invisible became visible in the flesh, and took upon Himself the form of a servant. In Him are preserved all the properties of the divinity and all the properties of the humanity, together in a real, perfect, indivisible and inseparable union."

This did not heal the schism that had by then continued for a millennium and a half. But to end 1,500 years of misunderstanding and mutual recrimination was accomplishment enough. The agreement reminded many Catholics of the existence and illustrious legacy of their brethren of the Church of Alexandria. Today it looks as if such a reminder was much needed, as the Coptic Church would soon be walking the way of the cross yet again — and Coptic Christians need and deserve all the spiritual and material support their Western brethren can possibly provide.

The bleakness of the situation for Christians in Egypt today, with the Muslim Brotherhood poised to take power, cannot be overstated. Might elegies be in order for a See and Church that was once among the most influential and powerful in all of Christendom? The Lord may yet see fit to save the Church that has produced so many martyrs for fourteen centuries now, and certainly Coptic heroism has not dimmed. But however events may unfold, the Coptic Church deserves our prayers and help — not only in simple Christian solidarity but in gratitude for the great gifts of grace God has given us through the noble Church of Alexandria, the Third See of the ancient and undivided Church.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Robert Spencer. "Requiem for the Third See of Christendom." Crisis Magazine (January 3, 2012).

Reprinted with permission of Crisis Magazine.

Crisis Magazine is an educational apostolate that uses media and technology to bring the genius of Catholicism to business, politics, culture, and family life. Their approach is oriented toward the practical solutions our faith offers — in other words, actionable Catholicism.

THE AUTHOR

Robert Spencer is the is the director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of ten books, including Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics: 100 Questions and Answers, and twoNew York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).

Article: Like, a Virgin?

2012-01-13T13:42:00.001+08:00

RUSSELL D. MOORE

Not long ago, a young single woman wrote to me with a question she would have preferred to ask her father, were he still alive. She's falling in love with a young man, and she's afraid of only one question: his sexual past.

An Evangelical committed to historic, orthodox Christianity, she wants to be a godly wife and mother. She made a commitment at an early age to remain chaste, and in her dating life thus far, she's kept her commitment. She regrets none of that. But now she worries about how to have "the talk."

This woman told me she is now dating a young man, also a Christian, who seems commendable in every way — and her family and friends agree. After a month or so of courtship, she is finding in him what she always prayed for in a husband — faithful discipleship, servant leadership, gospel clarity, and family focus. She's falling in love with him, and she's afraid of only one question: his sexual past.

Has he been with other women sexually? If so, how many and in what way? Has he ever had a problem with pornography? With every week, she's becoming more and more attached to this man, and she's afraid of discovering something potentially problematic after she's already lost her affections to him.

It's not, she assured me, that the information would necessarily kill the relationship, but she wants to know exactly what kind of man she's giving herself to. Her dilemma is that it sure seems awkward to say, "So, enough about C. S. Lewis; let's talk about your sexual past." For one thing, she wonders about seeming so forward with a man not her husband. For another, she wonders if the question itself might force too much emotional intimacy too soon. And she questions whether she really needs to know this at all.

This woman was hardly an isolated example. I find myself counseling young Evangelicals in similar predicaments almost every week. In a time when conservative Christians have pushed back against the sexual chaos of the spirit of the age, and instead placed emphasis on chastity and fidelity, this problem has emerged. What happens when one potential spouse has remained free from fornication and the other hasn't? How much of a sexual past, if any, would doom a potential marriage?

Nothing Casual

The impulse behind the conversation is countercultural in the best way. Courtship for the Christian, after all, isn't a means of entertainment; it's about discerning whether someone would make a good husband or wife. But the discussion is fraught with peril because it is tied up with deeper conversations about Christianity itself, about the tensions between law and grace, between justice and forgiveness.

The sexual past of a potential future spouse is important to know about because of the nature of marriage as a one-flesh union (Gen. 2:23–24; Eph. 5:28–33). Biblically speaking, marriage is not a partnership between two individuals who have compartmentalized off parts of their lives. The Apostle Paul dismisses any such notion with his radical statement that a husband's sexuality does not belong to him but to his wife (1 Cor. 7:4), and vice-versa. In a very real sense, your spouse's sexual past becomes part of your story, too.

Of course, the act itself, disconnected from the conjugal vow, does not create a marriage; otherwise, there would be no concept of "fornication" in the Scriptures. Even so, in the Christian perspective, there is no such thing as a casual sexual encounter.

Paul argues that the sexually immoral person sins not just against another but "against his own body" (1 Cor. 6:18). He compares the spiritual union with Christ in regeneration with the union called together in the sexual act. Even one who is "joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her," he writes, citing Genesis. The sexual act, mysteriously, forms a real and personal union.

Beyond that, one's sexual past — especially that formed early in life — invariably creates what sociologists call a "sexual script," and this script typically sets the fabric of one's sexuality for life. A woman has a right to know, therefore, whether a potential husband's script has been shaped by pornographic images, and a man has a right to know whether his future wife's serial encounters have taught her to disconnect emotion from sex. And so on.

Convictions Matter

Even so, I counseled the young woman who wrote to me against direct questioning. I've seen too many budding relationships wrecked by a talk that prematurely formed an inappropriate emotional intimacy. She doesn't need to know, a month into the relationship, all the details (or lack thereof) of his sexual past. What she does need to know is how he views sexual immorality and how he sees fidelity.

So I advised her to ask him what his convictions are about protecting himself and his future marriage from immorality. She might, I suggested, ask him how he would one day counsel his son to flee from pornography and other pitfalls. And I told her to watch to see what kind of wisdom and gravity (or lack thereof) he displays. A man who glibly dismisses such matters, I warned her, is a threat to her future marriage and children.

A man or woman who brushes off past immorality as "no big deal," or as something from which he has "moved on," has a conscience seared. This person is trained and ready to do the same kind of self-justification for future adultery.

What a Christian evaluating a potential spouse should fear most of all is not a repentant fornicator, but a person who will, as is increasingly common, declare himself or herself to be a virgin with some asterisks. One who sees, for instance, oral or anal sex as merely one of the "bases" short of "sex" is a person who has been trained to evade repentance. In the fullness of time, apart from radical conviction of sin, this person will excuse other acts of treachery to the marital vow.

The Peril of "Almost Gospels"

But there's another danger here, and it's a peril found in the same biblical tension from which a thousand other heresies have sprung. The gospel tells us how God is both "just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:26). There are "almost gospels" that always seek to circumvent one or the other aspect of this mystery.

On the one hand, there's the airy antinomianism ofthose who would seek good news apart from the law and righteousness of God. We find this error in Christians who sin with an easy conscience, assuming they can simply "rededicate" their lives to Jesus at the next altar call (if they're Evangelical) or the next time they go to confession (if they're Catholic or Orthodox). But such a "gospel," severed from the justice of God, is no gospel at all. Indeed, the Pauline epistles repeatedly take on the notion that God's free mercy means we should "continue in sin that grace may abound" (Rom. 6:1). The apostle's response to this couldn't be much stronger: "God forbid!"

On the other hand, though, there is the equally perilous temptation to emphasize the righteousness of God's holy law without the mercy of the Cross. Such an error evidences not only a low view of the gospel but also a low view of the law.

James points out that "whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it" (James 2:10), since sin isn't against a law but against the Lawgiver. Since, James argues, a transgressor is a transgressor, "so speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy" ( James 2:12–13).

Doubts & Difficulties

Often "the talk" about one's sexual past leads to a break-up. Sometimes that's necessary, particularly if the conversation reveals a pattern of concealed sin or an ongoing slavery to the works of the flesh. But sometimes the conversation reveals a deep sorrow and a repentant spirit for the immorality of the past. In this case, it shows forth precisely what the gospel is about: the sinner sees his or her past as hell-deserving but crucified with Christ. Yet sometimes, even so, the "pure" one will walk away.

Even in the worst of such situations, there's a good impulse behind all of this. No matter how accustomed we've grown to the libidinal anarchy of our times, fornication isn't natural. Image-bearing human beings were designed to give themselves completely, each to one mate. This is, as Jesus says, how it was "from the beginning" (Matt. 19:8).

Thus, the jealousy one feels at the thought of his spouse being with another person is right in the most primal sense. It reflects the righteous jealousy God expresses when he speaks of his covenant people as fornicators, as adulteresses who have "played the harlot" with suitors uncountable (e.g., Ezek. 16).

Yet I'm surprised at the number of Christians, particularly men, who are unwilling to move forward after hearing a repentant confession of past sexual sin. This is all the more puzzling when the one who "can't get over" the sexual past of a future mate is also guilty of fornication.

In addition, there are the Christians who insist that their fidelity to sexual morality entitles them to a spouse who is likewise pure. This was brought home to me when I posted my response to the anonymous, inquiring young woman. When I said on my website, as I have here, that past immorality wouldn't necessarily disqualify the man she was dating from becoming her husband (the way, for instance, he would be disqualified if he were not a Christian), I was amazed by the immediate fury of the virgins.

Some of them insisted I was horribly wrong, that they would never marry such a person. After all, some of them wrote, they had carefully kept themselves from the pleasures of premarital sex. What would be the point if they then married someone who had more experience than they? How could they go forward, always wondering whether their spouse was comparing them to some remembered tryst of long ago?

The Gospel's Answer

Again, the answer is the gospel itself. If there were "pure" people and "impure" people, then I suppose we could divide the world up into the two groups and marry accordingly. But purity is relative when judged against the tribunal of God's righteousness. The Christian is, first of all, one who recognizes that he stands by mercy, a mercy in which justice is found only in the sinless purity of Jesus. Since this is so, the gospel tells us, we are to receive others as we have been received.

It is good and necessary for us to teach our children sexual fidelity, the goodness and joy of chastity until marriage. But we must do so in a way that molds the next generation into the image of Christ, not into the image of the merciless Pharisees whom he opposed. Hearing our children pray, "Thank you, Lord, that I am not like that fornicator over there," is not success. One can go to hell with virginity intact.

Thus, you are not "owed" a virgin because you are one. Your sexual purity wasn't part of a quid pro quo in which God guaranteed you a sexually unbroken mate. Sexual fidelity isn't some heroic measure at all; it is our obligation as creatures of God.

The chaste Christian is blessed indeed, especially in these pathetic times, but he or she has rebelled at other points and been forgiven. That truth cannot help but fuel the mercy of one who has been forgiven much. After all, those who have been forgiven must know that we stand in grace not because our sins are not there, but because Christ has made propitiation for them on the Cross. And not for our sins only, "but for those of the whole world" (1 John 2:2).

The Bridegroom's Love

In today's culture, in which a person's life is often seen to consist in the abundance of his orgasms, "the talk" about one's sexual past is sadly necessary. If it brings to light a lack of repentance or an ongoing pattern of sexual sin on the part of a prospective spouse, a Christian should flee the trouble to come.

But if it reveals a prospective spouse who is repentant and forgiven, and the other potential mate is still "tortured" by the thought of it all, it could be that the root issue isn't about sex at all. The real question could be one of personal pride and a refusal to see oneself as a gospel-forgiven sinner.

The issue isn't whether fornication is damnable; it is. The issue is whether damnation can be turned back, by Golgotha Hill Blood and Garden Tomb Life.

Perhaps right now, as I write this in a coffee shop in Louisville, there's a couple just out of earshot beginning this awkward, painful conversation. If so, I pray they'll see beyond their potential marriage, and beyond marriage in general, to the mystery behind it all, a mystery that throbs with the gospel.

The first marriage was between two virgins; that is true. But the primeval one-flesh union reflected something else, something unveiled only ages later in the preaching of Christ. The cleaving of this husband to this wife pictured then, and does now, the icon of the Messiah and his assembly, of a Head with his Body. Jesus was a virgin. His Bride wasn't. He loved us anyway.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Russell D. Moore, "Like, a Virgin?" Touchstone (May/June, 2011): 16-18.

Reprinted by permission of the author, Russell D. Moore.

Touchstone is a Christian journal, conservative in doctrine and eclectic in content, with editors and readers from each of the three great divisions of Christendom — Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox. The mission of the journal and its publisher, the Fellowship of St. James, is to provide a place where Christians of various backgrounds can speak with one another on the basis of shared belief and the fundamental doctrines of the faith as revealed in Holy Scripture and summarized in the ancient creeds of the Church. To subscribe to the print or digital Touchstone go here.

THE AUTHOR

Russell D. Moore is the Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice-President for Academic Administration atThe Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He also serves as a preaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church, where he ministers weekly at the congregation's Fegenbush location. Moore is the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Christ, Adopted for Life, and Tempted and Tried.

Article: Education and the Individual

2012-01-13T13:41:00.001+08:00

RICHARD M. WEAVER

The greatest school that ever existed, it has been said, consisted of Socrates standing on a street corner with one or two interlocutors. If this remark strikes the average American as merely a bit of fancy, that is because education here today suffers from an unprecedented amount of aimlessness and confusion.

This is not to suggest that education in the United States, as compared with other countries, fails to command attention and support. In our laws we have endorsed it without qualification, and our provision for it, despite some claims to the contrary, has been on a lavish scale. But we behold a situation in which, as the educational plants become larger and more finely appointed, what goes on in them becomes more diluted, less serious, less effective in training mind and character; and correspondingly what comes out of them becomes less equipped for the rigorous tasks of carrying forward an advanced civilization.

Recently I attended a conference addressed by a retired general who had some knowledge of this country's ballistics program. He pointed out that of the twenty-five top men concerned with our progress in this now vital branch of science, not more than two or three were Americans. The others were Europeans, who had received in their European educations the kind of theoretical discipline essential to the work of getting the great missiles aloft. It was a sad commentary on a nation which has prided itself on giving its best to the schools.

It is an educational breakdown which has occurred. Our failure in these matters traces back to a failure to think hard about the real province of education. Most Americans take a certain satisfaction in regarding themselves as tough-minded when it comes to successful ways of doing things and positive achievements. But in deciding what is and is not pertinent to educating the individual, far too many of them have been softheads.

An alarming percentage of our citizens, it is to be feared, stop with the word "education" itself. It is for them a kind of conjuror's word, which is expected to work miracles by the very utterance. If politics become selfish and shortsighted, the cure that comes to mind is "education." If juvenile delinquency is rampant, "education" is expected to provide the remedy. If the cultural level of popular entertainment declines, "education" is thought of hopefully as the means of arresting the downward trend. People expect to be saved by a word when they cannot even give content to the word.

Somewhat better off, but far from sufficiently informed and critical, are those who recognize that education must, after all, take some kind of form, that it must be thought of as a process that does something one can recognize. Most of these people, however, see education only as the means by which a person is transported from one economic plane to a higher one, or in some cases from one cultural level to another that is more highly esteemed. They are not wholly wrong in these assumptions, for it is true that persons with a good education do receive, over the period of their lifetime, larger earnings than those without, and it is true that almost any education brings with it a certain amount of cultivation. But again, these people are looking at the outward aspects and are judging education by what it does for one in the general economic and social ordering. In both of these respects education is valued as a means of getting ahead in life, a perfectly proper and legitimate goal, of course, but hardly one which sums up the whole virtue and purpose of an undertaking, which, in a modern society, may require as much as one quarter of the lifespan. Education as a conjuror's word and education viewed as a means of insuring one's progress in relation to his fellows both divert attention from what needs to be done for the individual as a person.

Education is a process by which the individual is developed into something better than he would have been without it. Now when one views this idea from a certain perspective, it appears almost terrifying. How does one go about taking human beings and making them better? The very thought seems in a way the height of presumption. For one thing, it involves the premise that some human beings can be better than others, a supposition that is resisted in some quarters. Yet nothing can be plainer, when we consider it, than this fact that education is discriminative. It takes what is less good physically, mentally, and morally and transforms that by various methods and techniques into something that more nearly approaches our ideal of the good. Every educator who presumes to speak about his profession has in mind some aim, goal, or purpose that he views as beneficial. As various as are the schemes proposed, they all share this general concept of betterment. The teacher who did not believe that his efforts contributed to some kind of improvement would certainly have lost the reason for his calling. A surface unanimity about purpose, however, is not enough to prevent confusion and chaos where there is radical disagreement about the nature of the creature who is to be educated.

If man were merely an animal, his "education" would consist only of scientific feeding and proper exercise. If he were merely a tool or an instrument, it would consist of training him in certain response and behavior patterns. If he were a mere pawn of the political state, it would consist of indoctrinating him so completely that he could not see beyond what his masters wanted him to believe. Strange as it may seem, adherents to each of these views can be found in the modern world. But our great tradition of liberal education, supported by our intuitive feeling about the nature of man, rejects them all as partial descriptions.

The vast majority of people conscious of this tradition agree that the purpose of education is to make the human being more human. Every generation is born ignorant and unformed; it is the task of those whom society employs as educators to bring the new arrivals up to a certain level of humanity. But even with this simple statement, we find trickiness in the terms. The word "human" is one of varying implications. In estimating what constitutes a complete human being some persons today are willing to settle for a pretty low figure. To some of them, as previously noted, he is nothing more than an animal in an advanced state of evolution.

His brain is only a highly developed muscle, useful to him in the same way that the prehensile tail is to the monkey; his needs are a set of skills which will enable him to get his sustenance from nature, and his purpose is to enjoy himself with the minimum amount of anxiety and the maximum amount of physical satisfaction. Others go somewhat beyond this and insist that in addition to his requirements as an animal, man has certain needs which can be described as social, intellectual and aesthetic, and that these in turn require a kind of education which is not limited to practical self-survival. Others go beyond this and say that man is an incurably spiritual being — that he is this even when he says he is not — and that he cannot live a satisfying sort of life until certain ends which might be called psychic are met. Man has an irresistible desire to relate himself somehow to the totality, to ask what is the meaning of his presence here amid the great empirical fact of the universe. Many feel that until this question receives some sort of answer, none of the facts of life can be put in any kind of perspective.

We will not pause to weigh the opinion of those who consider man merely an animal. This view has always been both incredible and repugnant to the majority of mankind, and is accepted only by the few who have bound themselves to a theoretical materialism.

All others agree that the human being has a distinguishing attribute in mind. Now mind is something more than brain. Many anatomists and surgeons have seen a brain, but nobody has ever seen a mind. This is because we believe that the mind is not merely a central exchange of the body's system, where nerve impulses are brought together and relayed; it is a still mysterious entity in which man associates together the various cognitive, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual impulses which come to him from the outer and inner worlds. It is the seat of his rational faculty, but it is also the place where his inclinations are reduced to order and are directed. Most importantly for the concerns of education, mind is the place where symbols are understood and are acted upon.

Man has, in fact, been defined as the symbol-using animal. This definition makes symbol-using the distinguishing characteristic which separates him from all the other creatures with which he shares animal attributes. Even though the definition may be a partial one, it points to the faculty which has enabled man to create cultures and civilizations. The significance of the symbol is that it enables us to express knowledge and to communicate in an intellectual and not in a sensate way. Even in the matter of economy, this gain is an enormous one. If a man wishes to indicate six, he uses the symbol "6"; he does not have to lay out six pieces of wood or other objects to make his meaning clear to another. If he wishes to indicate water, he does not have to go through the motions of drinking or some other pantomime. If he wishes to express his insight into a wide complex of physical phenomena, he can do this by means of a mathematical formula, like the now famous E=mc2.

This is a highly symbolic form of expression, in the absence of which, it is hardly needful to point out, man's power to deal with nature would be very much smaller than it is at present. But symbolism is not used only to convey information about the physical world. Through the use of symbols man expresses those feelings and states of being which are none the less real for being subjective. His feelings of love, of delight, of aversion have been put in forms transmissible from generation to generation through the use of symbols — letters in literature, notation in music, symbolic articles in dress and in ceremonials, and so on. It is impossible to realize how poor our lives would be without the intellectual and emotional creations which depend upon this symbolic activity.

It might seem that all of this is too obvious to need a case made for it. But there exists a crisis in education today which forces all who believe in the higher nature of man to come to the defense of those subjects which discipline the mind through the language of sign and symbol.

For some while now there has been a movement among certain people styling themselves educators to disparage and even do away with the very things that were once considered the reason for and the purpose of all education. There has been a bold and open attempt to deny that man has a nature which is fulfilled only when these higher faculties are brought into play, educated, and used to make life more human in the distinctive sense. Oddly enough, the movement has arrogated to itself the name "progressive." That seems a curious term to apply to something that is retrogressive in effect, since it would drag men back toward the pre-symbolic era. In preempting the adjective "progressive' for their brand of education, these innovators were trying a rhetorical maneuver. They were trying to give the impression that their theory of education is the only forward-looking one, and that the traditional ones were inherited from times and places that sat in darkness. Now it is quite true that "progressive" education represents a departure from an ideal that has prevailed ever since the ancient Hebrews, the people of the Bible, thought about religion, and the Greeks envisioned the life of reason.

And furthermore, "adjustment to life" may be taken by the unwary as suggesting a kind of victory over life — success and pleasure and all that sort of thing. But as soon as we begin to examine the phrase both carefully and critically, we find that it contains booby traps. It is far from likely that the greatest men of the past, including not only famous ones but also great benefactors of humanity, have been "adjusted" in this sense.

This new education is not designed for man as an immortal soul, nor is it designed to help him measure up to any ideal standard. The only goal which it professes to have in view is "adjustment to life." If we examine this phrase carefully, we will see that it, like a number of others that these educational imposters have been wont to use, is rather cleverly contrived to win a rhetorical advantage. "Adjustment" has an immediate kind of appeal, because no one likes to think of himself as being "maladjusted"; that suggests failure, discomfort, and other unpleasant experiences. And furthermore, "adjustment to life" may be taken by the unwary as suggesting a kind of victory over life — success and pleasure and all that sort of thing. But as soon as we begin to examine the phrase both carefully and critically, we find that it contains booby traps. It is far from likely that the greatest men of the past, including not only famous ones but also great benefactors of humanity, have been "adjusted" in this sense.

When we begin to study their actual lives, we find that these were filled with toil, strenuousness, anxiety, self-sacrifice, and sometimes a good bit of friction with their environment. In fact, it would be much nearer the truth to say that the great creative spirits of the past have been maladjusted to life in one or more important ways. Some kind of productive tension between them and their worlds was essential to their creative accomplishment. This indeed seems to be a necessity for all evolutionary progress, not merely on the organic level but on the cultural level as well. This must not be taken to mean that such persons never achieve happiness. "Happiness" as employed by today's journalism is a pretty flabby and misleading word. Certain distinctions must be made before it can be safely used. The moments of happiness of creative people, though perhaps comparatively rare, are very elevated and very intense. This is characteristic of the life of genius. And when a culture ceases to produce vital creative spirits, it must cease to endure, for these are necessary even to sustain it.

Now let us look carefully at the second term of this formula. The prophets of the new education say that they are going to teach the young to adjust to life. But when we begin to elicit what they have in mind, we begin to wonder what kind of thing they imagine life to be. They seem to have in mind some simulacrum of life, or some travesty, or some abstracted part. They do not contemplate adjusting students to life in its fullness and mystery, but to life lived in some kind of projected socialist commonwealth, where everybody has so conformed to a political pattern that there really are no problems any more. Adjustment to real life must take into account pain, evil, passion, tragedy, the limits of human power, heroism, the attraction of ideals, and so on. The education of the "progressives" does not do this. It educates for a world conceived as without serious conflicts. And this is the propaganda of ignorance.

Furthermore, nearly all of the great character developments have involved some form of sacrifice for an ideal; nearly all great individuals have felt the call for that kind of sacrifice, But sacrifice does not exist in the vocabulary of "progressive" education, since forthem everything must take the form of "adjustment" or self-realization. Were Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus "adjusted to life"? The way in which one answers that question will reveal whether he stands with those who believe that man has a higher self and a higher destiny or whether he is willing to stop with an essentially barbaric ideal of happiness. The adjustment which the progressive educators prate of is, just because of its lack of any spiritual ideal, nothing more than the adjustment of a worm to the surface it is crawling on.

When we turn to the practical influence of their theorizing, we find that it has worked to undermine the discipline which has been used through the centuries to make the human being a more aware, resourceful, and responsible person. As would be expected, the brunt of their attack has been against those studies which, because they make the greatest use of symbols are the most intellectual — against mathematics and language study, with history and philosophy catching a large share also of their disapproval. (There are excellent reasons for terming certain subjects "disciplines" and for insisting that the term be preserved. For "discipline" denotes something that has the power to shape and to control in accordance with objective standards. It connotes the power to repress and discourage those impulses which interfere with the proper development of the person. A disciplined body is one that is developed and trained to do what its owner needs it to do; a disciplined mind is one that is developed and trained to think in accordance with the necessary laws of thought, and which therefore can provide its owner with true causal reasoning about the world. A person with a disciplined will is trained to want the right thing and to reject the bad out of his own free volition. Discipline involves the idea of the negative, and this is another proof that man does not unfold merely naturally, like a flower. He unfolds when be is being developed by a sound educational philosophy according to known lines of truth and error, of right and wrong.)

Mathematics lies at the basis of our thinking about number, magnitude, and position. Number is the very language of science. So pervasive is it in the work of the intellect that Plato would have allowed no one to study philosophy who had not studied mathematics. But these are the very reasons that mathematics is calculated to arouse the suspicion of the "progressives"; it works entirely through symbols and it makes real demands upon the intellect.

Language has been called "the supreme organon of the mind's self-ordering growth." It is the means by which we not only communicate our thoughts to others but interpret our thoughts to ourselves. The very fact that language has the public aspect of intelligibility imposes a discipline upon the mind; it forces us to be critical of our own thoughts so that they will be comprehensible to others. But at the same time it affords us practically infinite possibilities of expressing our particular inclinations through its variety of combinations and its nuances. Most authorities agree that we even think in language, that without language thought would actually be impossible. Those who attack the study of language (whether in the form of grammar, logic, and rhetoric or in the form of a foreign language) because it is "aristocratic" are attacking the basic instrumentality of the mind.

History has always been a sobering discipline because it presents the story not only of man's achievements but also of his failures. History contains many vivid lessons of what can happen to man if he lets go his grip upon reality and becomes self-indulgent; it is the record of the race, which can be laid alongside the dreams of visionaries, with many profitable lessons. Yet the modern tendency is to drop the old-fashioned history course and to substitute something called "social science" or "social studies," which one student has aptly dubbed "social stew." What this often turns out to be is a large amount of speculation based on a small amount of history, and the speculation is more or less subtly slanted to show that we should move in the direction of socialism or some other collectivism. Often this kind of study is simply frivolous; the student is invited to give his thought to the "dating patterns" of teenagers instead of to those facts which explain the rise and fall of nations. There is more to be learned about the nature of man as an individual and as a member of society from a firm grounding in ancient and modern history than from all the "social studies" ever put together by dreamy "progressive" educators.

Philosophy too is an essential part of liberal education because it alone can provide a structure for organizing our experience and a ground for the hierarchical ordering of our values. But under "progressive" education there is but one kind of philosophy, that of experimental inquiry in adapting to an environment. This has no power to yield insight and no means of indicating whether one kind of life is higher than another if both show an adjustment to the externals around them.

Thus with amazing audacity the "progressive" educators have turned their backs upon those subjects which throughout civilized history have provided the foundations of culture and of intellectual distinction.

If this has been stressed at some length, it is in order to deny the claim that "progressive" education fosters individualism. It may have the specious look of doing so because it advocates personal experience as a teacher and the release of the natural tendencies of the person. Yet it does this on a level which does not make for true individualism. Individualism in the true sense is a matter of the mind and the spirit; it means the development of the person, not the well-adjusted automaton. What the progressivists really desire to produce is the "smooth" individual adapted to some favorite scheme of collectivized living, not the person of strong convictions, of refined sensibility, and of deep personal feeling of direction in life. Any doubt of this may be removed by noting how many "progressive" educators are in favor of more state activity in education. Under the cloak of devotion to the public schools, they urge an ever greater state control, the final form of which would be, in our country, a Federal educational system directed out of Washington and used to instill the collectivist political notions which are the primary motives of this group.

No true believer in freedom can contemplate this prospect with anything but aversion. If there is one single condition necessary to the survival of truth and of values in our civilization, it is that the educational system be left independent enough to espouse these truths and values regardless of the political winds of doctrine of the moment. The fairest promises of a hands-off policy on the part of Federal educational authorities would come to nothing once they were assured of their power and control. If education were allowed to become completely statist affair, there is no assurance that the content of even science courses would be kept free from the injection of political ideas. The latter might seem a fantastic impossibility, yet it has actually occurred in the Soviet Union. This is a case well worth relating as a warning to all who would put faith in centralized education under a paternalistic state.

We may press this even further and say that education must regard two things as sacred: the truth, and the personality that is to be brought into contact with it. No education can be civilizing and humane unless it is a respecter of persons.

Some years ago the leading Soviet geneticist was one T. D. Lysenko, who occupied the post of President of the All-Union Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science. Lysenko claimed that he had disposed of the genetic theories of Mendel and Morgan, his motive being that these were "reactionary" and counter to the theories of socialism. Western scientists exposed the fallacies in his work and denounced him as an ignorant quack. But Lysenko, working through a stooge named Michurin, established what he called "Michurin science" in genetics, to which Soviet geneticists still have to bow because it is in accord with the Marxist political line. How far the Communists are willing to go in perverting science to the uses of politics may be seen in the following excerpts from an article in the USSR Information Bulletin written by Lysenko himself.

It was the great Lenin who discovered Michurin and the great Stalin who launched Michurin's materialistic biological theories on the highroad of creative work.

Not only has the great Stalin rescued the Michurin teaching from the attempts of reactionaries in science to destroy it; he has also helped to rear large forces of Michurinist scientists and practical workers. His guiding ideas have played and are playing a decisive role in the triumph of the materialistic Michurin teaching over the reactionary, idealistic Weissmannism-Morganism in the Soviet land.

The works of Joseph Stalin are an invaluable and inexhaustible fount for the development of theoretical Michurinist biology. His classic work, Dialectic and Historical Materialism, is an indispensable general theoretical aid to all agrobiologists, which helps them to gain a correct understanding of biological facts. Only when examined in the light of dialectical and historical materialism, the principles of which have been further developed by Stalin, does the Michurinist biological teaching gradually reveal its full depth and truth to us.

Where education is under the control of collectivist fanatics, not only is the individual's loyalty to truth despised, but the objective findings of science may be thus perverted to serve the ends of a political ideology.

Even though this may be regarded as an extreme case, we are living in a world where extreme aberrations occur suddenly, so that "It can't happen here" may be followed rather abruptly by "Now it has happened here." Dangers are always best met at the frontier, and the frontier in this instance is just where the state proposes to move in on education. Education's first loyalty is to the truth, and the educator must be left free to assert, as sometimes he needs to do, unpopular or unappreciated points of view.

Education thus has a major responsibility to what we think of as objectively true. But it also has a major responsibility to the person. We may press this even further and say that education must regard two things as sacred: the truth, and the personality that is to be brought into contact with it. No education can be civilizing and humane unless it is a respecter of persons. It may be that up to a certain utilitarian point, everyone's training can be more or less alike. But in a most important area, no educational institution is doing its duty if it treats the individual "just like everybody else."

Education has to take into account the differing aptitudes produced by nature and individual character, and these differing aptitudes are extremely various. Physiologists are just beginning to understand how widely men differ in their capacities to see, to taste, to bear pain, to assimilate food, to tolerate toxic substances, and in many other physical respects. On top of this are the multifarious ways in which individuals differ psychologically through their nervous systems, reflexes, habits, and patterns of coordination. And above this are the various ways in which individuals differ physically in their ways of intuiting reality, their awareness of ideals, their desires for this or that supersensible satisfaction, and so on. When all of these factors are brought into view, it is seen that every individual is a unique creation, something "fearfully and wonderfully made," and that the educator who does not allow for special development within the discipline which he imposes is a repressor and a violator.

Now the educator who is aware of all the facts and values involved in his difficult calling will recognize in the individual a certain realm of privacy. Much of present-day education and many of the pressures of modern life treat the person as if he were a one-, or at best two-dimensional being. They tend to simplify and indeed even to brutalize their treatment of the person by insisting that certain ways are "good for everybody". Yet it is a truth of the greatest importance that our original ideas and our intuitions of value form in certain recesses of the being which must be preserved if these processes are to take place. The kind of self-mastery which is the most valuable of all possessions is not something imposed from without; it is a gestation within us, a growth in several dimensions, an integration which brings into a whole one's private thoughts and feelings and one's private acts and utterances. A private world alone is indeed dangerous, but a personality whose orientation is entirely public is apt to be flat, uncreative, and uninteresting. The individual who does not develop within himself certain psychic depths cannot, when the crises of life have to be faced meet them with any real staying power. His fate is to be moved along by circumstances, which in themselves cannot bring one to an intelligent solution.

Most people have marvelled how Abraham Lincoln was able to develop such a mastery of logic and such a sense of the meaning of words while growing up in a society which set little store by these accomplishments. Yet the answer seems easy enough; Lincoln had a very real private life, in which he reflected deeply upon these matters until he made them a kind of personal possession. He was an individual — keeping up a train of personal reflection, even while mingling in friendly and humorous way with the people of his frontier community. Lincoln paid a price for this achievement, of course, the rule of this world being "nothing for nothing." But no one who believes in greatness will say that the price was out of proportion to what was gained. If it is true that Lincoln "belongs to the ages," it is so because he learned to think about things in a way that enabled him to transcend time and place. This is what is meant by developing a personality.

How far modern theorists have drifted from these truths may be seen in the strange remarks of the "progressive" educator John Dewey.

the idea of perfecting an 'inner' personality is a sure sign of social divisions, What is called inner is simply that which does not connect with others — which is not capable of full and free communication. What is termed spiritual culture has usually been futile, with something rotten about it, just because it has been conceived as a thing which a man might have internally — and therefore exclusively.

For Dewey an inner consciousness is exclusive, aristocratic, separative. What Dewey denies, what his spurious system forces him to deny, is that by achieving a depth of personality, one does develop a power and a means of influencing the community in the best sense of the term "influence." To speak personally is to speak universally. Humanity is not a community in the sense of a number of atoms or monads, knocking together; it is a spiritual community, in which to feel deeply is to feel widely, or to make oneself accessible to most of one's fellow members. In consequence, it cannot be too forcefully argued that the education which regards only development with reference to externals is not education for a higher plane of living, for the individual and for the society of which he is a part, but for a lower — for an artificially depressed level of living which, were it to be realized, would put an end to human development.

Although it may at first seem paradoxical to insist both upon discipline and the development of private and inner resources, the cooperative working of the two is a proved fact of education. Nothing today more needs recovering than the truth that interest develops under pressure.Man is not spontaneously interested in anything with an interest that lasts or that carried him beyond attention to superficial aspects. Natural interest which is left to itself nearly always proves impermanent, disconnected, and frivolous. It is only when we are made to take an interest in something that we become exposed to its real possibility of interesting us.

To be an individual does not mean to be "peculiar" or somehow curious in one's outlook. It does, however, mean to be distinctive.

It is only then that we see far enough into its complications and potentialities to say to ourselves, here is a real problem, or a real opportunity. We need not suppose that institutions are the only source of this kind of pressure. The situation a person finds himself in when he must earn a living or achieve some coveted goal may exert the necessary compulsion. But here we are talking about what formal education can do for the individual, and one of the invaluable things it can do is face him with the necessity of mastering something, so that he can find the real richness that lies beyond his threshold indifference to it. An interest in mathematics, in music, in poetry has often resulted from an individual's being confronted with one of these as a "discipline"; that is, as something he had to become acquainted with on pain of penalties. The subject there by its own powers begins to evoke him, and before long he is wondering how he could ever have been oblivious to such a fascinating world of knowledge and experience. From this point on his appreciation of it becomes individual, personal, and creative.

As individuality begins to assert itself in the man or woman, we realize that its movement is toward a final ethical tie-up of the personality. Individuality should not be equated with a mere set of idiosyncrasies. Idiosyncrasy is casual, fortuitous, essentially meaningless. No enlightened believer in individualism rests his case on anything as peripheral as this. To be an individual does not mean to be "peculiar" or somehow curious in one's outlook. It does, however, mean to be distinctive.

Individuality as a goal must be explained by men's inclinations toward the good. All of us aspire toward something higher, even though there are varying ways in which that something higher can be visualized or represented. Whether one is prone to accept an ethical humanism, a tradition of religious principles, or a creed having its authority in revelation, the truth cannot be ignored that man is looking for something better both in himself and in others. But because different persons have, through their inheritance, nurture, and education different faculties, they have different insights into the good. One man is deeply and constantly aware of certain appearances of it; another of others; and sometimes these differences are so great that they lead to actual misunderstanding.

Nevertheless, the wisest have realized that such differences express finally different orientations toward values, and that the proper aim of society is not to iron them out but to provide opportunity for their expression. Variations appearing in these forms do not mean simply that one man is right and another wrong; they mean that the persons in question are responding according to their different powers to apprehend an order of reality. In this kind of perception, some persons are fast movers; others are slow but deep; some have to see things concretely; others are more successful in working out ideas and principles; some people are profoundly sensitive to place; others would do about the same kind of thinking anywhere; some do their best work while feeling a sense of security; others require the excitement and stimulus of uncertainty to draw forth their best efforts. Such a list of differences could be extended almost endlessly. But what it comes down to is this: the reason for not only permitting but encouraging individualism is that each person is individually related toward the source of ethical impulse and should be allowed to express his special capacity for that relation.

This is at the same time the real validation of democracy. Democracy cannot rest upon a belief in the magic of numbers. It rests upon a belief that every individual has some special angle of vision, some particular insight into a situation which ought to be taken into account before a policy is decided on. Voting is perhaps only a rough way of effecting this, but the essential theory is clear: every person is deemed to have something worthy to contribute to decision-making, and the very diversity and variety of these responses are what makes democracy not indeed a more efficient, but a fairer form of government than those in which one, or a few men at the top assume that their particular angle upon matters contains all the perception of the good that is needed.

Yet there is a very true sense in which one does not become such an individual until he becomes aware of his possession of freedom. One cannot act as a being until one is a being; one can not be a being unless he feels within himself the grounds of his action. The people in this world who impress us as nonentities are, in the true analysis, people whose speech and actions are only reflections of what they see and hear about them, who have no means of evaluating themselves except through what other people think of them. These are the "other directed men," the hollow men, the men who have to be filled with stuffing from the outside, of which our civilization is increasingly productive. The real person is, in contrast, the individual who senses in himself an internal principle of control, to which his thoughts and actions are related. Ever aware of this, he makes his choices, and this choosing is the most real thing he ever does because it asserts his character in the midst of circumstances. Then the feeling of freedom comes with a great upsurging sense of triumph: to be free is to be victorious; it is to count, whereas the nonentity by his very nature does not count.

A liberal education specifically prepares for the achievement of freedom. Of this there is interesting corroboration in the word itself. "Liberal" comes from a Latin term signifying "free," and historically speaking, liberal education has been designed for the freemen of a state. Its content and method have been designed to develop the mind and the character in making choices between truth and error, between right and wrong. For liberal education introduces one to the principles of things, and it is only with referenceto the principles of things, that such judgments are at all possible. The mere facts about a subject, which may come marching in monotonous array, do not speak for themselves. They speak only through an interpreter, as it were, and the interpreter has to be those general ideas derived from an understanding of the nature of language, of logic, and of mathematics, and of ethics and politics. The individual who is trained in these basic disciplines is able to confront any fact with the reality of his freedom to choose. This is the way in which liberal education liberates.

Finally, therefore, we are brought to see that education for individualism is education for goodness. How could it be otherwise? The liberally educated individual is the man who is at home in the world of ideas. And because he has achieved a true selfhood by realizing that he is a creature of free choice, he can select among ideas in the light of the relations he has found to obtain among them. Just as he is not the slave of another man, with his freedom of choice of work taken from him, so he is not the slave of a political state, shielded by his "superiors" from contact with error and evil. The idea of virtue is assimilated and grows into character through exercise, which means freedom of action in a world in which not all things are good. This truth has never been put more eloquently than by the poet Milton.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

Freedom and goodness finally merge in this conception; the unfree man cannot be good because virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, and if this latter is taken away, there is simply no way for goodness to assert itself. The moment we judge the smallest action in terms of right and wrong, we are stepping up to a plane where the good is felt as an imperative, even though it can be disobeyed. When education is seen as culminating in this, we can cease troubling about its failure to accomplish this or that incidental objective. An awareness of the order of the goods will take care of many things which are now felt as unresolvable difficulties, and we will have advanced once more as far as Socrates when he made the young Athenians aware that the unexamined life is not worth living.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Richard M. Weaver. "Education and the Individual." The Intercollegiate Review(September, 1965).

Reprinted with permission of ISI and The Intercollegiate Review.

For more than 50 years, ISI has been the publisher of American intellectual conservatism's leading scholarly journals. Here you can access the archive of three of ISI's journals, Intercollegiate Review, Modern Age, and Political Science Reviewer. In these volumes, you will find the early writings of young academics who have become the intellectual giants of today. You will also witness the timelessness of the battle to defend the West and to preserve the truly permanent things. Visit ISI's journal archive here.

THE AUTHOR

Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as a shaper of mid- 20th century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric. A solitary figure in 20th century American academic life, briefly a socialist in his youth, a lapsed leftist intellectual conservative by the time he was in graduate school, a teacher of composition, a Platonist philosopher who wrote on the problem of universals and criticized nominalism, a literary and cultural critic, and a theorist of human nature and society. He is the author of Ideas Have Consequences and The Ethics of Rhetoric, his writings remain influential, particularly among conservative theorists and scholars of the American South. Weaver was also associated with the "New Conservatives," a group of scholars who in the 1940s and 1950s promoted traditionalist conservatism. He is the author of Ideas Have Consequences, The Ethics of Rhetoric,

Article: God's Calendar

2012-01-04T16:17:00.001+08:00

FATHER GEORGE RUTLER

Christmas celebrates the birth of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, which is what Christmas is, though that may be beyond the grasp of many nice people gazing into the windows of Macy's and Lord & Taylor.

Those who keep Advent in penitential preparation for Christmas will not be too exhausted to keep the full twelve days of the real Christmas.

The Feast of the Mother of God thanks the Lady whom Our Lord allowed us to adopt as our mother as he was dying on the Cross. Christ our brother wanted us to have His mother as ours. She was His by divine predilection. She is ours as a gift.

As we must admit in our humbler moments, God knows more than we do, and so He prepared the world for the entrance of Christ into it as a man, born of a woman. He seems even to have set up the pagans for it by intuition. Saint Boniface cut down the tree that the pagan German tribes worshiped as a god, but then he lit it with candles as a sign of the Light that is Christ. That, some say, is how we got the Christmas tree. Various dates were observed as New Year's Day until the papal revision of the calendar in 1582 restored Julius Caesar's configuration of January 1. Some Protestant countries did not catch up until 1752. But the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25 was kept as the moment of Christ's conception, as it was the traditional Hebrew date Nisan 15 for the creation of the world. Many court calendars and fiscal years still begin then.

St. Thomas Aquinas says (Summa Theologiae, I, art. 8) that grace does not destroy nature but builds upon it. Pagan celebrations of the New Year only need God's loving power to transform raucous revels into graceful dancing for the beautiful Lady who bore Our Saviour.

Some extreme heretics would not celebrate Christmas because they thought it was just an update of the pagan Roman feast of Saturnalia, along with Druid Yule logs and mistletoe and such. But God has taken these and changed them by His grace into something closer to lovely sacramental reminders of Christian truth. The dating of Christmas may have had nothing to do with the pagan Roman orgies of Saturnalia beginning on December 17. After all, December 25 was a week later. There was a pagan feast of the birth of the Invincible Sun (Dies Natalis Solis Invicti), started in 278, but this became widespread only in 360 as a reaction against the spread of Christianity. So the pagans may in fact have been reacting against the Christian feast of Our Lord's birth.

What matters is that we are pagans if we do not adore Our Lord, born to save us, and do not venerate his mother, who now is our mother.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father George William Rutler. "God's Calendar." From the Pastor (January 1, 2012).

Reprinted with permission of Father George W. Rutler.

THE AUTHOR

Article: God's Law and Our Happiness

2012-01-04T16:16:00.004+08:00

EDWARD SRI

Why does God give the moral law?

Why does any good father issue laws? Is he merely testing his child's obedience? Is he simply exercising power and control over the child?

Imagine if I sat my toddler down on the living room floor and surrounded him with his favorite toys — blocks, trains, cars, balls. Then I sternly looked him in the eye and said, "Do not touch any of these toys."

"Why Da-da?" he asks.

"Don't ask why! Just do as I say or you'll be punished — I'm testing whether you'll obey me!"

No good father would do this. A father gives laws to his children for their well being — because he loves them, wants what is best for them, and does not want them to get hurt. The law is an expression of a father's love. For example, when my 12-month-old son tried to climb the monkey bars in our backyard, I knew we needed to issue a new "law" for him.

After observing his older siblings repeatedly climb a ladder on the side of the play set and race across the monkey bars that stretched over the swings, little Karl decided he wanted to give it a try. He made it up the side ladder, reached for the rung of the monkey bars and found himself stuck hanging seven feet in the air. Suddenly I heard my kids rush inside screaming, "Karl's stuck on the monkey bars!"

I dashed outside and found him dangling with both hands clinging desperately to the wooden bar and a look of horror on his face while his older brother squatted below him, propping him up until I came. The boy was rescued, but I declared a new "law" that day: little Karl was not allowed to climb the monkey bars!

I issued this monkey-bar decree not because I was on a power trip with my 12-month-old. Rather, I gave this law because I love him and wanted to protect him from getting hurt. This law flowed from my fatherly heart.

Flowing from the Father's Heart

The same is true with our heavenly Father. Consider the first prohibitive law in the Bible, given to Adam: "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (Gen. 2:16-17).

God does not give this law to Adam in order to control him and restrict his freedom. In fact, God's words underscore the broad liberty He was giving Adam to eat freely from every other tree in the garden. There is only one tree from which God does not want Adam to eat, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

Neither is the law given merely to test Adam's obedience. There is a much deeper purpose to the command. The text says God warns Adam about this one tree because He does not want Adam to be harmed ("For in the day that you eat of it you shall die"). In other words, God gives this law to protect Adam from some danger that is symbolized by the tree of knowledge of good and evil (cf. Catechism, no. 396).

Here, we can catch a glimpse of how the moral law flows from God's love for us. As Pope John Paul II explained in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor: "God, who alone is good, knows perfectly what is good for man, and by virtue of His very love, proposes this good to man in the commandments" (no. 35).

The Instruction Manual

God's moral law is like an instruction manual for our lives. When purchasing a car, one receives an owner's manual that tells how best to operate the vehicle. The manufacturer who made the car knows how it works and instructs us on what we need to do to ensure that the car functions properly. No one views these instructions as impositions into our lives. They are not given to control us or restrict our freedom. They are given to help us use the vehicle well.

Similarly, the moral law is like God's instruction manual for our lives. God is the divine manufacturer. He made us and knows how we work. He knows that certain actions will lead us to happiness while other acts will end only in frustration and emptiness for ourselves and others. That's why God gives the moral law — to help guide us on the pathway to happiness.

When a friend of mine purchased a Fisher-Price exersaucer for her baby, she told me the instruction manual had some interesting warnings, such as: "This play saucer does not float . . . Do not use in water" and "Do not use for sledding." (Imagine a six-month-old sledding downhill in a play saucer or waterskiing in it on a lake!).

What would you think of someone who purchased an exersaucer, read the instruction manual, got angry, and tore it up, saying: "Fisher-Price, who are you to tell me what to do with my exersaucer? This is my exersaucer, and I have the right to do whatever I want with my play saucer. Don't impose your views about exersaucers on me . . ."?

Is that person able to go against the instructions and do whatever he wants with his exersaucer? Yes. But if he takes his six-month-old waterskiing in it, he will probably ruin his baby's life.

Similarly, can we use our free will to go against God's moral law? Yes. But when we do so, we ruin our lives and the lives of others. In the end, when we break God's moral law, we break ourselves.

Rules vs. Relationship

The law flows from God's love for us. But the devil wants Adam and Eve (and all of us) to view God's law apart from His love — to see the command as a rule, not as an expression of His relationship with us.

Consider the serpent's first words to Eve: "Did God say, 'You shall not eat of any trees of the garden?'" (Gen. 3:1). First, the serpent simply refers to the Lord as Elohim ("God"). This title is used in Genesis 1 to describe God as the Creator of the universe. The serpent's use of this title here is particularly striking because the rest of Genesis 2-3 characteristically refers to God as Yahweh Elohim ("the Lord God"), which elsewhere in the Bible expresses God's intimacy with His people as Israel's covenant partner. In Genesis 2, it is the "Lord God" who creates man from the ground and breathes life into him, who creates the animals and allows Adam to name them, and who creates the woman from Adam's side. Indeed, the "Lord God" is a loving God, involved in Adam and Eve's lives, providing for them as His children.

But the serpent will have none of this. He wants Eve to think of God as a remote deity, a distant Creator — one who gives a burdensome law. It is as if the serpent is saying, "Did that distant Creator, powerful lawgiver say, 'You shall not eat of any trees of the garden'?" The serpent wants them to think of God as an oppressive law-giver whose rule limits their freedom.

The woman responds by mentioning that they can eat from other trees, but that if they eat from the tree in the midst of the garden they would die. To this, the serpent says: "You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,knowing good and evil" (Gen. 3:4).

Attacking God's Fatherhood

Feel the gravity of the serpent's words: In saying, "You will not die," the serpent is calling God a liar. According to the serpent, the tree is not harmful. It is actually something that will make them like God, and God is so afraid of Adam and Eve eating from the tree and becoming like Him that He makes up this law in order to suppress them and keep them under His control.

Notice how the devil is not simply trying to get Adam and Eve to break a rule. Ultimately, he is trying to get them to break a relationship. The first sin involves questioning God's fatherly goodness. As the Catechism explains, "Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God's command. This is what man's first sin consisted of. All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in His goodness" (no. 397).

In conclusion, the first temptation and every one since involves an attack on God's loving fatherhood. In our relativistic world, many people adopt the serpent's view about God's moral law — they doubt that it is really there for our good. When a culture views religion as "just a bunch of rules" and morality as the Church "trying to tell others what to do with their lives," it no longer sees the moral law as coming from the heart of a loving Father who wants what is best for us. Like Adam and Eve, our modern world has not just abandoned moral truth; it has bought into the serpent's lie about God. When we reject God's moral law for our own preferences, we are ultimately rejecting the Father's loving care for us.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Edward P. Sri. "God's Law and Our Happiness." Lay Witness (May/June 2011).

This article is reprinted with permission from Lay Witness magazine. Lay Witness is a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968 to support, defend, and advance the efforts of the teaching Church.

THE AUTHOR

Dr. Edward (Ted) Sri is assistant professor of theology at Benedictine College in Atchison, KS, and a frequent contributor toLay Witness. Edward Sri is the author of Men, Women and the Mystery of Love: Practical Insights from John Paul II's Love and Responsibility, A Biblical Walk Through the Mass (Book): Understanding What We Say and Do In The Liturgy, Queen Mother, Mystery of the Kingdom,The New Rosary in Scripture: Biblical Insights for Praying the 20 Mysteries. CUF members receive a 10% discount.

Article: There's always hope

2012-01-04T16:16:00.003+08:00

GEORGE J. MARLIN

The Bible is as relevant today as at any point in its 400 year history, according to British Prime Minister David Cameron.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking on December 16, 2011 at Oxford's Christ Church celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, shook the very foundation of that college city when he said the Bible "was relevant today as at any point in its 400 year history. And none of us should be frightened of recognizing this."

Pretty good stuff – and there was plenty more. Cameron went on to say that the King James Bible "bequeathed a body of language" that has influenced every aspect of British culture – literature, music, and art. The Bible has guided Britain's politics "from human rights and equality to our constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy" and "helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today."

His most startling comment – which made international headlines – was that thanks to the Bible Great Britain is a Christian nation – "and we should not be afraid to say so."

Cameron also said Judeo-Christian beliefs provide the foundation "for the evolution of our freedom and democracy." And he added "the knowledge that God created man in his own image was, if you like, a game changer for the cause of human dignity and equality."

It is apparent that, since he has been responsible for governing, as opposed to just talking on the floor of Parliament, Cameron has learned that ideas and beliefs have real consequences for the everyday plight of Britain's citizenry.

No doubt, last summer's riots in London led by ageing hippies, parlor anarchists, and young narcissists made a lasting impression on the prime minister. He now realizes that mayhem in British society has been due to "an absence of real accountability or moral code."

"For too long," Cameron confessed, "we have been unwilling to distinguish right from wrong" and that "moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn't going to cut it anymore."

To fix this mess, he called on his nation's churches to play a role in promoting the values that "define us as a nation." (Compare that to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' milquetoast call for Parliament to allow the use of elements of Sharia law in Great Britain.)

Finally, unlike many politicians who have accepted a mistaken notion that society has to be kept free of religious influences, Cameron said, "I have never really understood the argument some people make about the church not getting involved in politics. To me, Christianity, faith, religion, the Church and the Bible are all inherently involved in politics because so many political questions are moral questions." (emphasis added)

Refreshing candor, isn't it? And by the way, the sky did not fall in Britain following his blunt remarks.

A further bit of good news: Cameron understands that his nation has moved from a practical "live and let live" attitude to a disastrous abdication of responsibility: "Do whatever you please."

"For too long," Cameron confessed, "we have been unwilling to distinguish right from wrong" and that "moral neutrality or passive tolerance just isn't going to cut it anymore."

Specifically, he observes that "diversity" and multiculturalism policies have failed (a sentiment now shared by the leaders of France and Germany, though America seems not to have noticed yet).

Countless nanny state regulations, enforced by muddled bureaucrats, have created an entitlement society populated by "victims." Cameron would doubtless agree with British critic Theodore Dalrymple's: "The sturdy independent upright citizen has become a neurotic dependent frightened wreck."

What the Prime Minister may not realize, however, is his analysis of the current crisis of civilization is strikingly similar to Pope Benedict's.

Benedict has argued the European cultural crisis is due to the modern perception that the idea of man is nothing more than a cultural construct. Hence, the pope has written, "the splendor of the fact that he is the image of God – the source of his dignity and of his inviolability – no longer shines upon this man; his only splendor is the power of human capabilities."

The pope has often warned that this view has caused European governments to develop "a culture, that, in a manner hitherto unknown to humanity, excludes God from public awareness." The drive to marginalize God and his Church was most evident in the politically correct European Constitutional Treaty (rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands), which failed to mention Europe's Christian roots.

By expelling morality from law, relativism has triumphed in Europe. And this confusing ideology that defines liberty as license and has degraded the responsibility to do what is right into the right to do what is irresponsible, has, in the pope's judgment, led Europe into an "age of agnosticism of disenchantment, of presumption."

Whether or not Prime Minister Cameron is serious about restoring Christian values as the foundation of Britain's political and cultural identity remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the fact he was willing to discuss the matter in the public square, and sees eye to eye with Pope Benedict on the evils of nihilistic secularism suggests there is hope that other elected officials will also see the need to lead their people back to their spiritual roots.

Who knows? It might even catch on here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

George J. Marlin. "There's always hope." The Catholic Thing (December 28, 2011).

The Catholic thing – the concrete historical reality of Catholicism – is the richest cultural tradition in the world. That is the deep background to The Catholic Thing which daily brings you an original column that provides fresh and penetrating insight into the current events affecting the Church, along with other commentary, news, analysis, and – yes – even humor. Our writers include some of the most seasoned and insightful Catholic minds in America: Robert Royal, Brad Miner, James V. Schall, S.J., Hadley Arkes, Francis J. Beckwith, Mary Eberstadt, Austin Ruse, George Marlin, William Saunders, and many others.

THE AUTHOR

George J. Marlin is the author/editor of ten books including The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact and Fighting the Good Fight: A History of the New York Conservative Party. George Marlin is the editor of The Quotable Fulton Sheen: A Topical Compilation of the Wit, Wisdom, and Satire of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. In 1993, Mr. Marlin was the Conservative Party nominee for mayor of the City of New York, and in 1994 he served on Governor-elect Pataki's transition team. He served two terms as Executive Director and CEO of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. In that capacity he managed thirty-five facilities including the World Trade Center, LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark Airports, PATH Subway and the four bridges and two tunnels that connect New York and New Jersey. His articles have appeared in numerous periodicals including The New York Times, New York Post, National Review, Newsday, The Washington Times and the New York Daily News. Mr. Marlin is also general editor of The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton.

Article: Forgiveness Is a Kind of Wild Justice

2012-01-04T16:16:00.001+08:00

THEODORE DALRYMPLE

Recently I was asked at a public discussion of crime and punishment at which I was a speaker whether I thought it was right that the government (in Britain) had made it illegal for an employer to ask a prospective employee whether he had a criminal record and, if so, its nature and extent.

This is a question that I have turned over in my mind, or at least let bubble away in my subconscious, ever since, for it in turn raises several interesting and important questions.

Most of the people in the audience, I suspect, thought that the rule was right, for it is both just and merciful (rarely are the two qualities so neatly conjoined) to give criminals who have purged their legal punishment a second chance. The idea of redemption is perhaps a legacy of Christianity even among those who are themselves not Christians. And the notion of forgiveness is especially attractive to people who do not want to appear primitively vengeful. Working as I did in a prison for many years, I often tried to put myself (mentally) in the position of a prisoner leaving prison: where would he go, what would he do, how would he keep himself in a way that did not involve crime?

With regard to the latter question, a couple of statistics are instructive. The prison department in Britain once published the ages at which adult prisoners were received into prison: 97 per cent of those who had committed burglary, and 98 per cent of those who had committed robbery, were between the ages of 21 and 39. This meant, or suggested, that criminality, at least of these two types, ceased spontaneously at the age of 40: assuming, of course, that it did not mean that the burglars and robbers had simply become more adept at crime and therefore evaded detection.

Crime in general is a young man's game; but the fact is that if former criminals can keep themselves after the age of 40 by some legal means of other, they could have done so before the age of 40 also. In other words, their recidivism (for most of the criminals in prison are recidivists and not first-timers) is the result of a lack of will, not a lack of opportunity, even if, as has sometimes been suggested by those who want to ascribe crime to anything other than the decision of the criminal to commit it, the change in their conduct at the age of 40 is ascribable to falling levels of testosterone. In other words, no special efforts are necessary on behalf of prisoners leaving prison, even if nevertheless some such efforts ought to be made: eventually they will do everything for themselves.

But let us return to the questions of justice, mercy and forgiveness, tackling the latter first. The willingness and ability to forgive or overlook is essential to good human relations because we are none of us angels, we all do things we should not, and some of us even have habits irritating to those closest to us (in my case that of never passing a bookshop without buying a book, which my wife finds very irritating). If we did not have the capacity to forgive, every argument would end in divorce or murder, or at any rate in some very unpleasant consequence.

But it does not follow that what is necessary in some circumstances is necessary in all, any more than it follows that a medicine that is good for you in a certain dose must be twice as good for you in double the dose (though I have met patients in my medical career who did believe that, often with near-disastrous consequences).

Mercy is an implicit recognition of the imperfection and imperfectability of man, and that it is unreasonably rigorous to expect perfect behaviour of any featherless biped.

In order to have the locus standi to forgive, the harm that someone does must be done, at the very least in part, to oneself. If someone robs you in the street, I have no right to forgive him; only you have that right. Moreover, even if you do forgive the robber, your forgiveness, morally grand as it might be (though it might just as well be cowardly or pusillanimous), has no claim to determine the treatment of the robber by the law, any more than your vengeful feelings, if you had them, would have done. Revenge, said Bacon, is a kind of wild justice, which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought to weed it out; the same might be said of forgiveness, except perhaps that wild would not be the qualifying word to use of the justice that would result from it. The law is instituted precisely to supersede the effects of incontinent emotion, whether it is of the punitive or sentimental kind.

Forgiveness, then, unlike mercy, has no place in the law. A pardon is not forgiveness, it is an exceptional act which in no way lessens the guilt of the pardoned.

Mercy is an implicit recognition of the imperfection and imperfectability of man, and that it is unreasonably rigorous to expect perfect behaviour of any featherless biped. As Hamlet said, if we were all treated as we deserved none of us would escape a whipping; it does not do, then, to administer justice as if no other virtue or desideratum than justice existed.

Those who think that employers should not have the right to ask applicants for jobs whether they have a criminal record lose sight of these considerations, as well as others. They believe that ex-criminals would find it harder to find employment if employers knew about their past, and that an inability to find work is one of the reasons so many criminals return to crime. But this is to suppose that ex-criminals have superior rights to those of employers who, in order to protect those rights, must blindly accept risks that they might otherwise not be prepared to run.

As it happens, even those who think that employers should not have the right to ask about job applicants' criminal record do not believe this of every kind of crime. They do not believe that schools, for example, should not know anything of a prospective employee's record as a paedophile. However liberal a person may be, there is always one corner of his heart reserved for vengefulness towards at least one category of person.

But let us disregard this for a moment in order to conduct a small thought experiment. Let us suppose that you need (or at any rate want) a gardener. There are two applicants, equal as far as you can tell in their gardening abilities, and equal in charm, etc. The only difference between them that you can find is that one of them has a criminal record for stealing from his employers. Which of them do you choose?

Most people, I suppose, would choose the gardener with an unblemished record of honesty. But there are some generous souls who, anxious to do good, might choose the man with the criminal record. We shall not enquire further whether their generosity is moral exhibitionism, the desire of a moth to fly near to the candle, or obedience to an abstract Kantian categorical imperative. The fact is, however, that there are people who are willing to overlook a criminal record in order either to do some good to society or to feel well about themselves. This, incidentally, applies as much in the sphere of personal relations as in the field of employment. Murderers, especially the most notorious, seldom lack for offers of friendship or marriage from precisely the same kind of people as their victim or victims.

I remember, for example, the case of a woman in our hospital who had just had her jaw broken by her lover. According to her, he had once 'snapped' her forearm, giving her a fracture by gripping it in his hands and applying force. She had met him not long after he had been released from prison for having killed a former girlfriend.

I can take a risk myself that I have no right to demand that others take. It is typical of governments that they should not understand the distinction.

Leaving aside the question of whether he should ever have been released from prison, her choice of boyfriend seemed to me distinctly inadvisable. I did my best to persuade her of the dangers, and at first she seemed convinced. We closed the hospital ward to him, we found her a safe place to go where he would not be able to find her. But at the very last minute she decided that love was more important than safety, she relented and left the hospital with him, arm-in-arm, laughing and joking with him. No doubt they went straight to a pub where, once he had had a little to drink, he would accuse her of having been unfaithful to him.

The risk she ran was of her own choice: a foolish choice, no doubt, but a choice nonetheless. Now it seems to me that, by contrast, the state has no right to make people run risks which are easily knowable but unknown because it wants to achieve another goal, even a laudable one such as the reintegration of criminals into respectable society.

Let us consider the case of the woman above, under slightly different circumstances. Supposing she had had her jaw broken but did not know that the perpetrator was a convicted murderer recently released from prison, but that I did know this. Would it have been my duty to warn her?

Clearly it would even if, as a matter of statistics, it was far less likely that he would one day kill her than that he would never kill her (for most released murderers to not kill again, even if their murder rate is very high by comparison with those who have never murdered). I would think it was important that she should be in possession of the information in order to make a choice.

Now someone might say that, in order for her to make her choice in a truly informed way, she would not only have to know that the boyfriend was a killer, but what were the statistical chances of a man such as he killing again — otherwise, she might make her choice on the basis of a mere prejudice against murderers. And since prejudice is the basis of all discrimination, it would be better for her to know nothing of this man than to know only that he was a murderer. Murderers have their human rights too, and the avoidance of discrimination on the basis of prejudice is a goal of such overriding importance that allowing people to take unknown but knowable risks is a small price to pay for it.

Such an argument would be absurd, and for the state (as in Britain) to force private individuals or companies to bear risks that they could easily avoid is highly dictatorial.

In fact, no one is free unless he is free to act upon his own prejudices. If he does so act he might be a very unpleasant and bigoted person indeed, or he might be an exceptionally generous and warm-hearted one: it all depends upon what his prejudices actually are. But the idea that the government should determine what prejudices people must not act upon — for example that an extensive criminal record might make a prospective employee less than a safe bet — is totalitarian.

For myself, having worked in a prison for many years, I have a soft spot for criminals — or at least, for some criminals. I am among those who would be inclined personally (and within reason) to give them a chance, if I had jobs at my disposition. I would even be prepared to be disappointed, to find that the thief whom I had found charming and thought wanting to turn over a new leaf had actually stolen from me. I would pat myself on the back because I would think that I had performed a good and charitable act by employing him. But I would also think it the grossest act of tyranny to require my neighbour to behave in precisely the same way. I can take a risk myself that I have no right to demand that others take. It is typical of governments that they should not understand the distinction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Theodore Dalrymple. "Forgiveness Is a Kind of Wild Justice." The New English Review (January, 2012).

Reprinted with permission of the author, Theodore Dalrymple.

THE AUTHOR

Theodore Dalrymple is a former psychiatrist and prison doctor. He writes a column for theLondon Spectator, contributes frequently to the Daily Telegraph, is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. He lives in France and is the author of The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism, Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline, In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, andSo Little Done.

Article: Restoring the Fullness of Fatherhood

2012-01-04T16:05:00.001+08:00

DONALD DEMARCO

The following 10 paradoxes illustrate the dynamic quality of fatherhood, a quality that invests it with both vitality and depth.

"If God took the name Father, it was to inspire us with a greater confidence in him." This remark that St. John Vianney delivered to his audience of farmers in the village of Ars, during his "Sermon of Hope," must have seemed to the good Curé one that was entirely free of controversy. Yet the postmodern world, as we know all too well, is bent on dissolving this relationship. Fatherhood, whether one is referring to God, priests, or laymen, is no longer easily and agreeably associated with confidence.

Pope John Paul II, taking a broad view of fatherhood, makes the startling point in his international best-seller, Crossing the Threshold of Hope that Original Sin is "above all" an attempt "to abolish fatherhood". The disobedience of our primal parents was a rejection of God's legitimate authority. But God's authority is inseparable from his fatherly love. Hence, a rejection of his authority was also a rejection of his Fatherhood. John Paul offers a most important insight when he identifies Original Sin with the attempt to abolish fatherhood. The Serpent offers Adam and Eve a caricature of fatherhood – an authoritarian posture that is incompatible with human freedom.

The first step, then, in restoring the good name and the fullness of fatherhood, is to re-establish the original connection between fatherhood and an identity that inspires confidence. The dissolution of this connection and the resulting state of "fatherlessness" is truly calamitous. David Blankenhorn, for example, provides evidence in his book, Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Problem, that fatherlessness is the leading cause of the declining well-being of children and the engine that drives our most urgent social problems from crime to adolescent pregnancy to child sexual abuse to domestic violence against women. Despite the massive social problems that fatherlessness has created, he informs us, the concerted effort continues to "deconstruct" and "deculture" paternity.

In his elegant and insightful memoir, Blessings in Disguise, Alec Guinness recounts an unintentional experience of fatherhood he had while he was in France for the filming of Father Brown. Sir Alec, dressed in priestly black, was traversing a winding road that led to the village where he had a room for the night. He had not gone far before he heard scampering footsteps and a piping voice calling, "Mon pere". A young boy of about seven or eight seized the actor's hand, swung it back and forth and kept up a non-stop prattle. Guinness dared not say a word to him for fear that his "excruciating" French would scare him away. Suddenly, with a "Bonsoir, mon pere," and an awkward bow, the boy released his grip and disappeared through a hole in a hedge.

Reflecting on the incident, Guinness began to think more positively about "a Church which could inspire such confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable". Sir Alec's journey home that night was part of a longer journey that ultimately led him into the Catholic Church. Even the portrayal of fatherhood can inspire genuine trust.

Nathaniel Hawthorne had the well-deserved reputation of being a good father and devoted husband. His daughter, Rose, who later came into the Church and, as a Dominican nun, took the name Mother Alphonsa, offers a splendid testimony of her love for her father: "To play a simple game of stones on one of the grey benches in the late afternoon sunshine, with him for courteous opponent, was to feel my eyes, lips, hands, all my being, glow with the fullest human happiness". This is the kind of love for dad that the eminently quotable Adabella Radici captures when she writes: "I love father as the stars – he's a bright shining example and a happy twinkling in my heart".

"I could not point to any need in childhood so strong," wrote Sigmund Freud, "as that for a father's protection." How much do children need a father? As author Maggie Gallagher tells us, "children not only need a father, they long for one, irrationally, with all the undiluted strength of a child's hopeful heart".

The Nobel-Prize-winning novelist, Albert Camus, was killed at the age of 46 in a car crash near Paris in 1960. Near the wreckage, investigators found a black briefcase that contained 144 pages of an autobiographical novel he had been preparing. When it was finally published, 43 years later, it contained these poignant words reflecting how much he lost when his father was killed in the First World War in 1914: "I tried to discover as a child what was right and wrong since no one around could tell me. And now I recognize that everything had abandoned me, that I need someone to show me the way, to blame and praise me . . . I need a father."

Re-establishing the natural connection between fatherhood and confidence is needed in order to do justice to God, priests, and laymen who have children (either biologically or by adoption). Fatherhood is multi-faceted and organic. It is not simply one thing, such as authority, strength, reproductive achievement, being a breadwinner, or having the legal privilege of passing on one's name. Perhaps worst of all, from the arena of reproductive technology, fatherhood is not merely a "donor" or a "seed". Fatherhood is a paradox, a dynamic blend of opposites, as it were, a fact of life that makes it both indefinable and elusive, on the one hand, but rich and magisterial, on the other.

The following 10 paradoxes illustrate the dynamic quality of fatherhood, a quality that invests it with both vitality and depth.

Fatherhood means being:

An authority without being authoritarian.

The father, like God, shares in the authorship of life. He is an authority and therefore someone to learn from and be guided by. But his authority does not restrict the liberty of others. In fact, the purpose of fatherly authority is to cultivate and enhance liberty. St. Thomas Aquinas wisely pointed out that "the respect that one has for the rule flows naturally from the respect one has for the person who gave it" (Ex reverentia praecipientis procedere debet ex reverentia praecepti). A person best understands fatherhood by knowing someone who is a good father. One must begin with the real experience and not a cultural caricature.
A leader without being a frontrunner.

Our prevailing notion of leader comes from the worlds of sports and from politics. In relation to the "leader board" in golf, the leader is the one who is ahead of the rest of the field. In the world of politics he is the one who is leading in the political polls by getting more votes than his rivals. But a father is not a leader in this way. He does not try to remove himself from his family. Nor does he regard the members of his family as rivals. On the contrary, he leads in a manner that fulfills each member. His leadership is inseparable from those he leads. What he leads and "fathers" into being is the good of those whom he loves. In other words, fatherhood requires that a father leads by being there, rather than being "ahead of the pack."

A visionary without being arrogant.

The father serves all the members of his family without being in any sense subservient or inferior. One might say, in this respect, that fathers, like tennis players, enjoy an advantage when they serve.

Every home must have a hearth and a horizon, as Hans Urs Von Balthasar has stated. The father is a visionary in the sense that he has an eye on the future. He has a keen sense of the importance of time. But he has this without presumption or arrogance. He is providential in his fathering. He knows instinctively that his children will grow up and lead independent lives. He provides for them a future vision of themselves and works hard to make that future a reality.

A servant without being servile.

The expression "servus servorum Dei," adopted by John Paul II, comes from Pope Gregory the Great. Paradoxically, this servant of the servants of God earned the appellation "Great." "He who humbles himself shall be exalted". The father serves all the members of his family without being in any sense subservient or inferior. One might say, in this respect, that fathers, like tennis players, enjoy an advantage when they serve.
A lover without being sentimental.

The love of a father is strong and unwavering. His love is not bound by a feeling, and hence prone to sentimentality. It is strengthened by principles that always focus on the good of others. Love means doing what is in the best interest of others. In this regard, authentic love can be "tough love". Sentimentality means always being nice because one is fearful of criticism. The real father has a spine and is not afraid of whatever opinions others may have.
A supporter without being subordinate.

A father is supportive. He holds people up, keeps them going when they are inclined to be discouraged. But his encouraging role does not imply subordination, but the kind of reliability and trustworthiness that one can expect from someone who is strong. He is not supportive in the Hollywood sense of being a "supporting actor." His supportive role is played out, as a matter of fact, as the leading man.
A disciplinarian without being punitive.

A good father knows the value of rules and the consequences of disregarding them. He wants his children to be strong in virtue. Therefore, he knows the importance of discipline, restraint, and self-possession. He is not punitive, nor is he overbearing. He makes it clear to his children that there is not true freedom without discipline, the discipleship requires training. He is wary of punishment as such, since it can strike fear in the heart of a child.

Merciful without being spineless.

The love of a father is strong and unwavering. His love is not bound by a feeling, and hence prone to sentimentality. It is strengthened by principles that always focus on the good of others. Love means doing what is in the best interest of others.

Mercy must be grounded in justice. Otherwise it is dissipation and weakness. In fact, mercy that disregards justice is unjust. A father, because he recognizes the uncompromisable importance of justice is anything but heartless. He is merciful, but his mercy perfects his justice. Mercy without justice is mere capitulation to the desires of others. Justice without mercy is cold legalism.

Humble without being self-deprecating.

Humility is based on the honest recognition of who one is and the nature of one's role. It takes into account one's limitations and weaknesses. The humble father, when he encounters difficulties, has enough humility to ask for help, even at times, from his own children. Yet, he never gets down on himself. He knows that remaining self-deprecating at a time of crisis is utterly futile. He has the heart to help and the humility to enlist the help of others.
Courageous without being foolhardy.

Courage is not fearlessness, but the ability to rise above fear so that one can do what needs to be done in a time of danger or difficulty. A father does not fall apart when he begins to feel the pressure. Foolhardiness is not courage but an unfocussed and unhelpful recklessness. Moreover, courage, as its etymology suggests, requires heart. The father, above all, is a man of heart.

Fatherhood, on all three levels, should inspire us with confidence. The child takes the hand of his father, the communicant receives the Eucharist from the priest, the believer prays to "Our Father who art in heaven". The rupture between fatherhood and confidence can he healed and restored to its original wholeness. St. John Vianney has reminded us that fatherhood and confidence go together. His simple and wise words, spoken almost in obscurity, have more truth in them than what can be found among all the postmodern thinkers who are vainly trying to deconstruct fatherhood on every level. God the Father will not be mocked; the Serpent will not be triumphant.

"Think of the love that the Father has lavished on us by letting us be called God's children and that is what we are" (1 Jn 3:1). "We are children of God by adoption. By the gift of the Holy Spirit we are able to cry 'Abba, Father" (Ga 4: 6).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Donald DeMarco. "Restoring the Fullness of Fatherhood." Homiletic & Pastoral Review (December, 2011).

Reprinted with permission of the author and Homiletic & Pastoral Review.

Founded over one hundred years ago, Homiletic & Pastoral Review is one of the most well-respected pastoral magazines in the world. HPR features solid articles on every aspect of pastoral life and eloquent weekly sermons that illuminate through exposition of Scripture. Subscribe to HPR here.

THE AUTHOR

Article: Full of Grace

2012-01-04T16:01:00.001+08:00

ADAM OF PERSEIGNE

If you stand in need of mercy, it is found in full measure in the heart of the Virgin.

If you reverence the truth, give thanks to the Virgin, since from the ground of her virgin flesh the truth which you worship has arisen.

No less give thanks to the Virgin if you follow after peace, since from her is born for you the peace which passes all understanding.

If you pursue justice, see that you are not ungrateful to the Virgin, for at the opening of her womb justice looked forth from heaven.

If your faith is shaken by some assault from an enemy, turn your eyes upon the Virgin and that which was wavering will be firmly fixed; if the lust of the flesh delights you, turn your gaze upon the Virgin, and the danger to your chastity is removed; if pride disturbs your spirit, turn your gaze upon the Virgin, and by the merit of her unsullied humility your swelling spirit will subside.

If you are set on fire by anger's torches, lift your eyes to the Virgin and you will grow gentle through her calm.

If ignorance or error have led you astray from the way of life, look to Mary, star of truth; if the vice of avarice commands your idolatrous worship, call to mind the generosity of the Virgin and with a love of poverty there will come to you the goodness of openhandedness.

In every peril the goodness of the Virgin comes to succor, and powerful is it to succor.

Give thanks for her childbearing; from her fullness the sum total of graces has flowed.

For us the Virgin brought forth, ours is the birth, for us the child was born and to us the Son was given.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Adam of Perseigne. "Full of Grace." excerpt from The Letters of Adam of Perseigne (Cistercian Publications., 1976).

Reprinted with permission of Cistercian Publications.

THE AUTHOR

Adam of Perseigne, (c. 1145–1221) was a French Cistercian, Abbot of the monastery of Perseigne in the Diocese of Mans. Adam was born around 1145 into a serf, or peasant, family. He is thought to have been first a canon regular, later a Benedictine of Marmoutier and then a Cistercian. In 1188, he became Abbot of Perseigne, wither his reputation for holiness and wisdom drew the great personages of his time to seek his counsel. He was spiritual director to kings and clerics, nuns and nobles and adviser to Richard the Lion-hearted. Adam also found favor at the witty court of the Countess of Champagne. He had at Rome a conference with the celebrated mystic, Joachim, Abbot of Flora, (in Calabria, Italy), on the subject of the latter's revelations, and aided Foulques de Neuilly in preaching during the Fourth Crusade. His letters and sermons were first published at Rome in 1662 under the title Adami Abbatis Perseniæ Ordinis Cisterciensis Mariale.

Pope's Urbi et Orbi Address

2011-12-27T11:20:00.000+08:00

VATICAN CITY, DEC. 25, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Here is a Vatican translation of the address Benedict XVI gave at the traditional blessing "urbi et orbi" (to the city [of Rome] and the world).

* * *

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Rome and throughout the world!

Christ is born for us! Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to the men and women whom he loves. May all people hear an echo of the message of Bethlehem which the Catholic Church repeats in every continent, beyond the confines of every nation, language and culture. The Son of the Virgin Mary is born for everyone; he is the Saviour of all.

This is how Christ is invoked in an ancient liturgical antiphon: "O Emmanuel, our king and lawgiver, hope and salvation of the peoples: come to save us, O Lord our God". Veni ad salvandum nos! Come to save us! This is the cry raised by men and women in every age, who sense that by themselves they cannot prevail over difficulties and dangers. They need to put their hands in a greater and stronger hand, a hand which reaches out to them from on high. Dear brothers and sisters, this hand is Jesus, born in Bethlehem of the Virgin Mary. He is the hand that God extends to humanity, to draw us out of the mire of sin and to set us firmly on rock, the secure rock of his Truth and his Love (cf. Ps 40:2).

This is the meaning of the Child's name, the name which, by God's will, Mary and Joseph gave him: he is named Jesus, which means "Saviour" (cf. Mt 1:21; Lk 1:31). He was sent by God the Father to save us above all from the evil deeply rooted in man and in history: the evil of separation from God, the prideful presumption of being self-sufficient, of trying to compete with God and to take his place, to decide what is good and evil, to be the master of life and death (cf. Gen 3:1-7). This is the great evil, the great sin, from which we human beings cannot save ourselves unless we rely on God's help, unless we cry out to him: "Veni ad salvandum nos! – Come to save us!"

The very fact that we cry to heaven in this way already sets us aright; it makes us true to ourselves: we are in fact those who cried out to God and were saved (cf. Esth [LXX] 10:3ff.). God is the Saviour; we are those who are in peril. He is the physician; we are the infirm. To realize this is the first step towards salvation, towards emerging from the maze in which we have been locked by our pride. To lift our eyes to heaven, to stretch out our hands and call for help is our means of escape, provided that there is Someone who hears us and can come to our assistance.

Jesus Christ is the proof that God has heard our cry. And not only this! God's love for us is so strong that he cannot remain aloof; he comes out of himself to enter into our midst and to share fully in our human condition (cf. Ex 3:7-12). The answer to our cry which God gave in Jesus infinitely transcends our expectations, achieving a solidarity which cannot be human alone, but divine. Only the God who is love, and the love which is God, could choose to save us in this way, which is certainly the lengthiest way, yet the way which respects the truth about him and about us: the way of reconciliation, dialogue and cooperation.

Dear brothers and sisters in Rome and throughout the world, on this Christmas 2011, let us then turn to the Child of Bethlehem, to the Son of the Virgin Mary, and say: "Come to save us!" Let us repeat these words in spiritual union with the many people who experience particularly difficult situations; let us speak out for those who have no voice.

Together let us ask God's help for the peoples of the Horn of Africa, who suffer from hunger and food shortages, aggravated at times by a persistent state of insecurity. May the international community not fail to offer assistance to the many displaced persons coming from that region and whose dignity has been sorely tried.

May the Lord grant comfort to the peoples of South-East Asia, particularly Thailand and the Philippines, who are still enduring grave hardships as a result of the recent floods.

May the Lord come to the aid of our world torn by so many conflicts which even today stain the earth with blood. May the Prince of Peace grant peace and stability to that Land where he chose to come into the world, and encourage the resumption of dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. May he bring an end to the violence in Syria, where so much blood has already been shed. May he foster full reconciliation and stability in Iraq and Afghanistan. May he grant renewed vigour to all elements of society in the countries of North Africa and the Middle East as they strive to advance the common good.

May the birth of the Saviour support the prospects of dialogue and cooperation in Myanmar, in the pursuit of shared solutions. May the Nativity of the Redeemer ensure political stability to the countries of the Great Lakes Region of Africa, and assist the people of South Sudan in their commitment to safeguarding the rights of all citizens.

Dear Brothers and Sisters, let us turn our gaze anew to the grotto of Bethlehem. The Child whom we contemplate is our salvation! He has brought to the world a universal message of reconciliation and peace. Let us open our hearts to him; let us receive him into our lives. Once more let us say to him, with joy and confidence: "Veni ad salvandum nos!"

Article: Who has been forgotten?

2011-12-27T11:13:00.001+08:00

DAVID WARREN

Call me the Advent grinch, but I am disappointed almost never to endure fire from the pulpit on the desecration of this season of fast.

I have a theory (well, I have several theories) that Christmas shoppers are shopping entirely for themselves. Worse, I think most retailers share my theory. The tone of advertisements at this season, and the ambience created in shopping environments, tend to confirm it.

Note, I did not say shoppers are buying things only for their own consumption. Intangibles come into this. The presentation of gifts has become itself a fairly uncompromising statement of self. It involves gestures that range in intention from the fulfilment of duty to the demand for attention. There is a calculus of debt: the requirement to balance accounts between giver and receiver, with subtle mutual signalling to slow the rate of inflation. Under these circumstances, over time, the stress has glided, from gratitude, to clamour.

Products are certainly acquired to be dispensed among family and friends. Though even at this level, I darkly suspect the average shopper spends two dollars on gifts for himself, to every dollar on gifts for others. One gets this impression whenever one notices what people are buying.

This is the secular order of Christmas, in which Christmas carols are played in-store on unending tape-spools, and generic Christmas decorations are spread everywhere about. Market studies have proved that these encourage spending, and it is after all the shopkeeper's task to sell, sell, sell.

There is only the Salvation Army (where it has not actually been banned, or removed to a remote location) to remind of the non-secular order. They are playing carols themselves, and collecting cash, like everyone else. But their mere presence reminds of that other order.

The subversion, not so much of Christmas as of the season of Advent, by commercialism, is of course an old saw. It has been unfolding for a couple of centuries now, so that muttering against it has long lost the power of breaking news. The Christmas season (from the Midnight Mass, forward through 12 days) is only slightly subverted by the welt of "boxing" sales. But only because it is already done in by the Advent subversion – in which the necessary period of fast and preparation has been overwhelmed by the shopping, plus the sybaritic glee of Christmas parties.

Call me the Advent grinch, but I am disappointed almost never to endure fire from the pulpit on the desecration of this season of fast. I take it for granted that the majority of my fellow citizens are no longer even pretending to observe Christian teaching. But those who are should perhaps be reminded what it is.

Instead, we self-proclaimed Christians limp along with this perverse reversal of the cycle, and instead of fast then feast, we commit ourselves to escalating bloat, followed by a bloated repentance. This is a dynamic in which any guilt we might feel is redirected – from the humane sense of sin, to the animal sense of having overdone it.

It is not that the sense of sin is dead, for it is written into our souls and into our very organisms; and it will never die, much though we might wish. Rather, the focus of this sense – of our own unworthiness, of our need for grace – has been diverted from moral failure, to petty things, such as our need to diet.

Yet the message of Christmas is surely symbolized in "the gift." The coming into this world of Christ was the purest Gift, of the self-giving God, bespeaking also the gift of life, and of salvation. We are here, and in God's love we can never be forgotten, never thrown away. How appropriate then to prepare for Christmas by acts of selfless and invisible charity. It is a season to seek out the poor and the lonely; to give not things, as objective counters, but more radically of ourselves. Our time is worth anyway more than our money.

St Francis Assisi preached that, at Christmas, we should give special attention to the feeding, and to the warmth and comfort, of our animals. How typical of him to add an absurdly whimsical, and lyrical aside: "Especially our sisters, the larks."

But why indulge the oxen, and the swine? Because only by creature comforts can the dumb beasts know that it is Christmas. I fear that for all our technological sophistication, we have sunk to the condition of those beasts. For we, ourselves, only know it's Christmas by the extra feed and the creature comforts.

The keeping of Christmas lists is a sensible enough practice, given the "calculus of debt" I mentioned above. We must keep track of our obligations, and whether on paper or in electronic form, be sure that no one has been forgotten. Nothing wrong with honest accountancy.

But suppose, for a moment, that we stare into our list, and ask ourselves again, "Who has been forgotten?" Forgotten, perhaps, through many years; forgotten and abandoned. And so think harder: Who has been forgotten?

Among Christ's gifts were two great commands. First, to love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. And a second commandment that is "like unto it": to love your neighbour as yourself. "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets."

In which light: Who has been forgotten?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

David Warren. "Who has been forgotten?" Ottawa Citizen (December 18, 2011).

This article reprinted with permission from David Warren.

THE AUTHOR

David Warren, once editor of the Idler Magazine, is widely travelled – especially in the Middle and Far East. He has been writing for the Ottawa Citizen since 1996. His commentaries on international affairs appear Wednesdays & Saturdays; on Sundays he writes a general essay on the editorial page. Read more from David Warren at David Warren Online.

Article: Heaven

2011-12-27T11:12:00.001+08:00

ROMANO GUARDINI

When is heaven truly and completely present?

It is when all heaviness is gone; when all sluggishness has been overcome, all wickedness, coldness, pride, irritation, disobedience, and covetousness; when there is no danger anymore of falling away; when grace has made one's whole being open up, body and soul, to the ultimate profundities, when there is no further danger that it will all close in again, become hardened in ways of evil; when all work to be done on earth is finished, and all guilt has been paid by repentance. What all this means is: after death.

After death – when time is no longer; when everything is in the everlasting now; when nothing can change anymore, but the creature stands illuminated by the light of eternity, before God – at that time, everything will be open, and will remain so. That is being in heaven ...

This is how we properly understand heaven. It is that close presence wherein the Father stands in relation to Jesus Christ. And heaven for us will be participation in this intimacy of love. This condition is already beginning; it approaches closer; now in peril, it is fought over, lost, and won back again. So it goes with our Christian life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Romano Guardini. "Heaven." excerpt from The Inner Life of Jesus: Pattern of All Holiness (Manchester NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1959).

Reprinted with permission of Sophia Institute Press.

THE AUTHOR

Romano Guardini (1885-1968), a professor of philosophy and theology at the University of Munich, lectured at universities around the world. He helped shape Catholic theology between the two world wars and after, as well as the thinking of many non-Catholics of the period. His influence contributed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and it continues to be felt through Pope Benedict, who, as a theologian, a cardinal and now as Pope, has drawn extensively on Guardini for inspiration.

Indeed, Guardini was a major theological mentor of Benedict XVI, influencing the Pope from his understanding of Jesus to his writings on the sacred Liturgy, from his view of faith to his perspective on the modern world. His books – those available in English – are The Inner Life of Jesus: Pattern of All Holiness, The End of the Modern World, The Art of Praying: The Principles and Methods of Christian Prayer, The Lord, The Essential Guardini: An Anthology, Proclaiming the Sacred in a Modern World, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Living the Drama of Faith, Learning the Virtues: That Lead You to God, Romano Guardini: Spiritual Writings, The Death of Socrates, The Inner Life of Jesus: Pattern of All Holines, and The Rosary of Our Lady.

Wednesday Liturgy: Covering the Crucifix

2011-12-21T11:08:00.000+08:00

ROME, DEC. 20, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.

Q: My parish has a beautiful crucifix mounted on the wall behind the altar that has been a great aid in my prayer life. Unfortunately, I must pray without this aid during the seasons of Christmas and of Easter, as during these seasons the crucifix is completely covered. During Christmas, a star is placed above the crucifix with a tail that hangs down to completely cover it. Likewise, during Easter, a banner of the Risen Christ is hung over the crucifix so that it is hidden from view. I realize that "a cross, with the figure of Christ crucified upon it, [be] either on the altar or near it" during Mass (General Instruction of the Roman Missal, No. 308), and I considered the processional cross, which is placed beside the sanctuary during Mass, to fulfill this requirement when the crucifix behind the altar is covered (cf. GIRM, 122). However, upon further reflection, I now question if the processional cross fulfills this requirement as it is beside the sanctuary during Mass and not "next to the altar" (GIRM, 122); and, it is not "clearly visible to the [entire] assembled congregation" (GIRM, 308). As well, it does not "remain near the altar even outside of liturgical celebrations" (GIRM, 308). Is it appropriate that the crucifix mounted on the wall behind the altar be covered during any liturgical season? -- R.G., Leduc, Alberta

A: While I don't think it is a good idea to cover the cross during these liturgical seasons, it does not appear to be illicit.

It is illicit, however, not to have any crucifix presiding over the altar during the celebration. The processional cross could fulfill this function, but only if it is placed on a stand beside the altar during the celebration.

Indeed, the indications in the norms referenced by our reader are that the processional cross is only carried out of sight in those cases where a crucifix is already present on or near the altar. If there is no cross, then it should be placed near the altar and serve as the altar cross.

Another possible solution, if the wall cross is covered or absent, is to place a crucifix upon the altar proper. In this case the processional cross should be carried away to one side so that only one cross presides over the altar.

While there may be no absolute prohibition to substituting the main crucifix for a smaller one during these liturgical seasons, I am of the opinion that it is not a felicitous idea.

As the U.S. bishops' conference recommends in its document "Built of Living Stones":

"§ 123 § The tradition of decorating or not decorating the church for liturgical seasons and feasts heightens the awareness of the festive, solemn, or penitential nature of these seasons. Human minds and hearts are stimulated by the sounds, sights, and fragrances of liturgical seasons, which combine to create powerful, lasting impressions of the rich and abundant graces unique to each of the seasons.

"§ 124 § Plans for seasonal decorations should include other areas besides the sanctuary. Decorations are intended to draw people to the true nature of the mystery being celebrated rather than being ends in themselves. Natural flowers, plants, wreaths and fabric hangings, and other seasonal objects can be arranged to enhance the primary liturgical points of focus. The altar should remain clear and free-standing, not walled in by massive floral displays or the Christmas crib, and pathways in the narthex, nave, and sanctuary should remain clear."

In the case described, the crucifix as an important, albeit not primary, liturgical point of focus is obscured rather than enhanced.

While a star is a frequent symbol of Christmas, and even of Christ, placing it right behind the altar places too much emphasis upon a secondary symbol.

While the figure of the risen Christ might appear more justified, nothing would be lost and much gained by placing the image in some other part of the sanctuary.

I hope that this practice is not an attempt to deliberately remove the crucifix from sight during these seasons. This would be a grave error. The Church insists that a crucifix must always be present for Mass during all seasons of the year in order to remind us of the presence of Our Lord's infinite sacrifice.

It is through the infinite sacrifice that Christ's entire saving mystery, from the annunciation to the ascension, is made present in each and every celebration. Even though we designate certain times and seasons to underline specific mysteries, the cross remains at the heart of the mystery of God's total self-giving for our salvation.

Wednesday Liturgy: Follow-up: Lighting the Advent Candles

2011-12-21T11:07:00.000+08:00

ROME, DEC. 20, 2011 (Zenit.org).- Answered by Legionary of Christ Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.

Pursuant to our remarks on the Advent wreath (see Dec. 6), a priest from Ontario commented: "Since becoming a pastor I have very rarely allowed the lighting of the Advent wreath after the Mass has started. Does not the addition of this gesture, often accompanied by homemade prayers, etc., constitute an illicit addition to the sacred liturgy? Has the Holy See approved of this ritual? Why not respect the more spare introductory rites of Advent (no Gloria) and light the wreath before Mass begins?"

I would say that I am in broad agreement with our correspondent. From a liturgical point of view, only the blessing of the wreath on the first Sunday of Advent is included among those that may be used at Mass. This rite has received the approval of the Holy See for those countries that requested its inclusion in their translation and adaptation of the Book of Blessings. It is not found in the original Latin benedictional.

The multitude of other rites and ceremonies that have grown up around the lighting of the wreath are mostly geared to family celebrations. These may be profitably used in church but outside of Mass. For example, it is possible to organize a prayer service before the Saturday evening Mass.

If, however, there is no ceremony outside of Mass to light the candles on Sundays 2, 3 and 4 of Advent, I think that it is legitimate for the priest to do so at the very beginning of the first Mass of the corresponding Sunday (or Saturday evening) with no added rituals or texts. For example, after genuflecting toward the tabernacle or bowing toward the altar, the celebrant could simply light a taper from an earlier candle and, saying nothing, use this to light the next candle. He could then go to kiss the altar and continue Mass as normal. The sacristan would light the wreath candles before the celebration of later Masses.

Article: Teaching Moments on Sexuality

2011-12-07T13:09:00.002+08:00

JANET E. SMITH

On several occasions, Catholic parents have approached me about how to talk to their heterosexual teenagers about homosexuality. Many teenagers are very accepting of the homosexual orientation; they think it is just as natural as a heterosexual orientation.

They think that permitting homosexual "marriages" is a matter of civil rights, that sexual orientation is like skin color: It is wrong to use either to discriminate against people. And, being teenagers, they are very sure that they are right.

I believe the willingness to approve of homosexual unions derives from two sources: a faulty understanding of sexuality and compassion for those who are attracted sexually to members of their own sex.

It is very difficult for anyone in our culture, let alone teenagers, to have a correct view of sexuality. It is a rare TV show or movie that does not feature some form of sexual immorality as perfectly acceptable. Homosexual relations are now featured regularly on TV and in film – and always with approval. When young people are inundated with such impressions, it is very difficult for them to believe that sexual intercourse is moral only between heterosexuals who are married. If heterosexuals can engage in non-procreative, uncommitted sex, why can't those with homosexual appetites? And why should we forbid marriage to them if they believe making a lifetime commitment is fitting for the love they feel for each other? (And this at a time when more and more heterosexuals are claiming that marriage is not necessary for expressing a lifetime commitment?! It is hard not to think that the clamor for same-sex unions is more about acceptance than about marriage licenses.)

With the ubiquity of media attention given to same-sex unions, parents will not lack teaching moments. Setting the stage is a good idea. Assure your teenagers that you think that being ordered in respect to sexuality is difficult for everyone; indeed, in our culture, most heterosexuals are out-of-control sexually. Tell them you would be as reluctant to allow a cohabiting couple to share a bedroom in your home as you would be to allow a homosexual couple to do so. But that, generally, both would be welcome at your dinner table. Mention that you appreciate the dignity and gifts of all human beings; they are all beloved children of God.

Inform them how the acceptance of homosexual relations is relatively new and that there has been a concerted campaign by the media to mainstream acceptance of homosexuality. Call teens' attention to the fact that few people know many of the facts about homosexuality. Although the causes of a homosexual orientation are various, it is well established that many males who experience homosexual attractions were abused sexually by males or felt rejected by their fathers. Many lesbians were abused by males and no longer trust males. If one's desire for sexual intimacy with a same-sex partner can be traced to abuse or the perception of rejection, how natural and healthy can it be?

Although heterosexuals have increased their propensity for having multiple sexual partners, the average homosexual male has hundreds of partners in his lifetime – and a significant number with anonymous partners; they are looking not so much for "Mr. Right" as "Mr. Right Now." Fidelity among gays is almost nonexistent; when they say they have been faithful to their partner, they generally mean they have not brought another partner home, but will readily admit to having had other sexual partners. (See "An Open Secret: The Truth About Male Homosexuals" by Joseph Nicolosi online.) Indeed, Dan Savage, a gay advice columnist, recommends that heterosexuals should learn from what he calls the "American gay lifestyle," which includes pornography, fetishes and "flexibility" in regard to fidelity.

Much of the activity in which gays engage, unfortunately, can only be judged to be degrading. It is even unpleasant to discuss explicitly what homosexuals do sexually with each other, but that information, again, shows how unnatural the act is; lesbians must use artificial devices and males must violate bodily parts meant for other purposes (hence the huge incidence of anal cancer). Even such indirect descriptions seem to violate discretion, but failure to deal with the facts of reality is very helpful to those who want to present the reality as something that it is not. While "gay pride" parades are not typical of homosexual behavior, a quick look at the pictures of such parades will give a flavor of what the "gay lifestyle" celebrates.

For good resources about the facts of homosexuality, direct teenagers to the websites for Courage (a support group for homosexuals trying to live a chaste life) and NARTH (National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) and/or hand them the pamphlet "Homosexuality and Hope" available from the Catholic Medical Association or the Our Sunday Visitor pamphlet "What the Church Teaches: Same-Sex Marriage." In fact, you might donate to such organizations as NARTH or Courage to show your commitment to assisting those with same-sex attractions.

Another major reason for the approval of homosexual unions is compassion. Many, if not most, persons with homosexual appetites seem to fear that if they are not permitted to be in homosexual unions they will live lives of miserable, debilitating loneliness. And we must admit that until they learn techniques of healthy relationships, their fears are not completely unfounded. Those with homosexual appetites seem to have a huge relationship wound in their being. They have not received the affirmation of their biological gender that they needed or are wounded in other ways, which drives them to seek intimacy with a person of the same sex, intimacy that becomes sexualized.

I think many of those who experience homosexual appetites have trouble having normal relationships with heterosexual males and females. Many gays report feeling like outsiders around heterosexual males and a sense of longing to be just one of the guys. Nor do they feel normal around females. The more effeminate might tend to think they are "one of the girls," but they know better. I believe the equivalent is true for lesbians; they, too, feel inferior around heterosexual women and are not "one of the guys," no matter how masculine they feel and act.

They should try to learn to express their disapproval of homosexual relations with sensitivity and clarity (just as they need to learn to express disapproval for fornication and pornography), while at the same time maintaining respect for those who engage in such activity.

I think we have to recognize that the homosexual orientation is a particularly heavy cross. It is not easy to try to give those who experience homosexual appetites the affirmation they need without appearing to approve of their choices in respect to their sexual behavior. Yet that is the approval that they seem to insist upon in order to feel affirmed. We need to affirm them as beloved children of God, while at the same time calling them to reject the homosexual lifestyle; loving them in their dignity, as Jesus did with the woman caught in adultery, while inviting them to abandon their homosexual lifestyle. (We should do the equivalent for heterosexual friends who are fornicating, using pornography, etc.)

Teenagers have big hearts and a strong sense of justice. We should invite our teens to be leaders in showing loving respect to other teens manifesting a homosexual orientation. While making their objection to homosexual actions clear, they should rebuke those who mock homosexual kids and make sure they involve them in social activities. They should try to learn to express their disapproval of homosexual relations with sensitivity and clarity (just as they need to learn to express disapproval for fornication and pornography), while at the same time maintaining respect for those who engage in such activity. We need to let those who experience same-sex attractions know we love them and are sorry for the suffering they experience. They need our friendship, our involvement and our prayers.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Janet E. Smith. "Teaching Moments on Sexuality." National Catholic Register(November 23, 2011).

This article is reprinted with permission from National Catholic Register. To subscribe to the National Catholic Register call 1-800-421-3230.

THE AUTHOR

Janet E. Smith holds the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. She is the author of Life Issues, Medical Choices: Questions and Answers for Catholics, The Right to Privacy (Bioethics & Culture), Humanae Vitae: A Generation Laterand the editor of Why Humanae Vitae Was Right. She has published many articles on ethical and bioethics issues. She has taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Dallas. Prof. Smith has received the Haggar Teaching Award from the University of Dallas, the Prolife Person of the Year from the Diocese of Dallas, and the Cardinal Wright Award from the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. She is serving a second term as a consultor to the Pontifical Council on the Family. Over a million copies of her talk, "Contraception: Why Not" have been distributed. Visit Janet Smith's web page here. See Janet Smith's audio tapes and writing here. Janet Smith is on the Advisory Board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

Article: Bringing Christ to the Clinic

2011-12-07T13:09:00.001+08:00

FATHER TADEUSZ PACHOLCZYK

A Catholic physician once related to me a powerful story about one of his patients, who had just received a diagnosis of advanced, metastatic cancer and had a relatively short time left to live.

The patient mentioned to the doctor that he was Catholic but had drifted away from the Church and no longer practiced. A short time after sharing the diagnosis, the doctor returned to the man's hospital room together with a priest, asking whether he would like to talk with him. The man became upset and threw them both out of the room, saying to his doctor, "Don't ever do that again!"

Over the next few weeks as his condition worsened, the doctor worked tirelessly with the patient, addressing his medical and pain management needs. He became closer to him each day, and spoke with him about a range of topics. A relationship of trust began to grow and develop.

When the patient's condition took a sharp turn for the worse, the physician knew the end was approaching. Once again he came to the door of the patient's room accompanied by a priest and stood there for a moment. The patient caught the doctor's eye, and with a glimmer in his own, said rather cryptically, "Oh, what the heck, he probably knows me better than you do, so send him in here."

The priest didn't come out of the room for over an hour. The man ended up going to confession and receiving the last sacraments. Ninety minutes after the priest departed, the man passed on to the Lord.

It might seem bold that the physician brought the priest to the room initially without first inquiring whether the patient had wanted a visit from the priest. Yet it was clearly out of concern for the patient's spiritual needs that he "erred" on the side of taking that risk. That same personal concern, bolstered by a stronger relationship with the patient, led him to try a second time, making it possible for the man to receive the sacraments and make his peace with God. The physician's boldness and unflagging concern for his patient played an important role in bringing Christ into a situation where His healing graces were needed, where even the priest alone probably could not have succeeded.

A few months ago, a physician in Florida told me a similar story from his own experience. A young man who had been found unconscious from a suspected drug overdose was admitted to the ICU. He was not brain dead, but his neurologic exam was poor, and death was imminent. His parents and sister were at the hospital that Sunday morning when it looked like he would die in the next hour or so. The physician explained the situation and then asked if they had any spiritual needs he could help them with. The father and mother indicated they were both Catholic, but they had never had the children baptized, saying, "I thought they should make their own decision." The doctor inquired if they would like their son to be baptized. They nodded yes, even though their daughter didn't agree.

The physician later commented: "Hopefully the patient was disposed to receive the sacrament. I believe his parents were comforted by their decision, and rightfully so. They had probably just requested the most important event in their son's existence."

The doctor placed a call to the hospital's Spiritual Services but couldn't reach anyone. He tried calling two local parishes but the priests were saying Mass. Finally he called a retired housebound priest he knew and asked him how to proceed. The priest instructed the physician to baptize the patient conditionally.

When the physician returned, the father spontaneously restated that he would like his son baptized. With the nurse and the parents at bedside, the physician took some tap water into his hand and poured it over the patient's forehead while saying, "I baptize you conditionally in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." The patient died within the hour. The physician later commented: "Hopefully the patient was disposed to receive the sacrament. I believe his parents were comforted by their decision, and rightfully so. They had probably just requested the most important event in their son's existence."

Some Catholic health care workers may take a largely hands-off approach when it comes to addressing the spiritual needs of their patients. The physician or nurse may feel such spiritual concerns are not really their purview or concern. Yet close collaboration between Catholic medical professionals and clergy is critical to effectively address the needs of patients approaching death. Even when a priest may not be available, physicians and nurses often will have opportunities to serve as unique conduits of God's grace, if they are willing to be courageous, take some risks, and bring Christ into the clinic.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk. "Bringing Christ to the Clinic." Making Sense Out of Bioethics (August, 2011).

Father Tad Pacholczyk writes a monthly column, Making Sense out of Bioethics, which appears in various diocesan newspapers across the country. This article is reprinted with permission of the author, Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D.

The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) has a long history of addressing ethical issues in the life sciences and medicine. Established in 1972, the Center is engaged in education, research, consultation, and publishing to promote and safeguard the dignity of the human person in health care and the life sciences. The Center is unique among bioethics organizations in that its message derives from the official teaching of the Catholic Church: drawing on the unique Catholic moral tradition that acknowledges the unity of faith and reason and builds on the solid foundation of natural law.

The Center publishes two journals (Ethics & Medics andThe National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly) and at leastone book annually on issues such as physician-assisted suicide, abortion, cloning, and embryonic stem cell research. Educational programs include the National Catholic Certification Program in Health Care Ethics and a variety of seminars and other events.

Inspired by the harmony of faith and reason, the Quarterly unites faith in Christ to reasoned and rigorous reflection upon the findings of the empirical and experimental sciences. While the Quarterly is committed to publishing material that is consonant with the magisterium of the Catholic Church, it remains open to other faiths and to secular viewpoints in the spirit of informed dialogue.

THE AUTHOR

Rev. Tadeusz Pacholczyk, Ph.D. earned his doctorate in neuroscience from Yale and did post-doctoral work at Harvard. He is a priest of the diocese of Fall River, MA, and serves as the Director of Education at The National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia. Seewww.ncbcenter.org. Father Tadeusz Pacholczyk is a member of the advisory board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

Article: God's call

2011-11-24T21:40:00.001+08:00

SERVANT OF GOD CATHERINE DOHERTY

The moment when you hear God's call is a moment of recognition.

Servant of God
Catherine Doherty
1896-1985

The moment when you hear God's call is a moment of recognition, a moment of receptivity and of deep openness. It is the moment when all we have to do is realize that we are creatures, and that it is God who calls us.

What is he calling us to? He is calling us to what each of us most deeply desires. He is calling us to a life that will bear fruit, for sterility is the most tragic thing that can happen to us. Remember the parable of the fig tree? God offers us fertility. He offers us a life of unimaginable fruitfulness ...

We crave greatness for our lives, and God asks us to become little. To pass through the door that leads to his kingdom, we must go down on our knees. Paradoxically, if we do so, we will find ourselves growing in stature, for "eye has not seen and ear has not heard what God has reserved for those who love
him."

This is a moment of choice. It is one of many such moments, for we will be called to choose every day of our lives until we die. But the fantastic thing about it is our freedom. We are utterly free to turn back from this power that draws us on. We are free to loose ourselves from the· bonds of a love that demands our total surrender. Nothing prevents us from saying no. Nothing except God's love.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Catherine Doherty, CM. "God's call." excerpt from Soul of My Soul Coming to the Heart of Prayer(Madonna House Publications, 2006).

Reprinted with permission of Madonna House Publications.

THE AUTHOR

Catherine Doherty (1896-1985) used her heritage as a Russian Christian as a matrix for responding to the needs of Christian life and work in the modern world. Her own personal pilgrimage led her to be "poor with the poor Christ" in the slums of Toronto and in Harlem; and later to the establishing of the world-wide Madonna House Apostolate. A dedicated wife and mother, Catherine was also a prolific writer of hundreds of articles, a best-selling author of dozens of books, a renowned national speaker, and a pioneer of social justice. Catherine Doherty's cause for canonization as a saint is now under consideration by the Catholic Church. Among her books are: Soul of My Soul Coming to the Heart of Prayer, Living The Gospel Without Compromise, An Experience of God Identification with Christ — a Road to the Mystical Life, and Catherine de Hueck Doherty: Essential Writing.

Article: 12-Step Pride-Elimination Plan

2011-11-24T21:39:00.000+08:00

DONALD DEMARCO

Of all the seven deadly sins, it is the most subtle to diagnose, the most common, and the most difficult to eliminate.

Pride is the deadliest of the deadly sins.

It is unrealistic, unattractive and unprofitable. One would have to be rather foolish, it seems, to grant significant room in his life to pride. If the devil could laugh, and the angels could weep, they would do so over the way we human beings stubbornly cling to pride.

Yet, of all the seven deadly sins, it is the most subtle to diagnose, the most common, and the most difficult to eliminate.

We should note, however, that not all pride is deadly. There is a sense in which pride is fully justified. A parent has this good pride when his children attain some standard of excellence. Likewise, a coach can be proud of his players for comporting themselves with good sportsmanship.

Good pride conforms to a good standard; bad pride does not.

St. Thomas Aquinas referred to this latter kind of pride as the attempt to achieve a "perverse excellence." This form of pride, though it has many facets, is, basically, an inordinate desire for praise, honors and recognition. Because it is "inordinate," it is out of synchrony with who we really are as well as our proper place in the grand scheme of things. "In general," as John Ruskin has remarked, "pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes."

Pride as Unrealistic

Pride is unrealistic on a personal level. We are not the cause of our own being. We do not bestow upon ourselves whatever gifts we have. Our life is short, and our hour is fleeting. It is, as Shakespeare called it, a "brief candle." It is a mere moment in time, a veritable sliver wedged between two eternities. It makes far more sense that humble gratitude be our dominant characteristic rather than pride. One thing we can truly take credit for is our willingness to attain humble gratitude.

Pride is unrealistic on a historical level. The virtue of piety, one that has lost a great deal of its force and beauty in the present era, honors the historical factors that give us not only our life, but all the opportunities, conveniences, blessings and riches to which we are heir. Thus, we honor our parents and our ancestry as well as our tradition. Because we receive more than we can possibly give, an attitude of thanksgiving seems to be far more appropriate than the desire to seek praise.

Because it is "inordinate," it is out of synchrony with who we really are as well as our proper place in the grand scheme of things.

Pride is unrealistic on a social level. Each person is but one among the 7 billion souls who presently populate the world. Cooperation with others is the key to a well-ordered, peaceful and prosperous society. A multitude of prideful egos breeds calamity. The proud person is reluctant to yield to the views of others principally because he wants his own way to prevail. Pride unchecked is a recipe for social catastrophe. One ego getting its own way is possible; two competing egos getting their own way is not possible.

Pride is unrealistic on a theological level. We are creatures. Therefore, it is owing to the beneficence of our Creator that we came into existence. The fundamental distinction between Creator and creature is one that Adam and Eve, in their pride, failed to honor. Their original sin of pride, which caused their dismissal from paradise and has plagued their descendants ever since, is the consequence of this failure. The creature should not aspire to be more that he can become. This is the sin of presumption. The Creator is not proud for being the Creator. That is within his province. His creatures should honor both the reality of their Creator as well as their own.

Pride as Unattractive

Boastfulness is unattractive. "The proud hate pride – in others," Benjamin Franklin quipped in his Poor Richard's Almanac. The braggart, the show-off, is essentially boring. No one enjoys the spectacle of another person trying to create the impression that he is larger or more important that others know him to be. Boastfulness is a verbal manifestation of pride. Its essential weakness lies in the fact that actions speak louder than words, and people are far more impressed by good actions.

Pride is a mask that is used to conceal the real self that we have rejected. It is a form of despair,...

Ostentation is unattractive. A person, by flaunting his elaborate attire, affected manners or costly possessions, may try to convince others of his superiority. This strategy backfires when it provokes laughter or derision. Ostentation is fine for a peacock. Modesty is more appropriate for human beings. Ostentation sends the unwelcomed message "Look at me!" Unfortunately, people see more deeply than what is on the surface. The ostentatious person can make a very sad spectacle of himself.

Hypocrisy is unattractive. Hypocrisy is the attempt to make people think that you are better than you know yourself to be. It is a fairly universal vice and a left-handed way in which vice pays tribute to virtue. But it is shallow and dishonest. Therefore, it is essentially unattractive, as any other form of duplicity is unattractive. People prefer to witness the shining example of moral integrity. But that is something which they observe, not something that they are tricked into believing.

Self-absorption is unattractive. "Man is a social animal," as Aristotle rightly pointed out. We read in Genesis, "It is not good for man to be alone." Self-absorption is more than unrealistic. It conveys a certain contempt for all others. C.S. Lewis has noted, "A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you're looking down, you can't see something that's above you." The glaring fact that the self-absorbed person misses out on a great deal makes him out to be someone to be pitied, not praised.

Pride as Unprofitable

Pride is unprofitable because it is precipitous, which is to say that it brings about a fall. This time-honored and biblically rooted axiom can be easily illustrated. Hold a small object, such as a baseball, at arm's length, and then release it. To no one's astonishment, it falls to the floor. The reason that it falls is because nothing is supporting it. Because pride does not have a foundation in reality, it can do nothing other than fall. Hence, it is not only unprofitable, but actually counterproductive. "I charge thee: Fling away ambition," warned Shakespeare. "By that sin fell the angels" (Henry VIII, III: 2).

Pride is unprofitable because it is wasteful. Pride is a wasteful expenditure of time and energy. Working humbly in God's vineyard is far more productive (though it might not get headlines) than trying to convince others of an illusion. Catholic convert Malcolm Muggeridge titled his autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Timebecause he came to realize that a great deal of his life was misspent because it flowed from that pernicious species of pride known as selfish ambition.

The choice between Narcissus and Christ is, intellectually, not difficult to make. But on the practical level of our own lived lives, it requires all that we can muster.

Pride is unprofitable because it is self-rejecting. Pride is a mask that is used to conceal the real self that we have rejected. It is a form of despair, as the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard has described at length, because it installs an artificial self in the place of the real self. People speak of "swallowing one's pride." It is surely advisable to swallow one's pride in order to allow one's real self to emerge. We might add that no one has ever choked to death as a result of swallowing his pride.

Pride is unprofitable because it is cataclysmic, insofar as it sets a spark to the other six deadly sins. Because pride is unrealistic (more specifically, vain and presumptuous), the proud person will meet with opposition and, as a result, experience much frustration. This frustration inevitably leads to anger and envy toward others who have fared better. Such a person, in addition, may give up and seek the solace of sloth. Or he may try to ease the torment of his frustrations in lustful, gluttonous or avaricious ways. Pride can set in motion a cascade of sins.

The mythical Narcissus is the personification of deadly pride. His incessant praise of himself led him to neglect the necessities of life and, therefore, to his premature demise. The Narcissus myth is a cautionary tale warning people against the vanity of pride. Christ, on the other hand, tells us that he is meek and humble of heart. Moreover, Scripture tells us that he was obedient unto death.

The choice between Narcissus and Christ is, intellectually, not difficult to make. But on the practical level of our own lived lives, it requires all that we can muster.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Donald DeMarco. "12-Step Pride-Elimination Plan." National Catholic Register(November 14, 2011).

This article is reprinted with permission from National Catholic Register. To subscribe to the National Catholic Register call 1-800-421-3230.

THE AUTHOR

Article: The love of the saints

2011-11-02T11:26:00.000+08:00

FATHER GEORGE W. RUTLER

No generation has had more saints to intercede for them than ours has.

Last week, Pope Benedict XVI raised three new ones to the altars. Saint Guido Maria Conforti, bishop of Ravenna and Parma, though plagued by ill health, founded the Xaverian Missionaries for the conversion of non-Christians; he died in 1931. Saint Luigi Guanella, who died in 1915, founded three religious orders specially devoted to the care of the sick and dying. Saint Bonifacia Rodríguez Castro, who entered heaven in 1905, founded an order whose special dedication is to women who are poor or unemployed.

The good works these saints did were outward manifestations of the two commandments which our Lord declared to be the bedrock of all moral laws: love of God and love of one another (cf. Matthew 22:34-40).

Jesus cited those two commandments, from Deuteronomy and Leviticus, in response to the Pharisees who were testing Him. He had already confounded the Sadducees, who had tried to trick Him with cynical questionings. Sadducees and Pharisees live in every generation. The Sadducees were materialistic skeptics who did not believe in what they could not immediately comprehend, such as eternal life, rather like the Modernists of recent times. The Pharisees accepted supernatural mysteries such as angels and the resurrection of the dead, but were arrogant about their faith, quite like anyone smugly pious enough to pose as more Catholic than the Pope.

Jesus disturbed both parties by digging into the bedrock of holiness that is the love of God made tangible in the way we behave with our fellow humans. The superficial contradiction of that is solipsism, or self absorption, neglecting God and neighbor. In the Greek myth, Narcissus was so in love with his own reflection that he rejected the voice of the woodland nymph Echo, who loved him. Saints do not live in isolation, and so the voice of God does not bounce off them.

In September, Pope Benedict told the German federal parliament that society is in danger of taking on a "bunker" mentality, isolated in a windowless world, whose light and atmosphere are artificial. Such is the fate of the solipsist. Last week was the feast of Saint John of Capistrano, who was anything but a solipsist. He used his brains and energy to relieve the siege of Belgrade in 1456 and helped to save our civilization. His love of God was not an abstraction. At the time of the battle, Pope Callixtus III ordered that church bells be rung at noon, and noonday bells have rung ever since. On All Saints' Day, the bells recall the divine love that Christ brought to earth and made tangible: "What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and touched with our hands…" (1 John 1:1).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father George William Rutler. "The love of the saints." From the Pastor (October 30, 2011).

Reprinted with permission of Father George W. Rutler.

THE AUTHOR

Article: On Saints and Souls

2011-11-02T11:21:00.003+08:00

FATHER JAMES V. SCHALL, S. J.

The modern world has a peculiar problem with Catholicism.

Few acknowledge that such a thing as "sin" exists. But an occult delight surges in many souls over the frequent aberrations of believers.

A twofold reason exists for this reaction. First, the track record of believers is consolingly not much different from that of unbelievers. Secondly, no need to distinguish right from wrong, good from bad can be given if no one can do anything about them. Yet we recollect the nagging teaching that Christ became man, in part, so that sins might be forgiven. The denial that sins happen logically denies the need or reality of a forgiving God.

In the Church, the first two days of November are the Feasts of All Saints and All Souls. In recent years, Benedict often gives, as evidence for the validity of Catholicism, the example of the saints, from all walks of life. Morality is not primarily a list of rules or series of sanctions. It is mainly following the example of those who loved God and neighbor, who served the minds and bodies of their friends and fellow men.

Prominent in the list of actual saints are those known to have been, by any objective standards, sinners. This approach teaches us that sin itself need be not the last word, though it can be, if we choose. Sin is the other side of human freedom. To deny the possibility and fact of sin is to deny the possibility and fact of human freedom.

Benedict has likewise devoted much attention to the souls of the departed. The teaching on souls in Purgatory has recently been downgraded, if not simply rejected. Yet it is the primary doctrine that stands, as it were, between saints and sinners. All Saints' Day is a celebration of all the saints who have ever reached the purpose of their lives, the City of God, the achievement of the end for which each person is created.

All Souls' Day refers rather to the probably far larger number of people who died repentant indeed, but not yet really ready to encounter the divine life. Benedict, along with Plato on the same topic, suggests that no one would want to stand before God unless he was sufficiently cleansed. He leaves the logic to sink in.

We hear of the Church Triumphant, the Church Suffering, and the Church Militant. The same Church is understood to have members in heaven, in Purgatory, and still deciding on where they will be. Obviously left out are those who have simply and responsibly rejected entrance into such a Church at any level. The last section of Hobbes' Leviathan was entitled "The Kingdom of Darkness."

Benedict devotes much attention to the following phrase in the Creed: "Christ will come to judge the living and the dead." Why is this? Readers of Plato – the pope is one of these – know that Socrates was concerned to show that the world was not created in injustice. Man was not "the measure of all things," as Protagoras had suggested. If he were, nothing we do would make much difference.

Readers of Plato – the pope is one of these – know that Socrates was concerned to show that the world was not created in injustice. Man was not "the measure of all things,"...

This consequence would mean that crimes and sins that men committed in this life were not accounted for if they were not repented of or punished. It would also mean that the many noble and good, but unacknowledged, things that we do for one another would not be recognized.

The doctrine of hell, if nothing else, testifies to the significance of our actual deeds, however we might judge them in our own interest. Plato understood this issue quite clearly. In Plato, if we die in our sins, we are condemned to the river of punishment. We cannot escape until the person against whom we sinned actually forgives us.

What Christianity adds to this teaching on forgiveness is that our sins are not simply against one another. Or better, as they are against one another, they are also against God who placed us in the order in which we live, the order of our freedom and responsibility. Christian revelation begins its teaching to us with the word: "Repent." This admonition implies that we have the graced power to do so. But we do not have the power to forgive ourselves since it is not only against ourselves that we have sinned.

How often shall we forgive our neighbor? Christ answered this question of the apostle by saying not just seven times but seventy times seven times. That is to say, the core of our issues with God remains as long as we have our freedom. But we can choose either way. This choosing is what we do in the drama of our actual lives. All Saints and All Souls – these two days, if we think of them, reach the very foundations of our being.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Father James V. Schall, S.J. "On Saints and Souls." The Catholic Thing (November 1, 2011).

The Catholic thing – the concrete historical reality of Catholicism – is the richest cultural tradition in the world. That is the deep background to The Catholic Thing which bring you an original column every day that provides fresh and penetrating insight into the current situation along with other commentary, news, analysis, and – yes – even humor. Our writers include some of the most seasoned and insightful Catholic minds in America: Michael Novak, Ralph McInerny, Hadley Arkes, Michael Uhlmann, Mary Eberstadt, Austin Ruse, George Marlin, William Saunders, and many others.

THE AUTHOR