Putting the doctrinal cart before the developmental horse

On some much more read blog than mine, whose identity I would remember better if I hadn't procrastinated so long before sitting down to write about it, an apparently new visitor to the blog got into the combox and inadvertently drove the discussion off the rails for a bit trying to explain how it was morally necessary to believe in geocentrism.

Most of his argument consisted of citing old Church documents declaring that geocentrism was an obliged belief to hold, like the Trinity or the bodily resurrection, and citing the historical consensus of popes and theologians until the modern era.

I felt some frustration when he continued to assert that geocentrism was held and taught "always and everywhere" despite Catholics with matching credentials, from medieval theologians to the latest popes, being more open to a Copernican conception of the universe. He was quick to point out that the dissenters from geocentrism were only expressing personal opinions, and ones that happened to be erroneous, while everyone else was making official proclamations with whatever weight of authority they could avail themselves of. This dismissal seemed a bit pat in context even before he continued as if to say "Always and everywhere--except for a few occasions of dissent, but I'm not really using hyperbole, so Always and Everywhere." I was almost more alarmed to see him studiously refusing to give more than a hand-waving refutation to these Copernican supposed material heretics, as if spending too much time trying to understand why they would be wrong would make it too hard to believe Always and Everywhere, than to see him stridently warn the blog's readers not to put too much stock in the consensus of their senses and reason.

The geocentrist did, in fact, quote documents where talk of heliocentrism was condemned as absurd or otherwise posed a moral or intellectual danger to the Christian. I will even agree that for pastoral reasons, at certain points in history it may have been prudent to discourage people from fixating on thoughts like "If we've been relegated to the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of some part of the universe, are we still the apple of God's eye?" It seems preposterous today, but before natural philosophy was divorced into physical science and theology, for the layman, maybe such a proposal would have sounded a lot more ominous.

I don't know. I'm only saying I can imagine something of the sort. One wouldn't even have to fall back on "they were a thousand years dumber than we are" to see that the best pastoral action is sometimes to prohibit something that is not inherently evil (such as making same-sex attraction an impediment to the priesthood) or mandate something that is not inherently morally obligatory (such as celibacy for the priesthood).

An idea was raised that I thought may have set the geocentric argument at nines, but it wasn't pursued and then the blogger got things back on topic and that was the end of it.

Someone pointed out that there was such a thing as development of doctrine, that our understanding of old teachings of the Ordinary or Extraordinary Magisterium can expand without contradicting the essence of original understanding. The geocentrist responded that no such thing had really happened, that the authorities who had spoken on the matter had spoken definitively and had left no room for dissent, question, or nuance; case closed--and further, new doctrines are to be judged against old ones, and not the other way around.

I think this is a wounding to doctrinal development. Let me cite the Latin for an example: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, At the time this declaration--already a familiar concept, written about by St. Cyprian and lamented for not appearing true by St. Augustine--was made, there was only one Church, so "Salvation is the Church" was not going to make anybody wonder about possible schismatic saints. Fortunately, although we don't always know what's going on when the Spirit moves the Church to do one thing and not another, the Spirit does, and He does not err. The declaration that salvation only came from and through the Church did not have to be fully understood by the bishops who declared it.

"Ah," said the geocentrist in paraphrase, "but we must interpret new doctrines in light of old, rather than redefine old ones under the light of novel and potentially heretical ones!"

Okay, so we have to be sure that a new dogmatic definition is consonant with old ones before it is accepted as anything more than a hypothesis. Fine, but it is not the same thing as allowing for understanding of an old doctrine to grow.

Development of "extra ecclesiam" would be like "Outside the Church there is no salvation. We used to think that meant only Catholics in good standing went to heaven. In further consideration of the Church's role as the sacrament of grace to the world, and of people who strive for virtue as they can and are not culpable for being outside our official ranks, we believe now that people who are not formal Catholics may be saved, but it is through the instrumentality of the Church that saving grace is somehow afforded to them."

Insisting that doctrines can develop only within the confines of undeveloped understanding, which is the essence of the geocentrist's objection to modern bishops and astronomer-friars taking no umbrage at a relativistic physical universe, is a confounding of development in the first place. It is like saying "We used to teach that only people in good standing with the Church can go to heaven; today we understand that God provides some graces to sincere unbelievers through the instrumentality of the Church, but they have to be Catholic to get to heaven." It's like proving the square root of two is irrational by assuming it is rational and then deducing a contradiction, and then claiming development of doctrine on the grounds that you've found a new way to state the same thing. There's no increase in understanding there, just an increase in confusion about how or why God would dole out some graces and not others.

Consider further that the Church has drawn its own borders of competence around faith and morals. The Church may contain members who are experts in science or politics, but it learned the hard way that acting as a secular power is not the best way to go; by and large, it never had as great a problem with science (if you say "Galileo!" then try to think of someone else who got the same treatment and get back to me--I won't take the time here). If the geocentrist wishes to convince me that I must accept that the Earth is the center of the universe, he's got to offer some proofs of the following:

1. The universe has a center in some meaningful and detectable way at all


2. Why the universe's construction leaves only the subtlest clues that our current cosmology still has a few unasked questions; clues so ambiguous that a particular, grossly different geometry never even makes the list of possible explanations for remaining discrepancies between data and theory; clues whose own subtlety suggest that the way we think the universe hangs together at large and small scales is, to the best of our ability to observe it, pretty close to how it actually does. If quadropole and octopole asymmetries in the Cosmic Microwave Background are real, and are physically meaningful anisotropies, why should I have to discard the Big Bang completely for one explanation that doesn't actually explain the observations, instead of another acentric that does?


3. Presuming the universe does have a center and we're at it, what moral meaning it would have and why I should be obliged to hold it (I'd accept excerpts from or commentaries on the documents he already cited for the former, but for the latter, I'd also like to know what the danger of heliocentrism was besides what usually comes with hypothetical disobedience to moral authorities.)


4. Failing anything better than "Rome has spoken! Don't trust your senses," at least explain how the Church could declare a physical arrangement of the universe to be a necessary belief and then say it's not competent as a body to judge empirical data. Either the Church lost some capability in recent centuries, old papal bulls trump formal pedagogical documents as cited in the Catechism (the agreement of other councillar or encyclical documents on this matter being the umbrella over this tension), or development of doctrine is bogus.

Update:
Something else occurred to me. If all the geocentric-favoring statements made in Church history were dogmatic and binding, and all the Copernican statements made later on as science improved were merely opinions, what does the geocentrist make of this pandemic of heretical cosmology? Sure, no pope has taught ex cathedra against heliocentrism, but why is the support for geocentrism so...obscure? Where are all the other uncomfortable doctrines that are clearly resolved but disapproved (only personally, not formally!) by popes and theologians?

I thought it would be enough to stop reading news articles online about religion

Also about science, and the comments posted thereon. Apparently it isn't good for me to read the discussions of touchier subjects at places like Amazon.com, either.

I was browsing for some books as stocking stuffers for my mom and saw a couple discussion topics listed at the bottom that looked interesting. Well, I started reading one that didn't turn out to be interesting in a terribly constructive way, either. One discussion was titled "Why do we excuse God's genocide in the flood story?" and it went downhill from there.

It's an interesting question until one realizes that every death is the result of the permission or will of God, and so we cannot apply the same rules for behavior to God that apply to us out of consideration for the fact that death is not a material good that we should be participating in.

If I'd been a little more mature, I might have been amused to see comments almost as bleak as 'If God wanted to wipe out all those people, why didn't he just will them not to exist, instead of having adults, innocent children, and animals feel the water filling their lungs, and terror filling their hearts? Must be a pretty weak God.' You're willing to posit a God who can create ex nihilo but chooses not to destroy in nusquam, but think that it's a sign of weakness, like you're some competing predator? That even a God who could only destroy by natural means would be too small for you to bother worshiping or deigning to admit might really exist?

Who cares? A God who created everything, one who can control the weather, has at least shown Himself to be what He seems to be, even if you have a measure of skepticism about who He or any of us claims He is.

Or maybe it doesn't amuse me because until I can grow a thicker skin and look at people with that mindset through more charitable eyes, I'm afraid that trying to avoid angry ignoramuses will turn me into one, into the mirror image of someone who goes around wishing more people referred to him as a Bright and acting surprised that anyone still goes to church anymore.

I learn a lot about good and bad driving by observing the mistakes of others. A lot of it's about the apparent weaknesses in my new state of residence's driving laws and standards for instruction, so I have plenty of opportunities to learn as well how much humility and patience I still need to develop, but it also gives me things to watch out for in case I'm ever a lot closer to the action.

I also learn a lot by being a stupid driver myself. It's a lot easier to see what my weak areas are than to try to imagine them because my commutes are so mundane that my margins of safety are hardly touched.

I think I learn the most, though, when I see other drivers react badly to my mistakes. The funniest one was when I lost control on some black ice and slid off the road. Did some minor damage to the exhaust system. While I was inspecting it, my dad called the police. A cop came out, seemed satisfied that I'd done everything I could and should have done so he didn't give me a ticket, but then asked me to get in the back of his squad car so we could get the accident report taken care of out of the weather. He wanted to get through it quickly, he said, before some rubberneckers came by and hit something. Sure enough, while I'm looking over the form, a car drives the other way slowly with the driver just staring at me in the back seat, and another car does the same thing, only not quite as slowly...*bang* I laughed, the cop uttered a mild expletive, and asked me to wait while he got the other two cars situated. Then he came back to finish with me, call out another car to deal with the two cars that collided, and called the city to get a brine truck out. Man, I still laugh about that.

There were two other very similar ones that I didn't realize I was also guilty of but still don't quite understand why it seems natural for people to do it. On different occasions, I have been backing out of a parking space when someone drove behind me, either because I didn't check a blind spot or they came around a nearby corner and feared I wouldn't look in time to avoid hitting them. Maybe I would have, maybe not; usually I catch that kind of thing but I appreciate being honked at so I can stop immediately and reassess my surroundings.

On the two occasions I have in mind, though, the cars honked to get my attention and then stopped right behind me. When I looked around, I just saw a car there, the driver watching to see what I would do. What do you want, a contrite gesture in my rear view mirror? I'd be happy to oblige, but my windows are tinted. Waiting to see if I've noticed you yet? Either stop before you get in my way or try to scoot past, whatever it takes to avoid a collision. If you're choosing between letting me slowly back into you and running over a pedestrian on ahead of you, hey, good choice, but dinging a fender or bumper would be much less significant than crumpling a door and possibly the person sitting on the other side of it.

I can't say it's not a natural reaction. My instinct is also to try to stop to reduce the variables I have to assess in order to safely defuse a situation. But man, staying right in the path of a moving car is just bad news.

Interesting fragment of a discussion I caught on...um...I think it was Moody Radio, that's the religious station that comes in most consistently when I'm driving around town, but I don't recall for sure. I wish I'd heard more.

They were going on about how Christ alone saves, not our works, not our works alongside Christ's completed atoning work on the cross, and how all we have to do is believe in Him.

I presume they meant "believe in" in the sense of "have faith in," not "think is factually true," because everyone on the other side of the veil knows the truth of that and they're not all in heaven.

So they were quoting and paraphrasing Paul a lot, making some good points about how if we had to rely on our own works we could never be assured of our salvation, which is true enough--actually, it's half true. If we're honest and have a little spiritual maturity, we should have a pretty good idea that our own works don't suffice. But they were making a good point: we can't save ourselves.

I felt they started leaning off the rails a bit when they mentioned good works coming along after we're justified barely as an afterthought. While someone living a grace-infused life can reasonably be expected to do more to bring grace into the world for others, I think it really does a disservice to James to say "'faith without works is dead' just means 'if I don't do good works, I probably don't have faith, but I have no obligation per se.'" They didn't explicitly go that far, but they thoroughly conflated sola fide with sola gratia. Christ wants more than intellectual assent or resignation to the fact of His saving work.

Jesus did not say to the sheep "You believed in me. Enter into the Kingdom," nor to the goats, "You did not put your trust in me, begone from My sight."

The segment I heard on the radio came shortly after a Catholic had called or e-mailed, quoted a few passages that were not identified after I tuned in, and then encouraged them to come to Mass. The host of the show said the Mass wasn't something he couldn't abide by, because each celebration of the Eucharist, he said, was a resacrifice of Christ, and His one crucifixion was done and finished and He is now resurrected. "Am I right?" he asked his guest.

The guest (A Doctor...I forget his last name, but I imagine his doctorate was in something like theology or scripture rather than medicine) went on about how we was an altar boy at daily mass every morning at 6:15 from grades 5 to 8, or thereabouts, and how he used to stare at that crucifix every day, that Catholics had to remind us of the sacrifice, but that's in the past and constantly being reminded of the Passion is a horrible thing to live under.

Well, no it isn't. It prevents one from developing a theology of cheap grace. How many stories of Easter have you seen where the Crucifixion is portrayed as little more than mildly inconvenient? If I had to scrimp and save and work time and a half to get nice Christmas presents for my children, let alone keep them housed and clothed and fed, I'd know they'd have some measure of gratitude if they really like the gifts that they got and the time I spent playing with them, but I'd know they wouldn't possess a mature gratitude if they didn't understand or care much about the labor I endured and the sacrifices I made to bring them those things. Not that I would expect it, necessarily; such things are often only appreciated in retrospect, from the perspective of their own adulthood. That they are children with childlike perspectives is no slight, but childlike is what they are and immature is what they should not remain.

Further, the good guest doctor didn't answer the question. He should have known well enough; even if he left the faith right after that eighth grade year, if he'd been paying attention to the rest of the Mass, like the homilies, instead of staring at the crucifix and nurturing an aesthetic rationalization against it, he would have been able to say "Actually, sir, you are mistaken; the Mass is a representation of the one sacrifice, the making of us present at the Last Supper and at Calvary." But then he wouldn't have had time to come up with a new excuse for not looking at how Scripture-laden the Mass is.

He did talk briefly about discussions he had with a priest friend of his, how the priest would push the Bible aside (which sounds scarier to sola scripturists, I would expect, than to Catholics) and say he can't trust the Bible on his own interpretation and so he needed the Magisterium. I would have put it differently, that he can't trust his own interpretation; "Can't trust the Bible" followed by anything else just sounds a little pat. Then he would pull the Bible back in front of the priest and ask how he can rely on the Magisterium to interpret a book that predates it by four thousand years.

I would have liked to hear the priest's answer. Mine might have gone something like the following.

The Bible does not, in its entirety, predate the Magisterium. It is this selfsame Magisterium that decided what would constitute the Bible everyone would be using. It included the Septuagint, for which I can understand your disapproval, and it also included the epistles of Paul and James. You seem content to believe the Church knew what she was doing then; why would the Holy Spirit guide the formalization of the canon but not its interpretation? Why would He leave Christians to flounder over the meaning and means of sanctification and justification for over a thousand years? What were they supposed to do until the printing press and mercantilism made viable a literate middle class that had the means to learn without being watched by a teacher? Can you explain why we have Mark and Luke but not the gospels of Thomas or Peter, why we have Acts and Revelation but not the Shepherd of Hermas or the Didache, why we have James as well as Paul but not Clement's letter to the Corinthians?

"There was a reason for the Reformation!" Yes, and the legitimate abuses that Luther pointed out have been corrected. Everything that has developed outside of Rome since then? I'm not so sure.

A few delinquent comments added to the comboxes below, if you're following.



So now and then someone says that the death of Jesus wasn't enough of a sacrifice because it wasn't permanent. I'm not sure what would constitute "enough," but the idea is that all that suffering and actual death isn't very meaningful because it didn't take.

Well, guess what: no one's physical death is permanent. We're all getting our bodies back someday. People alive at the end of time won't die at all. So, who cares if or how long somebody stays dead? Life and the loss of it, having soul torn from flesh, has some meaning in and of itself. Get used to it. If you have a better example of suffering than Christ's crucifixion, I'm willing to entertain it. Anyone?


Reminds me of some other "arguments" I've heard that I can only describe as satanic apologetics--not in the sense of making the case for Satan specifically, but making a case against Christ and His Church, usually without the benefit of honest logic. They're so twisted I can't see any goal besides possibly satisfying twin urges of Schadenfreude and sadism.

One of the more troubling ones I've seen goes along the lines of "Why would you want to go to heaven? In heaven there is no time, so you will be unable to laugh, unable to smile, to interact with anyone. You'll be in this frozen state." First, let's pretend that's true. If we're not supposed to want to go to heaven, what's the alternative? Hell? They don't make the argument that heaven isn't real, just that it's distasteful; as if ending up in some pagan afterlife or hell is just a matter of preference. But hell is outside of time, as well. There, you won't smile or laugh or enjoy anyone's company, either. From what the apologist has put forward, hell is just like heaven, except it hurts a lot. Why is that supposed to be better?

Another is "The only things that aren't improving are the completely dead, because death doesn't change, and the perfect, which isn't stable and must soon lapse into decay, from everything I've seen." Boy, the afterlife is unlike anything you've seen. There's no entropy in the afterlife because the next world is in eternity, and someone with a less parochial view of time and change in this world would recognize that entropy is the sign that tells us the direction in which time moves--and that real perfection does not include the potential for decay.

Another interesting one: You think "Pope Joan" was the only female contender to the See of Rome? Think again: "Mary Magdalene was almost pope." In this one, since Mary got to the tomb before Peter or John, she would have been entitled to become pope, but she didn't enter, and neither did John, so Peter went home with that honor. Of course, who showed up at the tomb first has nothing to do with who had been named Rock. I could expect this muddling of the truth to perhaps confuse someone completely ignorant of the story of Jesus, but instead I saw it directed to a room full of Christians and well-educated pagans and agnostics. If I had been there at the time, I would have been insulted no matter which of the groups I belonged to. Mary showed up there first? Really? Just looking to get a rise out of people, now?

How's this for timely posting?

So the president won the Nobel Peace Prize. Nominations had to be in scant days after his election, so I can't help but think he really got the award for becoming president. From the official press release:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics....

Has he? I see some shift in attitudes, but not anything substantial. At least Clinton got the Israelis and the Palestinians to talk--not that it lasted longer than anybody had that "Wow, he did it" feeling. I suppose having people feel optimistic when they see or hear you is a decent passive superpower, though.


Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.

Yeah, because in the past we had leaders who gleefully bathed in the blood of innocent soldiers, and now we're enlightened enough to realize we can talk and listen to each other and resolve things. Or give ourselves a nice civilized feeling while slowing the fuse on historical conflicts that would take more than a week-long summit to assuage. Or something.


The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations

What is this, 1985?


Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future

He's captured the world's attention, all right, or at least that of Europe and a few major American metropoli. I'm skeptical that the hope everyone in the world seems to be feeling about times to come was derived from any particular positive action on the part of our president.

You know how the routine goes. Democrat gets elected, the talking heads breathe a sigh of relief about getting back to their agenda of Progress and Getting Alongness. At least, that's how it was this time and last time. I don't have a meaningful recollection of Carter's election, so maybe this is one of those new traditions people keep starting.


His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.

I can't tell if this is about who has the largest intellectual market share or if it's really an attempt to cultivate a sort of republican milieu. Fine, if the values of the majority are what you want to perpetuate.


For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman.

When most businesses and sweepstakes organizations list the prizes for their contests, they exclude their own employees and their family members from participating because it's a conflict of interest. Organizations with mascots usually pay them hourly.


I was disinclined to comment on international politics after Yasser Arafat won back in the 90s, but when I see something like this, I have to ask if anyone else notices the emperor's absence of clothing.

Remember when they started doing away with pop-up ads because everyone hated how their desktops got so cluttered?

I do.

Yet, somehow, they're back. Now they're worse, though.

They're embedded in the page you're reading. They pop up when you hover over or move across a link. Often, they don't go away when you move your mouse. It seems that, sometimes, they're not supposed to.


Please, web designers: knock it off.

Since I don't have to talk exclusively about religion and politics here...

I found some blog a while ago, just long enough I don't remember whose it was, that was talking about Macs and PCs. The thing I recall was a comment that went something like "Macs are okay, once you get past the self-important posing and puffery, but when you really want to get down to computing, you'll buy or build a PC."

Really?

No, I'm sorry, but "reinstalling drivers" is not the same thing as "getting down to computing." I hope that $300 you're saving by getting an Inspiron at Best Buy is worth the downtime.

Isn't one abortion as good as another?

Apparently not.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed opposition to the incidence of sex-selective abortion: namely, aborting girls more often than boys because of a perception that boys are more valuable.

This perception is not groundless. Boys grow up to be men, and even in places where selective abortions are commonplace, men tend to make more money than women, and so are generally more able to provide financial support to their aging parents.

I wonder, then: if there's nothing wrong with abortion, especially if a mother or couple can't afford to have a child, then what's wrong with making your choice to have one or not contingent on financial concerns that are more remote but no less real?

Well, it's sexist, see.

Maybe what the good custodians of the culture of death should consider is a sort of affirmative action: establish abortion quotas so mothers carrying boys will be encourage more strongly or required to abort, in order to keep things equal. If nothing else, they could start sending unwanted females over to China and India for the boys who grew up without having girlfriends or knowing sisters can get an even chance at getting married.

Of course, the truly unbiased thing to do would be not to look at sex at all when making the "Choice." What I've mockingly proposed is just reverse discrimination, which is still discrimination.

Only way to ensure impartiality is not to find out the sex of the baby at all. So maybe there actually is a reason to keep would-be abortive mothers in the dark and not provide a sonagram at all. Yes, the added risks of an abortionist going in blind are well outweighed by whatever niggling progress is made towards, uh, Progress.


Let me know if you need me to spell out the sarcasm here.

I'm not paranoid...

I generally find conspiracy theories to be amusing. The (what I hope is a) coincidence I discovered in my mailbox this evening, though, was less than amusing.

I opened the box and saw that one envelope, with no return address but "nonprofit" stamped in the postage mark, had already been opened. I took a peek inside and saw these words:

"Emergency campaign: Stop Obama from passing an abortion bill"

Yeah, just a little unsettling. Probably just a neighbor got it by accident and opened it without looking first at the addressee's name, but the thought "aw man, is it going to come to this?" flickered briefly through my head.

Insipid liturgy

Some time ago, the Curt Jester derided the tendency to treat the mass as if it were little more than a late night talk show. I wrote a comment but must have forgotten to hit Post or something because it didn't show up and I had to try posting my comment again a day later, when people had pretty much moved on to more current blog entries from the Jester. Or maybe mine wasn't worth commenting on, but probably also almost everyone had moved on, either way. Since this is my blog, well...

On what I hope is a related topic, does anyone else feel this way about being prodded to stand during communion? I don't mean remaining standing for the whole prayer, but proceeding normally, kneeling for the centurion's prayer, and then getting right back on your feet until everyone has received as a sign of "standing with and showing your support for fellow parishoners."
Standing is a perfectly adequate posture and an ancient practice, I realize, but when I see a reminder in the bulletin or hear in before/during mass about a "longstanding tradition" I hardly saw in any church more than five or ten years ago, I picture some committee of aesthetically minded but modern and ignorant laymen going over the rubrics and muttering "stand together...yeah...or, or hang separately. That's good, that's good; let's get that in somewhere."
Anyway, this isn't like clapping for the choir or after the finance committee makes its report instead of having a homily, so I still follow the practice of whatever parish I'm in, but I'm always put off by this "moral support" verbiage. Maybe it's just me, but I'm distracted every time with the thought that I do or don't need an extra gesture of solidarity from people in other pews when I'm walking up to receive.

I mean, we're all the Body of Christ, and if we're in communion with Him, then we can be in no greater communion with each other. While this instance of the communion of saints is not false or a bad thing to meditate on, it seems like one more distraction from focusing on the Sacrament itself.

It's better than turning worship into a simple community-celebrating event with spiritual overtones, but the foremost thing in your mind when you receive should be "Jesus," followed by perhaps something like "How great a Savior who deigned to come to a pitiful creature like me!" If your primary attitude and posture are "Solidarity!" then you're putting the Eucharist behind a much smaller good.

Maybe there's a less modernistic rationale behind it, like a disjointed attempt to capture some of the reverence seen in Eastern liturgies, but no one's ever said anything to me except "solidarity!"

Yeah. It's all about us while we share in the life of God, right?

Put it to God first. Whatever we see or feel connecting us to one another is derivative. Not bad, just derivative.

My mother e-mailed me a few days ago about Obama's no-longer-hypothetical intent to rescind the shield of conscience from medical professionals who object to abortion. I tried calling a dozen times Thursday but never got through, so I e-mailed the following:

I would like to ask the President not to rescind the conscience protections for medical professionals, particularly with regard to performing abortions.
One thing that makes America great is that with few exceptions we may judge for ourselves what we should do and how we should live. By removing the shield of conscience, I believe that the harm done by requiring doctors and nurses to act in what they believe is an immoral manner would outweigh any good brought about by facilitating some debatably inalienable entitlement to a particular kind of medical service.
The debate over the legitimacy of entitlement to abortion services is often compared, sometimes implicitly, to the civil rights movement, but I submit that the comparison is faulty. Making it illegal for people to exercise bigotry systematically in public does ring of justice, but positively forcing someone to betray his values is another thing entirely; freedom is not necessarily abridged when someone is prevented from doing something, especially if it could bring harm to others, but requiring someone to do what they cannot condone does not promote freedom, either, no matter how lofty the reasons.
Draft boards didn't allow conscientious objectors off with a smile and a handshake during wartime, but they did allow them to serve their country in other ways that did not cause a moral conflict. Can we not afford a similar latitude to physicians today? Are there so few abortion providers that their ranks must be filled by people who aren't trying to women back, but actually believe that abortion harms mother and society as well as child? If not, why would requiring medical professionals to provide abortions be necessary?

It is this last point that makes me think abortion is not just being promoted as a social good in itself but as part of an agenda I'm struggling to describe with happier words than "diabolical." If the Civil Rights Act were an apt parallel, then abortion would be a mandatory service at every hospital, whose administrators would have the responsibility of complying to the law. The CRA did not require every bigot to start giving up their bus seats and holding open front doors of businesses for customers of color.

You can't outlaw racist attitudes, and I don't think we should try. No, I'm not saying it's a good thing; I'm saying that, basic civil protections aside, bigotry and racism are better fought in the streets, so to speak, than by the federal government trying to nuke society's attitudes from orbit.

You can legislate morality, but you can't police thoughts. All you accomplish with the latter is putting a deluding veneer over the top of a decaying system and underground resistance.

This is the kind of problem we run into when we start inventing rights, especially when it comes to things that don't fit in the "I shouldn't interfere with someone's decision over a private matter" category (for the record, life issues are not private matters, which is why murder is a crime against the state and not just against the victim and his loved ones)...or for that matter, so-called rights that do not derive from or even contradict natural and divine law. You end up someplace where your "right" to something requires other people to accommodate your wishes, even if it infringes other rights guaranteed to them elsewhere.

So much for consent being the arbiter of rightness that can hold us back from the precipice.

The same question was raised when universal health care was described as a basic human right. If it were so, how can a basic human right not exist until the advent of a medical profession, and not be discovered until the invention of socialism? Were billions of peasants denied a basic right to cheap and easy medicine in millennia past? By whom? To whom can we address our grievances as descendants of victims of anti-medicalists?

You can make that argument against other aspects of government. In a peaceful anarchy, one cannot have a right to vote because there is no voting going on; in a pure democracy, a democrat is not denied the right to representative government because he directly participates. These rights, though, are contingent, not basic or essential to the human condition.

But I was talking about abortion.

Some time ago, I talked about how voting for Obama on pro-life grounds was, at best, imprudent. The argument given in favor of Obama was that his philosophy was more humane, so that he would reduce the demand for abortion where he wasn't reducing the supply.

So, shortly after being elected, Obama rescinded the Mexico City Policy. Now he may try or pretend to take away our right to follow our consciences. Supply's sure going up. What about demand? No, the president is busy taking care of all the other things a president has to do.

How's that working out for the children?

"Is it fair..."

...one of the California supreme court justices asked Kenneth Starr, to nullify the 18,000 gay "marriages" that had taken place between the court's ruling that gay marriage could exist and be practiced in California, and the passage of Proposition 8. Is it fair that all these couples, having moved in together, now lack the legal status they thought they were getting?

Fair?

Fair is a question you ask after you answer "Is it right?" Slaveowners 200 years ago demanded of abolitionists a justification that taking away their free labor was fair to them. The obvious answer was "No, but it's the right thing to do."

Do I sympathize with the people who had a public ceremony and pooled their resources? Sure. I hate moving to a new home; doing so with someone else, becoming a single legal entity, and then having it undone has got to be an order of magnitude worse than what I experience every few years, not even broaching the subject of it being a civil rights issue.

Am I going to say "Aww, you've put so much time and effort into it; we'll ignore valid legislation that you find inconvenient because we'd feel bad," though? No. Again, I'm not broaching the subject of civil rights, because "is it fair?" is not that kind of question in this context.

Life's not fair. Unfair things happen all the time, and we have to learn to adapt. Social security runs dry and Generation X has to work longer to get full benefits, if they end up getting them at all; retirees lose their pensions, sometimes after years of retirement, sometimes days before retiring. People wait in lines at stores for hours only to find that whatever they wanted to buy is sold out. Rapists walk free because their victims' testimony does not provide sufficient doubt against his alibi. A man's friends plan a surprise party and don't find out until the big day that he's gone out of town for the weekend. What are you supposed to do, get a court order to declare your former employer solvent, or to get an electronic tether on your friend? Become a vigilante or a thief to mete out your own brand of justice and get what you worked as hard (should I say "no harder?") as anyone else to get a chance for?

You want to know what's not fair? Telling a bunch of people that marriage is something it isn't, and assuming that the opinions or powers available to other people who disagree are simply not worth considering, so when things get rough--poof!

Kinda like promising easy mortgages to people who can't, really, afford to buy a big new home. Evicting them would be awful, but what's unfair is making a promise you can't keep.

There are arguments that can be, and are, made in favor of gay "marriage," although I don't buy them. If you have to suggest that it would be too difficult to do the right thing, though, then maybe you don't believe those arguments, either.

...And, inaugural fallout

I didn't think Obama's speech was too bad. It was pithy and focused on the high points, and even implied that motherhood was a noble struggle.

I did have a cynical epiphany on my way to lunch Tuesday, though. I don't so much believe it's simply true as think it might be a fruitful mental exercise to consider how it applies to politics.

Every politician preaches hope and change, after a fashion. Some change is an advancement toward a good, other change is a retreat from evil. Still other change is change we want to avoid, the things that the candidate you vote against stands for. Hope is the desire to see the desired changes realized and the motivation to help them along.

Why did Obama get so much milage on just speaking those two words?

The impression I have is that, in the past, politicians tended to couch their rhetoric in terms of what we could hope for and what we should change. "Hope" and "change" were vehicles to political or societal ends, or perhaps more precisely, the fuel in the vehicle.

So, we got used to politicians promising to clean up the mess they'd inherit and get us back on the right track. What it seemed like, just for a moment, was that while Obama was specific enough to keep his reputation with the Democratic Party, his rhetoric about hope and change itself felt to many people like a revelation, like an unveiling of the things they wanted to achieve all along, no longer masked or sullied by particulars. "He's right," they might have thought, "all I really want is for things to get better," and there was enough generic grist for the political mill that people could flavor it with whatever prejudices they wanted.

But I don't know that anybody thought this way in particular.

Electoral fallout

Yes, the tremendous probable increase in infanticide overshadows the civil rights victory we had this week, one that was almost anticlimactic for people too young to remember the 1960s. Yes, I was touched to see Jesse Jackson's emotional reaction to Obama's election, as well as disappointed that it had to be Obama who broke through the white ceiling.

I wasn't following the race that closely Tuesday night, so I didn't hear the official news until Wednesday morning. Although I wouldn't have been thrilled to have McCain as president, I would have been relieved as well as surprised. So I was of uncertain feelings when I got in the car to go to work and put in my CD of the rosary yesterday.

It was Wednesday, though, and I remembered that Wednesday is a day we usually say the Glorious Mysteries.

The Glorious Mysteries. Signs not just of hope, but of victory.

Yes, we suffered a relative defeat at the national level, but not all hope is lost. Proposition 8 passed in California, on the worldly level, and on the supernatural level, the triumph of good has already been secured.

We still have a lot of work to do. We might not be happy. But we should remember that, while we are deep in this vale of tears and can't see where it ends or what's over its rims, we already have a reason for joy.

I didn't end up voting for McCain, but I did vote against Obama.

It is not always and everywhere immoral to vote for a candidate who supports evil policies, as long as we do so in spite of those policies, and if we honestly judge that the other goods he is likely to accomplish outweighs the evils he is likely to accomplish. The only way you can be sure you're not voting for someone you don't 100% agree with is never to vote, and that can be an opportunity for shirking your civic duty (even when abstaining on a particular Tuesday in November is the best apparent choice).

The first thing we have to do is remember that in weighing the hazards and consolations between two unpalatable candidates is that we shouldn't just be trying to rationalize a decision that we want to make but is still bad, the way we justify a sin we like. If you're misinformed, scared and confused, and are being pressured, it can mitigate some of the guilt of having an abortion, but it doesn't allow you to say things like "My abortion wasn't bad; it's a good [and] thing I didn't know what I was doing."

As for me, the reason I will not be voting Democrat at the higher levels of government for the forseeable future is that a big part of the DNC's platform is abortion. The reason I didn't vote Republican this time is that their counteroffer to "more abortion means less grief, and stop complaining about the grief" leaves something to be desired. The GOP has more of a tendency to talk a pretty good game and then make some small pro-life gesture. When Republicans controlled both the Executive and the Legislative, they could have done something more timely to end abortion, but for the most part what we've gotten is some individual candidates with hit-or-miss personal opinions and a few Supreme Court justices who haven't done a lot yet. I'm hopeful that the composition of SCOTUS will tilt in our favor around the time the nationwide opinion on the slaughter of innocents becomes a groundswell, but that won't be anywhere as soon as I'd really like.

Meanwhile, the current rate of abortion is around 3000 per day. I can think of few things--certainly not enough considered aggregately--that counterbalance a loss of innocent life on the scale of 9/11 every day. When people are talking about other social policies that Obama (or McCain, really, but one thing at a time) would promote, ask if whatever social welfare or entrepreneur-supporting program he wants to institute would be better than reducing the abortion rate, or better than not increasing it. If it's not clear, ask if it would be worth paying the price of having another 9/11 every day.

Most people who support him, nominally in spite of his pro-abortion attitude, claim that his work will ultimately end the need for abortion, and that will be better in the long run. That's laudable by itself, but I haven't been convinced that abortion was ever needed. If women think they should have an abortion, then we need to change their minds and hearts as well as the circumstances that lead them to that conclusion, but meanwhile children are dying by the thousands.

But let's say it's possible. Let's say abortion can be ended solely by eliminating the demand for it. It's a reasonable hypothesis--people will stop selling if nobody's buying. What's not reasonable, in my mind, is assuming that someone who would libertinize abortion and expand social services could drive abortion to obsolescence in four years. If not in four, then in eight.

In the one or two terms he would have the opportunity--we shouldn't count on candidates espousing "benign infanticide" indefinitely, because as the Democrats said in 1992 and 2008, sometimes a change is needed--would he at least be able to make enough progress that the abortion rate will be lower when he leaves than when he started?

I'm profoundly skeptical. The first thing Obama has said he wants to do is sign FOCA. That will make abortions cheap and easy to obtain, and will have the immediate effect of increasing the abortion rate. Maybe FOCA won't cross his desk immediately after his inauguration, but if the Democrats control Congress, it would be reasonable to expect it to be sooner rather than later, and it's easier to roll back restrictions on abortion than it is to root out the social ills that lead to it. Bottom line, abortion will increase before it decreases. In the time Obama will have, I doubt that he would be able to make enough of a change to make up the difference.

Let's say abortion, right after FOCA, goes up to its peak 1980s levels, around 5000 a day. Let's assume further that it's come down a thousand a day each decade since then because of better social programs, and that the Republicans aren't doing anything because they want that carrot to dangle in front of us. This assumption implies that the decrease in abortion rate, after the FOCA balloon, will continue more or less consistently as long as Obama and his philosophical peers keep doing what they're doing. At that rate, abortion would be obsolete by 2060. Without FOCA, abortion would drop at its current rate to zero around 2040. Let's note the ridiculousness of assuming that "abortion is a sacrament we shouldn't have to need to receive except when we want to" types will maintain power for another thirty or fifty years and move on.

Restarting at 5000 a day and decreasing at the same rate, by the time we got back down to current levels, an additional 33 million abortions will have taken place. Abortion would have to remain at today's rates, preserved by Republicans for political leverage against Democrats who ostensibly see it as a tragic necessity, for an additional thirty years to make up the difference.

Let's not play the "If the GOP didn't fight what led to abortion, we wouldn't have it" game. We're bound to have some candidates who are going to get elected or not based in part on other issues that people on both sides of the aisle are motivated by. Let's also not pretend that the status quo will only be maintained by the GOP. Pro-lifers are wising up, and whether Palin was a stunt or not, she was also the best sign of hope we've had in some time, that someday we might have someone who will really work to end abortion absolutely and abruptly, not just discourage it.

So ask yourself: Does Obama really have the political capital to change society in the limited time he will have? Do Obama and his successors?

I wouldn't plan that far ahead.

There are some who say we should disregard the negligible effect our vote will have on the election, and instead consider the substantial effect our vote will have on our souls.

I think this is a worthwhile factor to include in the decision making calculus when we go to the polls (or abstain, if that's how you feel), especially when trying to weigh voting quixotically against voting tactically isn't making one candidate stand out. However, I think this philosophy is prone to a few abuses that should disqualify it from being used in isolation.

The first is presuming that the utility of voting is outwardly nil, but the spiritual effect is grave. The former is a reasonable statistical conclusion except in contentious districts, but we never really know how close a race is until the polls close. The latter is true as far as everything we do here echoes in eternity, but in my mind doesn't pass muster because otherwise if we do something, anything, in an attempt to mitigate evil, in a world where remote material cooperation with evil is often (not always, make no mistake) absolutely impossible to avoid, then either committing a particular act out of prudence rather than enthusiastic endorsement cannot be intrinsically grave or everything we do is objectively disordered and there's no point in singling out things that don't have immediate grave effects.

The second is that the primary ends of voting is subverted to the secondary ends, or really the ternary ends. The intent of casting a vote is to participate in the selection of a leader, whether the person is well qualified, relatively well or poorly qualified, or purely unfit for the job. A subsidiary end is to care for the state of our soul. Obviously everything we do should be done with an eye to our spiritual health, but that informs how we do something, not just what we do. For example, the fact that life should be protected and that one person may be too gentle to harm another does not preclude a different person from having the duty and disposition to become a soldier.

Taking our moral priorities as read, then, if we subvert an act's primary end in order to achieve a secondary end, then we commit an abuse of that act, and abuse is always disordered. Just as we are not to dismiss procreation in the marital act in order to pursue pleasure, we should not go to the poll thinking "It doesn't matter whom I vote for as long as I don't endanger my soul." Your soul may be your greatest responsibility, but it is not your sole responsibility, and you even fail in that duty if you are too blithe in disregarding the duty you have to be a conscientious citizen.

This is Catholicism, folks. The dichotomy between CYA and spiritual combat in a communal theater is false.

Maybe there is no good choice, but don't pervert the ends of an act because the effectiveness of achieving one result doesn't seem to scale with another. A safe choice isn't bad but it might not be the best one.

I can't believe how angry some people are getting over the election.

After the bitterness of Gore's supporters when W. was given the presidency, I'm less surprised than I should be, I suppose. What gets me is how personally the race is being taken.

I've been seeing it more from the liberal side, but I don't know if my experience has been representative.

I'll go online and I'll see screeds left and right with the thesis "I hate Sarah Palin." What? She's running for office with the guy you're probably voting against. Maybe she's dangerous to your way of life and thinking, but she's doing a job and trying to do what seems right.

Heck, the guy I'm voting against (not sure whom I'm voting for, but I know whom I'm voting against) not only differs with me on major policy issues, he supports widespread infanticide, as far as I'm concerned, and while that makes his platform overqualified in the heinousness tryouts, I don't hate the man. His positions and campaigning make me angry, but not hateful.

I just can't understand how rational people can find Palin so infuriating. I mean, I'm a pretty low-energy, even-keel person, and I get that some people are a little more volatile than I am, but where does this fully-flowered hate for someone most people had never even heard of until a few weeks ago spring from?

Anyone have any anecdotes they'd care to share that support or contradict my observations?

"I've yet to detect a liberal bias in the media"

This observation was made either by a guest or by the host (I think it was George McGovern, but there were several unfamiliar voices on the show last week) on "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," a weekly radio show that riffs on current events. I've noticed more Bush-bashing than Democrat-bashing on the show, and tried to ignore it, even when it wasn't particularly witty, because I didn't listen to the show much when Clinton was in power so I couldn't judge whether they were being nicer to him than to his successor, and because Bush does make for an easy target no matter how you slice his rhetoric. I suppose I just got a bit fed up at one more insinuation that conservatives just aren't all that lucid, after all.

Seems a bit rich, coming from the folks who truck with people who believe that truth is personal--relative--before anything else, but...well, maybe I'll answer that attitude another time.

On the very radio network where this denial of visible bias was made, I sometimes catch parts of All Things Considered on my afternoon commute. For most of the first summer after I moved to where I could get NPR on the drive home and little else, they talked about the horrors of the war--dealing with casualties and ruined infrastructure in Iraq, broken veterans' bodies and families in America. For most of the second summer, they gave a pretty round introduction to the person of Barack Obama, which brings us to now.

That kind of programming content isn't liberal, is it? Surely, if it were, it would confirm the trope that reality had a liberal bias, wouldn't it?

No, not exactly; and no, it wouldn't; in that order.

Covering the tragedy of war is a fine thing. Keeping it from getting sanitized helps make us circumspect when we consider waging war. Covering nothing but tragedy, however, is not news. Nothing against human interest stories, but the majority of the stories presented covered nothing but the horrific side effects of war--the collateral damage, not the accomplishment or failure of the war's actual, you know, goals.

What about Obama? He's a relative unknown, so isn't it fitting to do a sort of expose series?

Yes, generally, but it's odd that the few allusions to his dark horse candidacy (three years ago, Illinoisians were expressing surprise at the sudden rise of their now-junior senator, who has now spent half his national career running for president) have a faintly messianic tone to them that goes largely unobserved.

I'm not saying the coverage of Obama has been unfair, either for or against him. I'm just saying that coverage of the presidential race had been largely exclusive of any candidate who didn't have a D after his name.

In journalism, that's technically called slant, so maybe saying "there's no bias" is really a half truth.

Oh, all right. They did talk about Sarah Palin for a few days after her selection, but they didn't seem happy about it.

"Wait, Ed: what about all the NPR you didn't listen to? Surely your drive home isn't that long! Or 'ATC' isn't representative of all their reporting!"

No, it's not a long drive, but do you honestly think that, over two years, I would always and only catch the current-administration-defaming segment on the program?

"Shouldn't the media take a skeptical attitude toward what they're being told?"

Yes, and I would expect them to dig for the truth, rather than assume the guys they don't like are lying and run with whatever facts corroborate that assumption. That's not skepticism. Sometimes good things happen, too, and sometimes bad things happen that don't fit our preconceptions. Question everything, including what you'd like to be true.

People who claim to hate the Church don't hate it because it's bad, they hate it because it's easier than seeking the truth.

My mom called me this weekend to ask if I'd heard about the campus chaplain at Illinois's Newman Center being arrested for drug possession, since I had known some people there. I hadn't heard about it, but in reading the news articles online Saturday, I learned two things.

1. Don't go to a public news agency's web site expecting a high level of discourse, no matter how well written the article itself is.

2. To paraphrase Archbishop Sheen, most people who hate the Church, hate it mostly for what they imagine it is.


I'd like to share with you a few of the gems I found while looking through articles about this priest's arrest. Hopefully there's someone out there who might have read those comments and thought "Hey, you know, those are good points" who will now have one more place to go where a lucid rebuttal can be found.


What happens to the baptisms, the weddings blessed, the sins forgiven and the eucharists transubstantiated by this man?

Nothing. A sinful man was ordained a priest because all we have to ordain is men who sin. Even if he's laicized, he would still be able to confect the sacraments; it's just that he wouldn't be permitted to. Sure, we'd all like holy men to be our spiritual leaders, but the Church never taught that sacerdotal efficacy depended on the man being in a state of grace, nor on the magnitude of the sins he commits.

I can't tell if this question is supposed to accuse the Church of some kind of works-righteousness, or if it presumes an uncatholic superstitiousness and a distinction between mortal and venial sins to have its point made.

You have to think outside this box put around you...obedience to men will not get you into heaven.

Who told you that? A man? People outside the Church seem to have a frighteningly higher view of the clergy than Catholics do, and they don't see it when it happens in their own midst. Priests and bishops are not just running a company in the church business, but they're not superhuman, either; they are given a few charisms to aid in the life of the Church, but that's about it.

I won't bother with the related accusations about allegedly extrabiblical practices being unbiblical, which is obviously tautological but hardly ever explained as a truly bad thing. Perhaps another time I will address the atheist's related argument, the accusation that we let the Church think for us; it's been handled quite well by other people, but when I'm in a mood I might just toss in my two cents.

I can't be too uncharitable; I've known many Protestants whose prayer lives are fruitful and every bit as personal as they'd like yours to be when they ask what role Jesus plays in your life. Still, there's so much emphasis on the event of getting saved that it makes me wonder what kind of relationship with Christ they're effectively advocating. Can you imagine how it would look if you talked about a friend you had who was really great, and how other people should be his friend too, and all they needed to do was invite him to their house and he would carry the relationship? Doesn't that sound like it would be lame if you didn't already have a good idea of what Jesus was to us?

And, no, obedience to men is not a sufficient condition for entering the Beatific Vision...but I ask in reply: does being disobedient get you into heaven?

People put too much trust in men in everyday things as well as spiritual (even non-Catholics, as evinced by the plethora of ministers in the world) for this to be a meaningful accusation. Come back when you can tell me why I should listen to you telling me not to listen to anybody. I don't care if it's the Bible, history, or science.

The Catholic Church claims to be the one true church, yet its history says otherwise. What a shame they have not learned from the sex scandals that rocked them now it's drugs and again it's the children that are victims.

What does history say? That there is more than one true church? That there might be one true church, but it's not headquartered in Rome? That it really has no objective judgment on the veracity of Rome's claims?

I've read many comments about the sex abuse scandal, most of them of the "at least he was only selling drugs to college kids" variety. A close second, though, was of the "Drugs and sex? Being an altar boy is the most dangerous job today!" variety. Never mind that St. John's Catholic Chapel is not a community parish, and so is unlikely to have many people at all of that age in attendance. It's much more convenient to associate the whole of hierarchical Christianity, or even the whole of theists depending on your perspective, with whatever timely or unspoken historical corruption you prefer.

Reminds me of Protestants whose sole efforts in apologetics consist of, as far as I can tell, paraphrasing the table of contents of Boettner's Roman Catholicism. As if everyone knows what the real story is behind Rome's failings (just like what everybody knows about Galileo's trial), and we only need the reminder to endorse the accusations.

How very typical! First pedophilia, now drug-dealing! Bunch of perverts, hiding behind clerical robes!

Oh, so we can see now that homosexuals and pedophiles are latent drug users and pushers? Why don't we accuse the Church of working with the CIA to create AIDS, and with NASA to fake the moon landings, too?

Any stick will do to beat a dog, eh?

It is precisely because the Roman Catholic Church has been casting so many stones over the centuries that there is so much understandable and deserving backlash.

Understandable? Sure. Deserving? For the sex scandal, okay, there was too much emphasis on protecting the institution and its appearance in America (where, remember, the problem has been generally isolated), and not enough on protecting the innocent and powerless, but if you're going around misattributing vices to people, that's called calumny, and it prevents you from playing the "At least I'm not a hypocrite" card.

Further, if you really don't know the story behind Galileo, or the motivations and statistics pertaining to the Crusades or the Inquisitions, then maybe you can go the "I'm intellectually lazy, but at least I live up to my own standards" route, although that's not much of an improvement, and it's less than impressive if your standards are so low that you never fall short of them.

Perhaps these things are happening to bring to the public's awareness that ORGANIZED Church religiosity is NOT the answer...How impractical to expect young men and women to live celibate lifestyles. In Europe in the old monasteries, they've found corpses of infants sealed up in the walls...This article doesn't say he's accused of sodomizing and raping.

No, the article doesn't say that, but you're going to bring it up anyway, aren't you?

That first "perhaps" is interesting. It's almost as if a higher power were moving to immunize humanity from churchgoing...like God doesn't want us worshipping together? If it's not God, I wouldn't want to be be learning whatever it has to teach us.

And again with the canard that celibacy is virtually impossible. Dawn Eden can tell you more about that than I feel like doing right now. Does anyone have any idea how widespread or isolated the instances of babies hidden in tunnels between monasteries and convents are? I think someone does, but I doubt it's the person who declined to tell us concretely how extensive the problem was.

I suppose it's more civilized for people who can't resist sex to kill their children in the womb and throw them in a dumpster or incinerator like so much suctioned fat or a malignant tumor.

Another prime example of the danger of putting all of your hope & faith in man, in a human being.

Wait, who did that? Those of us who are disappointed? I'm disappointed, but I'm not surprised to learn that the priest has sinned. "People sin" is pretty much axiomatic in Christianity. Expecting better from a priest, even from this priest, isn't what got him into the situation. He got himself into the situation.

Just goes to show you that organized religion is pretty much useless.

If it had been a politician, would we be hearing about how the government is useless? I mean, as if it were proven by the arrest of a politician on drug charges. Do they say school is useless when a teacher is caught fraternizing with students?

Priests if anyone should be held to higher standard of living and exemplary life.

Fair enough--priests more than other people in positions of authority and trust are expected to be on good behavior, even if they are more attractive targets to the Enemy. Still, while it is interesting how many professed unbelievers express disappointment that a man of the cloth has sinned, it strikes me as a peculiar flavor of disrespectful to presume, almost gleefully, a guilty verdict was already all but pronounced (and, yes, most of the "He should have known better" comments I've read were coupled with a foregone conviction of guilt). I'm surprised I haven't already heard jokes about how he's going to enjoy the penal social life.

It's probably good that I don't venture into timely political ramblings very often

Like Mark Shea, I was primed to vote for a third party candidate. I tend to vote Republican these days, but it felt like the time was right to step back and find a third party candidate who better represented my political views, rather than voting for the one out of the two frontrunners who just seemed a little less unrepresentative than the other. I haven't followed McCain's campaign or the associated issues terribly closely, so I didn't develop quite the personally skeptical view of the GOP nominee that Mark has, but I thought it would be as good a time as any to make a sort of implicit vote of no confidence in the GOP. Maybe in the long run, failing to win on an attempted moralist platform against a candidate who wants to ride the fumes of electoral symbolism into utopia is just the wake-up call the GOP needs.

Then McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate.

I started thinking that these incremental but largely unfruited steps toward ending abortion might come a little more quickly with a serious pro-lifer in the White House. I'm not pleased that ending abortion is like turning back the tide, but I'll prefer being thrown a bone in the Supreme Court or someplace on rare occasions to having a real crusader for life never win and hardly even inspire his competitors.

I think McCain-Palin, out of the two teams that have a reasonable chance at the presidency, is the better one. Policies aside, McCain has some leadership experience from his time as a military officer, and Palin actually has more executive experience than Obama. They'd all be new enough to the job that it's anybody's speculation how they'll handle whatever the world abroad and at home throws at them in the next four to eight years, so I'm not sure it's really worthwhile to worry about things that the candidates haven't had to deal with or comment on during the courses of their current jobs. I'm still on the fence about some of the other issues that get dredged up from the candidates' personal and professional histories in order to show inconsistency in their current platforms, but that's always the case, and I've seen more politicians change their minds on their less environmentally protective policies than I have on their less child protective policies after hitting the national stage, so if you're keeping score, add that in.

There are a few other issues on each side that I don't want to get into right now, but suffice it to say things were looking as well as I could expect until I heard that McCain and Palin don't have a problem with intelligent design and think it would be a good idea to have it taught alongside the traditional stuff.

I'm not trying to put a national science curriculum on par with life issues, mind you; the preceding was just so that we may take the life issues as read.

All right, I can't resist one parallel.

We've got another case of "compromise by concession" here. We see it in the abortion debate not infrequently; the pro-choice side, attempting to leverage the label, claims tolerance of women who choose not to abort, and ask why pro-lifers can't extend the same courtesy; the problem is that in trying to split the difference, we still have abortion, which satisfies the pro-choicers, and merely a strong prevent-things-leading-to-abortion-except-the-fact-that-it's-wrong program, which pro-choicers still consider a good thing; meanwhile, pro-lifers get nothing but blame for being too focused on the real root problem (disdain for the dignity of unborn children, and all too often their mothers), and not enough on the superficial root problem (mothers who fall back on abortion because it's easier than giving birth and everything associated with that). It's not all bad; something isn't good or evil based on quantity, but it can be better or worse if there's more or less of it. It's just that one side gets closer to its ideal society, and the other side has to put up with being a stick in the mud for not settling for half a morality.

What's this have to do with science?

ID, I will remind you, doesn't.

There's no place for it in science. ID might even be true--as a theist I will never deny that what exists came to be through the action of an intelligent, powerful entity--but it's not science. Science is about gathering empirical data and repeatability in testing phenomena. The goal is to accurately, to reliably, describe nature. Intelligent design offers no theories that can be proven, makes no claims that can be properly tested and disproven. All it does is point to inadequacies in the state of the art and make an argument from incredulity. It's a parasite on science--it has nothing itself to offer except what it borrows from philosophy or steals from physics and biology.

In good science, the limits of our understanding are openly admitted (if not always with the most sincerity by enthusiastic researchers). In bad science, one is told either "what you cannot measure cannot exist," or more germanely, "science isn't up to the task of answering these questions," even though in some cases it only might not be yet, "so here's something else you can call science to explain what science can't."

If I were a science teacher required to cover ID, all you'd get out of me is "Okay, we don't have all the chemical kinetics down to explain the apparent rate of mutation and speciation; ID draws a black box around this puzzle and calls it God, or at least an Architect; this is a God-of-the-gaps argument, and advances in science on fronts X, Y, and Z would leave ID without a leg to stand on."

I don't mean to rehash the entire ID thing any more than I meant to beat the dead coach team of abortion and prudent voting. Let's take my concerns on the public school curriculum as read, as well, shall we?

I'm kind of back to holding my nose and punching the chads with R's next to them. In eight years Bush hasn't done a lot to compromise biology and astronomy programs in this country, so I can hope that the next four or eight years wouldn't be any worse.

While I hold out that hope, though, should I expect something different with abortion? With ID, opposition was fierce enough that it just couldn't get much traction; the pro-life movement wasn't in much of a different situation.

So here I am, hoping that the pro-life movement will be advanced in the coming decade, at the grassroots level if not at the Supreme Court, while hoping that whatever salient power the White House has in influencing the national science curriculum isn't used to bring about political compromise in the classroom--and I haven't even gotten to global warming.

It's hard to hope that a brilliant political gesture from a candidate is more than just a gesture, and that another political gesture from the same candidate is nothing more than a gesture. That's the essence of trying to make a prudential judgment, I suppose.

Softball Gospel

I will probably be adding to this list from time to time. I used to periodically post on boneheaded homilies and statements as they came up but didn't tie them together, but I think they deserve to be compiled. I will introduce this topic with three items:

1. The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish was Jesus inspiring people to share.
   

   
   No, it was the creation of a plenitude of food from a dearth. It doesn't make sense that so many people would show up with so much food but still expect catering, and it doesn't take direct intervention from God to goad people out of hoarding their lunches.



2. Doctrine X hasn't been defined de fidei by the pope, so we're at liberty to disagree with it.
   

   According to the Pontificator's Tenth Law, "All dogmas of the Church Catholic are infallible, but some are more infallible than others." In short, it means that we are obligated to hold true whatever the Church teaches, even if it's not one of the few items that has gotten an ex cathedra stamp of approval. For many of us, on a number of issues, the best we can muster is "The Church says X is true; I disagree, but it is the Church's place to make that call, so I will live in obedience and work within the boundaries of the Church to get the issues I have resolved," and that's good enough.



3. Jesus, the Prince of Peace, came primarily to bring peace to the world. Take anything in the Gospel that sounds like Jesus being authoritarian or hard with a grain of salt. God is, after all, a Nice Guy.
   

   I like nice guys, I try to be one, but niceness is not the primary quality I want in a God or other authority figure. I didn't always (usually, but not always) think my dad was nice when I was growing up--and really, niceness is in the eye of the beholder--because he sometimes punished me or didn't let me do things I wanted, but it didn't make him a mean person, it just made him a good father--it made him right. I know my feelings are irrational, by definition, so while I like having them respected, I know that there are more important and better things to concern myself with than whether someone is every bit as polite and obsequious as I might like. I wouldn't want a doctor, either, that tried to comfort me by saying I wouldn't have to get some kind of major, risky surgery, but then let me die horribly from disease. So often today, though, genuine goodness is given no higher a definition than "be supporting of and unobtrusive to whatever people want."

This last item deserves a little unpacking. It ties in somewhat with the second item and something I heard during this morning's homily.

What trips people up on the third item so often is that last part--they use their conscience as an excuse to do whatever they want but still claim to be in good standing with the Church. On the surface, it's as silly as refusing to show up to work or badmouthing your product to potential customers and claiming to be an employee in good standing. I'm not talking about when people struggle to make the heroic effort to accept as true everything the Church teaches; it can take a heroic effort just to know everything the Church teaches. I mean that one's conscience is not an escape hatch from obedience. Yes, in principle you should follow your conscience, but if your conscience is properly formed, it will not disagree with the Church, and if you know it is badly formed, you shouldn't follow it in the first place--we see all the time in more secular arenas where people make errors in judgment, and no one bats an eye (okay, these days, not no one) when they're held responsible for their errors instead of being patted on the head and told "we understand, you must have been doing what seemed right for you at the time."

I think it's symptomatic of the "God is nice" school of theology. We see it also when people put an absence of physical violence at a higher priority than justice, or higher than an absence of moral violence--when people are expected to endure everything short of feeling a clenched fist or seeing a gun. We see it when people dissociate Jesus upsetting the moneychangers in the Temple from, well, Jesus upsetting the moneychangers in the Temple.

We also see it with today's Gospel reading:

If he refuses to listen even to the church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector

The way I used to hear it explained, it was used sort of as a baseline for the practice of excommunication. The way it was homilized (is that a word?) to me this morning, Jesus was teaching His disciples how not to cause excessive harm--basically agreeing to disagree and avoiding situations where you and the person who you think did wrong might be forced together and have to bring the subject back up.

I'm not saying it's a bad practice. When you reach an impasse, all you can do is go away, pray, and try not to be a further obstacle to the other person's spiritual growth. While it's good advice for the laity, however, the Magisterium has additional responsibilities, so the bishops who come out and say "so-called Catholic politicians who support abortion will not receive communion if they present themselves for it" are not out of line. While the bishops who say "Abortion is contrary to Catholic teaching, but what more can we say if they do not listen?" are trying to be inclusive and warm and fuzzy, babies are dying by the thousands. While they're trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the errant member of their flock out of the fear that he might remain willfully in error, talking about how there's nothing more they can say, they are refusing to act to protect the lives of the children the politicians support the killing of (that is, to prevent the politicians from sinning in deed, since they cannot be prevented from sinning in thought), and they are refusing to protect the other Catholics from scandal.

This on the grounds that we are not to judge another's conscience? Please.

I can't judge a particular individual's conscience, but I don't need to be God to be shown a hypothetical person who thinks infanticide is a permissible means to achieving a comfortable economic end to know that the person's conscience is not properly formed. I don't have to try or pretend to look into a real person's conscience to judge that his actions are in fact bad; whether someone commits first degree murder or manslaughter, an untimely death has occurred, and to deny that it is a material evil is to lie, and to lie in order to protect someone's feelings is also evil.

The politician, or whoever, who steadfastly supports abortion has already cut himself off from the life of the Church. There is little harm one can cause a dead thing. We should not try to block any graces God might be sending an erring politician, but telling the unrepentant sinner that his sin is not so great that it needs to be forgiven is not doing him any favors, and allowing him to jeopardize the faith of everyone else who might get that impression does no favors to the Body of Christ, either.

Call me proud, but I'm not quite ready to say a spade's not a spade on the grounds that I am ignorant of the motivations of the digger.

Some look at excommunication as an outdated, barbaric exercise of power on the part of the Magisterium. I would point out that excommunication has been described, by greater Catholic minds than I, as analogous to amputation. Sure, cutting off a limb seems horrifically barbaric, but if the limb is gangrenous and does not respond to treatment, then removing it is necessary for protecting the health of the rest of the body. Neither would we want someone infected with a serious communicable disease to commune with healthy people who might be vulnerable to the disease; certainly, the ill man needs whatever help he can get, but "help" is not the same as "pretending there's nothing wrong and telling him he's fine, even if we find his raspy cough and oozing sores to be a little alarming in appearance."

Some translations don't use "Gentile," they use "pagan." Do we allow pagans to receive communion in the Catholic Church?

No, and we don't look the other way when they say Church officials don't have the right to deny them life in the Church (it is mortal sin that does that, not the Magisterium) and say "Hey, fine, whatever, but let's talk about something besides all the doctrines you don't believe in."

I think I've landed on what personally bothers me the most about having the tabernacle someplace other than directly in front of (or behind?) the high altar.

I'm not 100% opposed to putting it somewhere else; in small prayer groups, it's nice to be able to get closer to the Sacrament in repose, especially if wandering back and forth in the sanctuary would be disruptive or distracting to others. There might be a canonical solution that can meet this need, as it were, without architecturally denigrating the Eucharist, but I don't know enough about the subject to feel motivated to speculate right now. Or maybe I just don't feel motivated to speculate, but really, I don't know what rules there are that regulate these matters.

Anyway, I just got home from, among other things, attending the vigil mass of the Assumption at one of the churches in town. They have their tabernacle in a niche near the front, visible from most places in the pews, where in older churches of that size you might have found a side altar. I got there early, so I had many opportunities to see people coming and going between the sanctuary, the sacristy, and the music area on the far side of the tabernacle.

What I noticed is that, while people did bow toward the main altar, no one seemed to notice the tabernacle at all.

I'm not saying they should be making some superstitiously repetitive gesture every time they turn or move a little towards it, but more than once I saw people cross the sanctuary, venerate the altar, go to the side podium to rearrange the sheet music or whatever, and then turn around, venerate the altar again, and leave.

Hey! Jesus was right behind you! The altar's just a blessed piece of wood with a relic stone in it!

Maybe this is just habitual neglect peculiar to this church; I don't see side tabernacles get ignored everywhere I find one. Still, it's natural to focus one's attention on things that are placed prominently. When I was young, I used to wonder which I was supposed to venerate if I happened to find myself between the altar and the tabernacle, but then someone explained it to me. These people weren't children, of course, but with Jesus physically moved out of the way, it's easier for Him to be mentally moved out of the way, too, and for little more than the opportunity to put a floral arrangement behind the crucifix mounted above where the high altar would have been.

Maybe the time is ripe for a corollary to Lex orandi, lex credendi: lex aedifici, lex credendi.

Westerners penalized by western governments for preferring western civilization

How long will it be before America completely forgets that a bad idea, one poorly conceived or some slice of misanthropic, is to be countered with open criticism, including calling it what it is and explaining why, so that the truth can soundly box its ears in the public arena?

Not that long ago, Mark Steyn wrote an article for Maclean's saying that al-Islam and Western values do not play well together. One Muslim--or perhaps a professional behalfist --filed suit with the Canadian "human rights commission," demanding punishment for hate speech.

One should wonder how inflammatory just reading the charges against this guy in any detail would be; would it be sufficient to add caveats like "This jerk said thus-and-such intolerable thing," or will it come to the point where folks get offended for hearing scandalous topics discussed, the way some members of my college Bible study group acted as if I were nearly blaspheming by talking about blasphemy?

I'm curious to see what will happen if these self-appointed cultural vanguards screw up the courage to poo-poo folks who happen to mention in public how Sharia has dealt with homosexuals. If they thought the mere recognition of culture shock was uncivilized, they're going to be in for quite a rude awakening when the people they're tolerating get enough political clout to start enforcing intolerance in return.

Or maybe they'll be like the residents of Erik the Viking's Hy-Brasil island, denying that the ground on which they stand is sinking, right until their last breath. If the height of their political reasoning power is the alleged victim of any perceived oppressor is the friend to any other victim of any other oppressor, then maybe there will be no awareness of reality at the last breath, either.

CPCSM to Nienstedt: "Condone us or we'll scream loudly and stamp our feet!"

I think the folks who promote "gay pride" still have a lot of work to do. When I hear people talking about events like what was going to be held at St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis, I don't hear about great accomplishments or historical figures like George Washington Carver's many inventions or MLK's principled opposition to segregation and discrimination. Pretty much all I hear is rhetoric about being proud rather than ashamed of their sexuality, and pretty much all I see is public spectacles designed to desensitize us--and maybe them--to acts of perversion (and I'm including the publicity of acts which by themselves, in private, might not be particularly bad things).

I don't think that kind of behavior is is a result of healthy pride. There are plenty of things I'm not this-is-bad ashamed of about myself that have no need to be advertised, and publicizing them would have nothing to do with throwing off the societal yoke of bigotry. If I wanted to shock people I disagreed with into complacency, though, I might go out in public and show people how odd I could be, until everyone got used to it; maybe it's not positive approval, but it would be the tolerance of resignation, and maybe that's a good enough first step.

What would happen to gay pride parades when people reach that point? Would they still go on to spite the memory of traditional values, or just to accommodate people with exhibitionist fetishes?

I know the goal of these kinds of events is to wear down opposition, to get people to give up on opposing publicity and public approval of anything sexual. They might do a lot better if they also provided reasons for their virtue other than sentiments like "You're just like racists opposing the Civil Rights Movement from forty years ago," which is only true superficially and incidentally. As I've lamented before, we don't see gay evangelists going door to door in suits politely making their cases.

There is such a thing as self-esteem. You should value the good that is in you, regardless of whatever troubles or flaws you bear. It is also healthy to recognize the good things that you have accomplished. What do gay pride events usually celebrate? libertinism? Nothing special there; I can see that coming from people of all orientations on any college campus. Is it an inoculation against the disapproving words of people who believe that there is such a thing as sins of lust? Maybe, but homosexuals don't have the corner on that market, either.

They complain that their behavior isn't lauded by the Church and by much of society. Well, too damn bad. My bad behavior isn't lauded either. It just seems like they're picking on homosexuals because the question of homosexuality takes up so much bandwidth in our culture today.

What's "Progress?"

The word indicates some sort of advancement toward a goal or improvement. In the sense of improvement, a particular goal isn't necessarily implied, but without one, it's difficult to make an objective judgment of the degree or utility of progress. It doesn't always have to be an overarching goal by which we can evaluate the whole of some human endeavor; we can look to science and slap an "understand how the universe works" sticker on it, but for the most part we can only look at how well we're answering specific questions along the way. We may be near the end or the beginning of scientific exploration, but which it is, is more a matter of speculation or philosophy than of empirical research and mathematical modeling.

What about non-scientific progress? I think we have the same problem, but there's no external yardstick or phenomenon to measure "progress" against. We end up taking some values we hold, or inventing some, and plotting a course to follow them, sometimes with little concern for other values, which other people who might have a stake in the matter might hold or which get subordinated to their crusade for inadequately explored reasons.

Let's look at social progress for a few moments.

What do we have? At the forefront is the idea of personal equality and freedom, that a person should be able to do more or less whatever he wants, regardless of circumstances that don't immediately ask for a tempered agenda, like the conflicting rights or desires of another person. Now, equality and freedom are fine things, things we should often err on the side of, but they can also be somewhat empty. Freedom isn't just a matter of "from," but one of "to" as well, and equality unchecked can smear some distinctions that are legitimate.

What we see a lot of in our society is a pattern of identifying social injustices, agitating to eliminate them, and then looking for new injustices. We're at a point now where activists look at the patterns of the past and try to map them onto the future, perhaps more out of a sense of Progress than out of a sense of certain things being just and certain things being unjust. It's a lot more complicated, but Progress itself as we've seen it in our civilization has become the value we use to judge things by, instead of a label for pursuing real virtues. Freeing real or artificial demographics from oppressive (by which I mean "distasteful to some") traditions becomes the primary means for keeping score of our society's virtue, so while achieving legally approved gay marriage and consequence-free sex for children everywhere are themselves lauded, the only price counted is the disappointment of the White Male Oppressors (and a little angsty uncertainty, which is categorized as a healthy disdain for undoubted (not unquestioned--if it'd really been questioned, then some answers might have been considered--authority), and Progress moves on to find the next social power struggle, since it seems to see nothing except demographic conflicts.

I think the problem is right there. For individuals, it boils down to "nobody should be prevented from doing whatever they feel like doing," and at higher societal levels, there's really...nothing. You get the occasional visionary like Marx or the fictional architects behind Orwell's Big Brother, but for them Progress is just a tool to achieve an equality and freedom that are the poorest imaginable.

Progress becomes, not an achievement of justice, but a speedometer by which we measure the rate of adoption of ideas no one remembers trying before.

At that point it's easy to get off track. It's not hard to imagine someone forgetting what the fullness of marriage is, especially when duty was emphasized at the expense of the joys of an intimate relationship and raising children, and be in favor of opening it to everyone who wants it since it can be such a source of joy. It's a little harder to imagine right now that pets should be afforded the franchise, but once they are bestowed with enough human rights? In California, pets are no longer owned by their keepers, so don't think no one's testing the waters. Maybe the slope isn't very slippery, but there are people out there advocating any crazy notion you can think of, so don't be too surprised.

"Progress" toward no real goal, or toward one that isn't particularly (or obviously) good, isn't progress. It's just change. Change can be good, sometimes even for its own sake to break up the monotony, but when someone asks "why not?" we should also ask "why?"

"Why not?" is not an answer that justifies change. It is the question.

What's the Church got to prove to you?

What makes the Catholic Church the Bride of Christ? What evidence does she--do we--have? Truth claims? An argument from history? Evidence of holy activity in the world? Proof that it's the only ecclesial body that makes sound claims of what defines or identifies the Church and meets those criteria?

Fr. Kimel has some words for the devil's advocates:

Yes, the Catholic Church should do better at making Christians, it should do better at evangelizing, it should do better at catechizing, it should do better at preaching the gospel, it should do better at worshipping God, it should do better in serving the poor and the oppressed, it should do better in every aspect of its life and ministry.

However, if the Church was doing better in all of these areas, or even just the one you have mentioned, would you be persuaded that the Catholic Church is the Church of Jesus Christ, as she claims to be? Of course not! Because performance neither proves nor disproves the claims of the Catholic Church. Ironically, your objection to the Catholic Church—viz., her poor, even sinful performance—is grounded in a works-righteousness understanding of the gospel. You are demanding that the Catholic Church justify herself as the Body of Christ by her works! But the Catholic Church is the Body of Christ only by grace and election!

Are you willing to apply the same criterion of performance to individual believers, to yourself? Are you willing to prove your regeneration in the Spirit by your works, by how well you are living the Christian faith, by how effectively you are proclaiming the gospel in word and deed? Jim, are you not in fact judging the Catholic Church by a standard you would never apply to yourself? What would you say to the nonbeliever who declares that Christianity cannot be true because there are so many bad Christians?

But your criterion of performance also fails for other reasons. For one thing, you are judging the Catholic Church on the basis of her performance in one geographical area in one period of time. But she has no doubt performed better (whether it be at catechesis or evangelism or whatever) in other places and in other times. Why not judge the Catholic Church at her best? Why not judge the Catholic Church by her saints?

I added the emphasis. Funny how even with sola fide in your corner, without having a didactic anchor, "knowing them by their fruits" ends up becoming a back door to Pelagianism.

If one sees fit to judge the Church this narrowly, why not more narrowly? Indeed, some do. Some make employment of women outside the home their litmus test, or the willingness to bless already-sexual homosexual partnerings, and every other concern is secondary, or disconsidered out of hand.

If you are looking at such a small piece of an ecclesial body's doctrine or practice, it's not really a church you're interested in. You want a social institution, of great or small caliber, to make you feel good with a grand gesture.

If you're looking to judge an ecclesial body on how it performs in these other areas--recruitment, training, social service, whatever--then you're also not interested in a church. You want a charitable organization, or a business.

Go ahead. See if you can rate the Catholic Church next to Welfare and Social Security, or against Kaplan and the public school system. See if any evaluation would even make sense and then get back to me.

As for simple skeptics:

[F]or 2,000 years the Catholic Church has been proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ and making disciples. How many saints must the Catholic Church produce to convince you? How many martyrs must lay down their lives? How many nations must she evangelize? How many churches must she build? How many baptisms must she administer? How many penitents must she absolve? How many Masses must she celebrate? How many religious orders must she establish? How many hospitals and schools must she found? How many hungry persons must she feed? How many homeless must she house? How many kings and despots must she confront in the name of Christ? And who stands today, pray tell me, more firmly and courageously against the culture of death, abortion, and sexual immorality than the Catholic Church?

If you insist on judging the Catholic Church by her works, then by all means do so, but do so across all categories of mission and ministry. Do not judge her just by your parish church in the year A.D. 2007 but judge her by her remarkable and glorious history that reaches back to the Apostles of Christ.

Yet are you truly in a position to judge her sanctity and sins, good works and failures? Why do you see only her weaknesses and not her strengths, her defeats and not her victories?

Go ahead. Take G.K. Chesterton's advice, and consider judging the Church on how good it has been, as well as on how badly it has failed in its mission. Condemning the Church because over history it has let a million poor people suffer in squalor and die alone in ditches and alleys is premature, to say the least, if you don't even know if the number of people the Church has succeeded in helping is on the order of dozens or of billions.

I wouldn't be satisfied with a statistical rationale if I were making that argument, but if I were bold enough to berate the Church for not living up to a higher standard than I hold anyone else to, I'd still be obliged to determine how well it performed against this new standard.

Abuse of liturgical abuse

The American Papist put together a video making fun of some of the sillier liturgical abuses that have been committed against the Novus Ordo:



For now I'm not going to comment on the grotesqueries of clown masses, but rather the relatively mundane liturgical dance, whose inappropriateness in formal liturgy is not always self-evident. Most of the arguments I've seen against it fall into one of three categories: it's not a natural part of our liturgical culture (i.e. simply grafting it into the rubrics tends to be disruptive on multiple levels), it tends to draw attention to itself and away from God (which confounds the purpose of the mass), and it's often just badly done (which I don't have to explain, do I?).

If someone managed to convince me that dance could be properly integrated into the mass, and then somehow compelled me to reconstruct the liturgy accordingly, I'm sure what I'd do is have the dancers direct the preponderance of their effort and attention toward the altar or tabernacle. Most of the (thankfully little) I've seen seems to have put a premium on engaging the congregation and showing them what the performers are doing, and hardly in the "Hey you, remember that this is all about praising the Eucharist/Incarnation/trendy theological meme" sense.

If it points to us, even in aesthetically inspiring ways, it is not worship. Maybe if it praised God for the great things He has done in and for and through us, but performing art like what we see here is frivolous decoration at best, and turning the liturgy into self-celebration at worst.

I don't mind art for art's sake, but worship is for the glory of God. We can (and should) see God's greatness in all human activity, but the liturgy isn't simply human activity, and any aesthetic element to the liturgy should expressly draw us toward the Eucharist and upward to heaven. With the stuff like what the American Papist is satirizing, the claim that it's well-ordered worship sounds a lot like a storefront church claiming to be rooted deep in history because its unschooled pastor is teaching himself Hebrew to read the Torah.