“By Strong Hand and Terms Compulsatory”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene 1

—

[This is Part II of my series in honor of my dad, on the fifteenth anniversary of his death. Click HERE for Part I.]

During the midnight hour on Sunday, March 3, 1991, three Los Angeles patrol officers brutally beat a defenseless man. The three officers acted under the direction of a sergeant.

The officers’ names are: Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, and Theodore Briseno. The sergeant was Stacey Koon. The defenseless man was Rodney Glenn King.

George Holliday made a video of the beating, from the balcony of his apartment across the street.

King had two passengers in the car with him. The police detained the passengers at the scene briefly, but then released them without taking them anywhere.

Holliday must have crossed the street and told the passengers–Rodney King’s friends–that he had videotaped the beating. One of the passengers told King’s brother, Paul, about the videotape.

The following day, both Paul King and George Holliday went to the police to report the unlawful beating. Paul King mentioned the videotape.

Both complaints were immediately filed as “requiring no further attention” by the LAPD. Holliday and Paul King knew they had been totally blown off.

So Holliday then took his videotape to KTLA, and within 36 hours the rest of America had seen the beating on the news.

For freedom Christ has set us free (Galatians 5:1). But a criminal forfeits that freedom and subjects him- or herself to compulsion. By lawful authority.

The officers awaiting arraignment on Friday, March 22, 1991 (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

I.

Rodney King had subjected himself to compulsion by lawful authority, in the midnight hour of Sunday, March 3.

A California Highway Patrol vehicle saw King’s Hyundai going 120 mph on the San Fernando Freeway. The officers tried to pull King over. He had a duty to obey, to stop on the shoulder. He did not do so. He led the officers, and other patrol cars that joined in pursuit, on an eight-mile chase.

By doing this, King apparently committed the crime of “felony evading.” (He was never charged for this, or any other crime.) When King finally pulled over, next to a park, the officers in pursuit identified the situation as a “high-risk stop.” Which means that they had the right, in the interest of their own safety, to order all the occupants of King’s car to get out with their hands up. King and his two friends had a duty to obey such an order.

At this point in the unfolding story, we reach the moment where we might question the way the officers tried to compel King and his passengers, under the color of lawful authority.

It apparently was the policy of both the California Highway Patrol and the LAPD, at “high-risk stops,” to order the motorist and passengers to lie down flat on the pavement, arms spread wide, face turned away from the approaching officer.

This was to allow for a relatively low-risk approach by the officer, to handcuff the motorist, and any passengers.

(Whether or not this policy of demanding a “prone position” has changed since 1991, I do not know.)

Granted, if you have led police officers on an eight-mile high-speed chase, I think we can say that you have forfeited your bodily freedom at least for the moment, and you must submit to handcuffing.

But ordering someone to lie down, prone on the asphalt, face turned away? Maybe that crosses a line out of the realm of officer safety and into the realm of undue humiliation?

Anyway, as a practical matter: At about 12:40am on March 3, 1991, Rodney King did not comply with the order to lie prone on the ground, and for good reason.

For one thing, King likely did not hear the order over the sound of the helicopter overhead. Secondly, he would have had trouble understanding the word “prone,” even if he did hear the order. Lastly, while he did get down on all fours, he did not appear able to lie the whole way down. Was it because he was too proud? Maybe. Was it because he was intoxicated and confused? Almost certainly.

King never made any violent action; he posed no threat. He never even directly evaded getting handcuffed. He was pretty clearly drunk and confused. And then suddenly he was in fear for his own life.

II.

Officers Powell and Wind proceeded to beat King mercilessly with their metal batons. Officer Briseno kicked him. Sergeant Koon gave the orders.

As we mentioned, George Holliday captured it on tape. The overwhelming majority of the people who saw the tape in the ensuing days regarded the police officers’ actions as criminal.

According to two different polls, 90% of the residents of Los Angeles County saw Holliday’s videotape, and 92% of those who had seen it believed the officers had used excessive force. Eighty percent thought the officers had committed a crime.

The officers, in other words, put themselves into the position that Rodney King had put himself in, by speeding on the freeway and not pulling over. The officers made themselves subject to compulsion by lawful authority.

Lawful authority did not respond with violence this time, but with due process. An L.A.-County grand jury indicted the four officers for criminal assault.

Due process requires a fair trial. The long, hot summer of 1991 saw some stunning developments in the pre-trial business.

III.

I don’t know who made the decision to try all four officers together. I don’t know if putting them on trial separately was ever even considered as an option.

The decision in Minneapolis last year to try Derek Chauvin separately from the other officers involved in George Floyd’s murder–that certainly seems like a wise decision, indeed.

The circumstances in L.A. three decades ago were different. Sergeant Koon never personally laid a hand on Rodney King. He did, however, order his officers to beat the defenseless man mercilessly.

I would say that putting all four officers on trial together proved to be the first, and probably greatest, of the prosecution’s mistakes. That is, if it was their mistake. Perhaps it was simply a fait accompli, for legal reasons I don’t understand.

By putting the officers on trial together, the prosecutors wound-up having to contend with four different, highly skilled defense lawyers. The defense ultimately managed to dominate the trial. If the officers had been tried separately, maybe that wouldn’t have happened.

The Superior Court of Los Angeles County assigned the case of People v. Powell et al. to Judge Bernard Kamins. (In California, the trial courts are called “Superior” courts.)

The defense immediately petitioned to have the trial moved outside of Los Angeles, on the grounds that the officers could not get a fair trial there.

At that time, Los Angeles County had 6.5 million eligible jurors. For the officers to have received a fair trial in that county, the court would have had to find twelve among those 6.5 million who could listen impartially to testimony and review evidence, leaving a final conclusion about guilt or innocence until the end.

Jurors must presume criminal defendants to be innocent of the charges against them, then wait to see or hear proof, proof that overcomes every reasonable doubt about the defendant’s guilt.

California law stipulates that a criminal trial should occur in the county where the crime took place, unless a compelling reason calls for a “change of venue.”

The defense argued that the daily news coverage of the event had “contaminated” the objectivity of the L.A.-County jury pool.

Judge Kamins concluded that this was not a compelling reason to move. Because: the same could be said about the jury pool in every county in California.

They simply could not conduct the trial in a county where the potential jurors would show up for duty not having heard about the case. No such county existed. Therefore, this was no reason to change the venue.

…As spring turned into summer, Judge Kamins became ever more eager to move the trial forward.

I don’t presume to know the judge’s mind, but what little I know about the steps he took lead me to see him as a humble, practical man. He recognized that the best thing for everyone involved was to move the trial forward as expeditiously as possible. But the judge’s humble practicality got him into trouble.

The defense insisted on a change of venue and appealed over Judge Kamin’s head, to the California Court of Appeal.

Kamins had set June 19 as the day to begin the trial. On June 12, the Appeal Court put an “indefinite stay” on moving forward with jury selection, until the higher court had considered the defense petition for a change of venue.

Kamins tried to negotiate his way out of the impasse by putting a possible change of venue back on the table for discussion by the parties. The judge communicated informally, departing from the strict rules that govern court communications. It seems clear that Kamins did this in order to get the trial moving sooner rather than later. But his effort backfired completely.

The defense petitioned to have Judge Kamins removed, on the grounds that his off-the-cuff communications had given the impression that he was partial to the prosecution.

In high summer 1991, the California Court of Appeal made two decisions that deserve to go down in infamy.

On July 23, the Appeal court unilaterally ordered a change of venue. That particular Appeal Court decision is known as Powell v. Superior Court.

In this decision, the Court of Appeal granted that the “media saturation” argument did not suffice to compel a move. But the Court of Appeal introduced another consideration: the contamination of the L.A.-County jury pool by political allegiances to either the mayor or the police chief.

A “coup,” so to speak–put into motion by the police commission, and backed by the mayor–had tried to oust Chief Gates. The City Council protected the chief, and the “coup” failed.

But:

Neither the mayor nor the chief were directly involved in People v. Powell et al.

And:

All other political issues in L.A. paled in significance to the trial itself. The allegiance of the citizens was not really to either Mayor Bradley or to Chief Darryl Gates. If either of those two gentlemen had suddenly moved to Tahiti, it would not have had anywhere near the political impact that the ultimate verdict of this trial would have.

The Appeal Court’s stated goal was to prevent the “average person on the street” from thinking the trial unfair. So, on August 21, in Briseno v. Superior Court, they removed Kamins from the case.

Fall arrived, and the Appeal Court’s two interventions had delayed the trial by six months. Courtroom testimony didn’t actually begin until a year after the beating. And that testimony unfolded in front of a Ventura-County jury that had not one single black person on it.

Ironically enough, it was the Appeal Court itself that managed to make the average person on the street start to think that things were not right, not fair, not above-board. Something rotten in the state of Denmark, as Hamlet put it.

To be continued…

 

Three SCG Chapters Touching on the Birds and the Bees

Now St. Thomas considers the formation of the Body of God Incarnate, in His mother’s womb. St. Thomas applies the doctrine about the divine Personality of Jesus to His hidden life as an unborn baby.

As we try to understand these chapters, we should remember that we have insights into the fertilization of a human egg by human sperm, as well as the formation of a human embryo and its development–insights that St. Thomas did not have.

In Chapter 43, St. Thomas makes an argument about the conception of the Christ that we would now say actually applies to every human being. St. Thomas recognizes that the logic of the Incarnation required that the divine Person be united with the conceived embryo at the moment of conception. Christ the embryo was a Person from the moment He came into being in the womb.

In order to understand St. Thomas’ first argument in Chapter 45, we have to keep in mind that the he did not hold this to be true for other human beings. St. Thomas thought that the embryo was “pre-human” and only became a human person with a rational soul–and a properly “human” body–at some later point in development, during pregnancy.

This explains St. Thomas’ remarks at the end of Chapter 44, where he speaks of the “quantitative” increase of the preternaturally “organized” prenatal Body of Christ. He is talking about the growth of the size of the baby’s body. In the saint’s mind, in human beings in general, that growth in size is not yet “human” until some later point during pregnancy.

Again, what St. Thomas maintains about Christ is actually true of everyone, as developments in science have taught us. The one-celled human conceptus does in fact possess the full “organization” of a human body, in the DNA. It is all just a matter of “quantitative” growth from there, with no change of substance or essence.

In Chapter 45, St. Thomas’ gets bogged-down in a controversy over whether or not the male supplies any “matter” in human conception. We can leave that aside and still appreciate the saint’s points about the power of the divine cause.

I dare you not to smile at the end of Chapter 45, when the Angelic Doctor makes a humbly manful distinction about what exactly causes a mother to lose her virginity.

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 43

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 44

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 45

My Dad, George Floyd, Rodney King, and Some Posts to Come

Fifteen years ago today, my father died.

He grew up in Washington, D.C., a fifth-generation native of the city. He became a lawyer and dedicated his whole career to urban land-use law. That is: the orderly growth and prosperity of his city.

When my father was working as a young lawyer, not long before I was born, Washington, D.C. erupted in riots. After Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, the city burned.

This had a big impact on our family life. Some of my earliest memories involve driving around the damaged neighborhoods, my father explaining to my brother and me what had happened.

By my late teens, I knew the streets of Washington better than any cabbie. My seminary classmates at Catholic University had a game: They would look at a map of town and randomly name an intersection. I would then describe all the buildings located there, from memory.

I could do it because of love. My dad taught me that love.

I was a young man myself when Los Angeles, California, burned at the end of April and the beginning of May, 1992. My dad was still with us then. He had not yet suffered the debilitating stroke that would render him an invalid for the last decade of his life.

The LA riots were more brutal than the riots of the 60’s. On tv sets all over the world, people saw senseless beatings take place live.

In our home, we were stupefied with deep, crushing sadness. I have never been as profoundly upset as I was during those four or five days. We hardly slept; we spent most of the nights watching the news. The devil was dancing on the face of the earth.

The innocent blood of the dead in the streets stained my young, idealistic dreams. My dad had taught me to cultivate hope for American urban life and peace among races. The things that he stood for, the things for which he had dedicated his whole life–they lay broken in front of our eyes, like a shattered window on the asphalt.

One week ago today, on the other hand, things went differently. Like the jurors in People v. Powell et al. in 1992, the jurors in State v. Chauvin had seen a video. (In fact, in Minnesota, they had seen several videos.)

This time, the jurors believed their own eyes. They had seen a murder committed on video, so they reasonably proceeded to convict the murderer of the crime.

The prosecutors in State v. Chauvin had calmly and diligently made their case. They presented several credible eye-witnesses to the murder. They presented experts on the use of force by police. They testified that what Derek Chauvin had done was certainly wrong and criminal. The prosecutors presented medical experts who explained the cause of death; their testimony successfully removed any reasonable doubt that George Floyd died by homicide.

At the Chauvin trial, black witnesses and white witnesses spoke about Floyd as a human being. They spoke to a jury of Floyd’s peers, themselves willing to see Floyd as the human being that he was.

In other words, the prosecution in the Chauvin trial had a slam-dunk case, and they held the ball firmly in both hands and sprang towards the basket with the steady self-control of a well-trained athlete. They dunked the ball.

Chauvin is in jail, awaiting sentencing, and the world recognizes that justice has been done.

What happened thirty years ago was altogether different. I have reflected on this extensively, and I think I have identified one particular aspect of what happened in Los Angeles that we should try to understand now. This will take a few days, and a few posts, to get through, so bear with me as I try to lay out my thoughts.

Here comes Part I:

Cellphones existed in March of 1991, but they most certainly did not have cameras, and they were the size of a loaf of bread. The only person I knew with a cellphone then was my business-executive aunt. She kept the thing in her car, in a large leatherette pouch.

People did have camcorders in 1991. Portable hand-held video cameras that recorded on magnetic tapes.

Mr. George Holliday, who lived in the Monte Vista apartments on Foothill Boulevard, near the San Fernando Freeway, in Los Angeles, owned a new camcorder.

The sound of sirens and a helicopter awoke Holliday from his Saturday-night slumber at 12:45am on Sunday, March 3, 1991. He looked out his window and saw an arrest unfolding across the street. A large number of police officers had converged.

Holliday thought of his new video camera sitting by the tv in the living room, went to get it, and stepped out on his balcony to film what he saw. His 81-second videotape captured three LAPD officers–under the direction of a fourth–brutally beating a defenseless man.

There was no way to “upload” the video since a. it wasn’t digital and b. there was no internet to speak of at the time. Instead, Holliday took the tape to a local television station the following day. The station broadcast it on the evening news. By midnight Tuesday, every station in the Western world had broadcast the video.

People who saw the video spontaneously thought of the beating and scourging of the Lord Jesus by the Roman soldiers. In fact, when Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ came out, I wondered if he had staged the scourging scene to look like the Rodney King tape, because there are so many similarities in body movement by Jesus in the movie and King in the video.

In many communities, tv stations had to apologize for airing the Rodney King tape at times when children could have been watching. It caused nightmares. Watching the nine minutes of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd is sickening, but the brutality of the Rodney King beating is actually a great deal harder to endure, even though King did survive. That King survived was a miracle in and of itself, as was clear to everyone who watched Holliday’s video.

So, significant difference #1 between State v. Chauvin in 2021 and California v. Powell et al. in 1992:

In 1992, there was only one videotape. Over the course of the last month, the jury in Minnesota saw over twenty different videos, shot from different cameras. Over a dozen bystander cellphones, street security cameras, police body-cams.

When Rodney King got beaten, there was only the word of the people involved, the police reports which manifestly did not recount what had happened, and George Holliday’s video. (During the thirty hours between the incident and the public airing of the video, the officers did everything they could to cover up the beating.)

I don’t pretend to understand all the events that unfolded in the short-term aftermath of George Floyd’s murder last year. I shared some thoughts at the time, but I don’t claim to have a comprehensive view.

On the other hand, I do have a pretty good understanding of what happened after the Holliday video became public in early March 1991.

The video presented compelling evidence of criminal police brutality. As a police-commission report put it, the following July: “All segments of society condemn the Rodney King beating.”

But the political situation in Los Angeles was far, far from stable. What was then known as “south-central” was a largely lawless world of gangland violence. The white police chief and black mayor were at odds. Chief Darryl Gates nonetheless acknowledged after seeing the Holliday tape that the officers should face prosecution for criminal assault with a deadly weapon.

Warren Christopher was a widely respected elder-statesman California lawyer. (He went on to become President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State.) He chaired a joint commission formed out of the two separate commissions that the feuding mayor and police chief formed. The joint commission became the “Christopher Commission.”

LAPD patrol cars in 1991 had a rudimentary form of text messaging called Mobile Digital Terminal communications, or MDTs. The Christopher Commission studied all the MDTs of the previous six months, as well as thousands of other records, and conducted interviews with hundreds of officers and citizens. The commission concluded:

There is a significant number of officers in the LAPD who repetitively use excessive force… Our computerized study of complaints filed in recent years shows a strong concentration of allegations against a problem group of officers. Graphic confirmation of improper attitudes and practices is provided by the brazen and extensive references to beatings in the MDTs. The problem is aggravated by racism…

The LAPD’s failure to analyze and act upon these revealing data evidences a significant breakdown in the management and leadership of the Department… The Department not only failed to deal with this problem group of officers but it often rewarded them with positive evaluations and promotions.

As Christopher put it, it was a “blunt” report. It clearly identified a serious problem of organizational racism. The report took for granted that the Rodney King beating involved a heinous crime.

Meanwhile, however, other wheels started turning in the exact opposite direction. The four charged officers began to mount their legal defense.

The officers would never acknowledge any personal wrongdoing. In the summer of ’91, the officers’ lawyers successfully impeached the impartiality of the first judge assigned to the case. He had refused a “change of venue” petition. The replacement judge then agreed to move the trial to a suburb. The criminal case would be tried in Simi Valley, Ventura County, a bedroom community for many LAPD officers. Meanwhile, all this legal wrangling consumed months of time.

In Simi Valley, the jury pool for the Rodney-King-beating trial consisted of predominantly white suburbanites. They finally reported for voir dire, to a brand-new county courthouse, in January 1992. The parking lot hadn’t even been fully paved. After the whittling down of candidates, the final jury panel did not include a single black person.

To be continued…

Chap. 42 of SCG, Book IV

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 42

The Word of God suitably took human nature to Himself.

Christ’s Human Nature: God’s “Very Own Instrument”

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 41

St. Thomas held an ax in his hand.

He saw an instrument that he could hand to someone else–the ax. And he saw an instrument that was “his very own”–his hand.

In Chapter 41, he proposes this distinction as a solution to the one-Person-with-two-natures problem.

The Incarnation: Metaphysical Objections

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 40

terms…

quiddity the nature of a thing, its essence; that which makes a thing what it is

individuation what makes something a unique instance of its nature. Think: these particular atoms

remember:

supposit or hypostasis = this individual thing. If the thing is rational the hypostasis = a person

and accidental does not mean “inadvertent;” it means, not pertaining to the essence or substance.

—

This chapter lays out the objections. St. Thomas will solve them in upcoming chapters. So it’s like another cliff-hanger 🙂

Maybe the Incarnation really is impossible?! Just wait till the next episode!

Open Letter to Cardinal Cupich of Chicago

—

 

Your Eminence:

Many of us watched the speech you delivered via video at the “Religion, Faith, and Flourishing” symposium about the sexual abuse of children. We recognize that you represented our Church at this important event, as the highest-ranking prelate to address the conference.

In your speech, you claimed that “the voice of the sex-abuse survivor must be our Church’s true north.” You extolled your own virtues as a bishop and the excellence of the administrative apparatus of your archdiocesan corporation. And you singled-out one of your predecessors, Joseph Bernardin, as a hero.

You went on to say, “Imagine if all the bishops had followed Bernardin, how much further ahead we would be in preventing abuse and punishing offenders, how many children might have been spared.”

In 1993, Mr. Steven Cook accused Bernardin, as well as another priest, then-Father Ellis Harsham, of sexual abuse. In your speech for the symposium, you solely recounted Bernardin’s version of the events surrounding that accusation, and you neglected to mention important statements by others.

The fact is that, by twelve years later, no one disputed that Cook rightly identified Harsham as an abuser. Cook ultimately stated that he could not trust his memory regarding Harsham’s associate Bernardin—at least he could not trust it enough to move forward with a lawsuit. Bernardin then immediately rushed to the microphones to announce to the world that Cook had “recanted” and “the justice system has publicly affirmed my innocence.”

Bernardin went on to claim that a Chicago priest had urged Cook to make the accusation. The priest has insisted that is untrue. Bernardin told the public that he had always been “chaste and celibate.” The late Dr. A.W. Richard Sipe declared that he knew that was untrue. Bernardin claimed that he and Cook “reconciled” shortly before Cook’s untimely death. We only have Bernardin’s word on that.

In other words, Your Eminence, you extolled in your speech the heroism of the self-proclaimed hero, using only his version of events as your source of information.

But the late Cardinal is an eminently questionable source for the truth of the matter. (Pun intended.) Another reasonable interpretation of the Cook-Bernardin Affair is: Cook took a secret cash settlement in exchange for withdrawing his public accusation against Bernardin. We know from the Vatican’s McCarrick report that such a practice was used to silence the sex-abuse victims of high-ranking prelates at that time.

In the summer of 2019, James Grein publicly accused Bernardin of having abused him. A year earlier, Mr. Grein’s public testimony had led to the Vatican “trial” of Theodore McCarrick, the procedure that resulted in McCarrick’s involuntary removal from the clerical state.

Was Grein’s testimony about McCarrick true, but his accusation against Bernardin false? Is that what you have concluded? If so, on what grounds have you reached that conclusion?

A friend of mine has spoken with another sex-abuse victim of Bernardin’s. That survivor is still trying to recover, quietly, a half a century later.

Haven’t you insulted the intelligence of your audience by presenting only Bernardin’s version of the events of the Cook-Bernardin Affair? Doesn’t your audience deserve to know that the question of Bernardin’s guilt is, in fact, not really settled at all?

You referred repeatedly in your symposium remarks to the year 2002. That year, then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick made many public speeches about how the Church had solved the sex-abuse problem. We believed him; we trusted in our prelates. Turns out that McCarrick belonged in jail at the time.

Is there any question that McCarrick and Bernardin were friends? Is it not the case that Grein’s assertion about Bernardin could very well be true? Aren’t we supposed to believe survivors?

All that said, let’s concede for a moment—for the sake of argument—that your predecessor Joseph Bernardin did not, in fact, abuse Steven Cook. Do you not recognize nonetheless what the Cook-Bernardin Affair of ’93-’94 did to sex-abuse survivors across the country? How it cost them advocates in the media? How it led many to question their own memories? How it hurt their self-confidence and left them in the shadows? How can you talk in one breath about seeing Jesus in the sex-abuse survivor and then in the next breath celebrate the Cook-Bernardin Affair as if it were some kind of golden moment?

There is also substantial evidence that Bernardin regularly covered-up for sex-abusing priests in Cincinnati and Chicago. Also, his roommate and “buddy” in his home diocese of Charleston. S.C., was ultimately convicted for sex abuse of minors.

There is more. Your address at the symposium relied on the idea that the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter made national policy that solved the sex-abuse problem in the Catholic Church. That is, the secrecy and cover-up that has made many reasonable people all over the world think that our Church is corruptly governed.

In December of 2018, however, your Attorney General in Illinois offered her advice about fundamental flaws in the Dallas Charter. She pointed out how imprecise the terms are, the terms that you bishops use in dealing with sex-abuse cases. She showed in her report how the process you extolled in your symposium speech is actually full of dangerous gaps that have left many survivors out in the cold.

It has been over two years since A.G. Madigan offered her advice. You met privately with her successor in office the following year. Have the U.S. bishops taken any steps to address Madigan’s helpful points? If so, why don’t we rank-and-file Catholics know anything about those steps?

Your Eminence, many of us Catholics are struggling to hold onto our loyalty to our beloved Church. It would help us if you would reply with clear answers to the questions I have asked you. After all, as you yourself put it in your speech, “full accountability is a universal non-negotiable.”

Yours in the Lord,

Father Mark White

Collinsville, Virginia

Four SCG Chapters on the Unity of Christ

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 36

The Lord Jesus has a complete human nature, which includes having a human will.

—

St. Thomas uses the term “accidental” in a technical sense different from what we are used to. He does not mean inadvertent. By “accidental” he means not pertaining to the essence. An apple could be red or green; either one is essentially an apple. The color is an “accidental” quality.

Also, remember how we tackled the terms supposit and hypostasis. This has proved over and over again to be a stumbling block for faith in the Incarnation: God Personally took our human nature to Himself. Jesus Christ is a divine Person, the Almighty Creator and Lord of all, Who Personally is a man, a human being, like us in every way except sin.

 

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 37

Christ’s soul and body are united, just like our souls are united to our bodies. Christ’s human nature subsists in His divine Person.

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 38

He in one individual.

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 39

The Church has formulated Her doctrine on the Incarnation in order to harmonize with the way Sacred Scripture ascribes both divine and human things to the one Person, Jesus Christ. (The communication of idioms.)

How Can Christ be Human without Being a Human Person?

The Council of Chalcedon, by Vasily Surikov

 

With Chapter 35, we begin a series of chapters that consider how divine nature and human nature can unite in one Person, the eternal Son of God.

This chapter explains the wrongness of Eutyches’ solution to this problem, which is known as the heresy of monophysitism. St. Thomas thoroughly explains what we mean when we refer to human “nature.”

Chap. 35 is just the beginning of St. Thomas’ treatment of the union-of-two-natures-in-one-Person problem. There’s more to come, so don’t be alarmed when the end of this chapter leaves you wanting more.

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chapter 35

The Sunday Obligation

The Lord Jesus appeared to the Apostles on Easter Sunday. Then He appeared to them again on the following Sunday. We can read something into this.

If believers are not to be overwhelmed, they must be able to count on the support of the Christian community. This is why they must be convinced that it is crucially important for the life of faith that they should come together with others on Sundays to celebrate the Passover of the Lord in the sacrament of the New Covenant. (Pope John Paul II, Dies Domini 48)

I think we can all feel the page turning on the coronavirus. Praise God. Which means that all of us Catholics must now consider again the duty of attending Mass on Sundays.

On the one hand…

The Last Supper did in fact happen. The God-man Jesus Christ did in fact establish the Most Holy Eucharist and the sacred priesthood. He did offer His Body and Blood for us on the cross; He did die; He did rise again, and then ascend into heaven. He does abide with His people in the Holy Mass celebrated by ordained priests on our Catholic altars.

None of this involves a conspiracy of disinformation. These are all solid facts that anyone can take to the bank. The Holy Mass is–at its invisible, burning core–Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ living, loving, gathering, sustaining, carrying us to heaven.

Christians need each other. Christians need the grace of the sacraments. Sunday Mass gives us hope, support, and the chance to love our brothers and sisters, and to be loved. We need it.

On the other hand…

How can self-respecting, conscientious people participate in the rituals of an institution that so manifestly lacks integrity? Doesn’t that make me an accessory to the crime?

Theodore McCarrick stood in front of the cameras on behalf of the American bishops, precisely when the credibility of the institution hung completely in the balance, in AD 2002. He lied through his teeth.

Popes and fellow Cardinals knew it. For decades they did what they always try to do: sweep the criminal case under the rug. Sixteen years later, the truth came to light, no thanks to the Church mafiosi who knew about it before then.

The Vatican then produced a “report” that exonerates every living Catholic official of any responsibility. The worst betrayal of trust by Church leaders since the sixteenth century occurred right before our eyes. But according to the Vatican, no one is really responsible for it.

McCarrick’s victims still have pending cases. The victims of thousands of other priest pederasts still have pending cases. Dioceses routinely conduct “reconciliation programs,” then declare bankruptcy–all for one reason: to keep the criminal cases safely under the rug. All this continues apace.

The Boston Globe did its Spotlight investigation–which itself came over a decade after an earlier investigation in Louisiana. Then, over a decade after the Globe reports, they made a movie about it, which won the Best-Picture Oscar. Now, a half a decade after that–well over a generation since this problem emerged–nothing in our lost and clueless Church has really changed.

Yes, we have criminal background checks for everyone who works or volunteers at our parishes. Yes, we have on-going “safe environment” education. But where the rubber actually meets the road, in the adjudication of actual individual criminal cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, things have not gotten better. If anything, they have gotten worse.

In the “old days,” the bishop would deal with you personally to orchestrate the cover-up of crimes committed against you. Now, the lawyers run the whole show, and the bishop treats you as if you don’t exist.

Meanwhile, the pope sends carefully crafted communiques to conferences and symposiums. He makes promise after promise. And criminal cases by the hundred languish, under the rug–where the pope himself clearly believes they belong.

Seminarians say, “We want to be part of the solution.” Brothers: that’s what we said. Twenty years ago. The mitered mafia was living a lie then, and they are living a lie now, too. Don’t comfort yourselves with the idea that things will be better in twenty years. I comforted myself with that idea, too.

…How can a decent person be a party to all this? Isn’t it actually more religious, more genuinely honest, to disassociate oneself from this perpetually benighted Catholic mess?

—

I find myself in an unusual situation, when it comes to confronting this question of conscience. Because of the bishop’s decree, the only way I can participate in Mass is to celebrate by myself.

I’m like a husband whose wife has been taken away from him by some cruel twist of fate. I keep living our married life, but alone. I come to the table, but my companion is no longer there.

I don’t say, “The Lord be with you,” when I celebrate the Eucharist. Because there’s no one there to say, “And with your spirit.”

—

I don’t pretend to have the answer to the “being Catholic now” dilemma. But I think we can eliminate these two possible solutions:

1. “Screw the Catholic Church. It’s just an empty cult, fit only for sex-abuse enablers.”

No. It’s the religion of Jesus.

2. “The institutional problems in the Church are above my pay-grade. I’ll just live my little Catholic life, in my personal spiritual cocoon.”

No. The Church belongs, above all, to Christians of conscience who live in solidarity with the desperate. The Church doesn’t belong to chancery bureaucrats, or Vatican bureaucrats, either. It belongs to the brokenhearted souls who cling to Christ for dear life, and love Him in the wounded neighbor.

We have to act. We have to lead. We have to own this screwed-up situation and do our best to improve it.