Explaining the Photo

Donald Cardinal Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, Mother Loraine Maguire and another Little Sister of the Poor, and President Trump. In the Rose Garden of the White House at a ceremony last week, for an executive order on “Religious Freedom.”

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Someday we will have to explain this photograph to our grandchildren. That is: the Catholic Church shaking hands in this manner for this reason with this man.

I want to meditate with you on this. But first, some local color. Both my parochial vicars have enjoyed their post-Easter vacations. Now they’re back home, so I get to take a few days off. I got in the car and drove west.

Vanderburgh County, Indiana, has a splendidly stylish courthouse in Evansville:

I have driven through southwest Indiana and southeast Illinois before. But there weren’t so many inland seas then. Every creek and runoff has swelled and overflowed into acre after acre of cornfield. Indeed, half of the riverfront plaza in Evansville lies submerged beneath the Ohio. The Wabash lurches big and brown.

…Back to the matter at hand. I have examined our Catholic place in the “religious freedom” debate before. [Click HERE for a compendium.] I had decided to focus my mind on other things. But then the picture above–with the Cardinal, the nuns, and the president–got taken.

Who’s against religious freedom? In his speech at the ceremony last week, the president insisted that the free exercise of religion by the black church gave us the Civil Rights Movement. Amen. The president went on to conclude from this: Therefore, we had better not enforce the Johnson Amendment, the federal law which prohibits preachers from endorsing particular candidates for political office.

This reasoning seems awful shaky to me, because: The Johnson Amendment prohibited all the black preachers who participated in the Civil Rights Movement from endorsing any candidates. The law held sway the whole time. But it didn’t seem to cramp Dr. King’s style at all.

Insofar as the Lord Jesus need not run for any office–reigning supreme, as He does, as King Eternal in heaven–I for one cannot imagine ever wanting to endorse a particular political candidate from the pulpit on Sunday morning. After all, politics involves many imperfect compromises, even on a good day.

Now, of course we cannot compromise on the dignity of human life. We cannot compromise on everyone’s right to life–not to mention liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And who among us would want to compromise on this idea: Using artificial contraception makes no sense. Nothing good comes from mutual masturbation. Honest people find better pastimes.

But: Did we, the Church, really want to stand in the Rose Garden and shake President Donald Trump’s hand on the very day when he gloated in triumph over the passage of a law that would cost a lot of people their health insurance? Or do we want to shake his hand on any other day, for that matter? People shake hands because they trust each other. How could anyone trust Donald J. Trump? About anything?

In his statement about the executive order, another attendee of the ceremony, Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, noted that Americans with “deeply held religious beliefs” should never have to pay for anyone else’s birth-control pills. Therefore, we need some system by which to keep our money in clean, kosher bank accounts. Rather than in unclean bank accounts that pay for objectionable pills and procedures.

Meanwhile, no Catholic leader simply stands up and says: Dear fellow Americans, it is much better to live without the pill! Whether you’re Catholic or not. Whether you have “deeply held religious beliefs” (whatever those are) or not.

No Catholic leader stands up and says: This is not about money. It’s about sexual honesty. And true happiness. And friendship with the Creator Who made us all and loves us all.

What is this precious “religious freedom?” In the person of our leaders, we stood in the Rose Garden and clapped about it last week. But what is it?

Did the Apostles have a harder time preaching the Gospel because no one had yet written the U.S. Constitution?

Speaking of the Gospel, seems to me like, in the Rose Garden last week, we boiled it down to: “As long as our bank accounts don’t disburse any money whatsoever to Anti-Life, Inc., then we’re good.”

Now, I beg you, dear reader, not to think that I am for giving money to Anti-Life, Inc. (by which I mean a corporation, wholly owned by Satan, that includes, but is not limited to, Planned Parenthood.)

But it seems to me that our greatest weapon against the destruction of life and the degradation of sex is not: begging for legal exemptions in a labyrinthine bureaucracy, in which our purity comes at the price of looking utterly self-interested.

Don’t we have a better hope of winning souls by simply preaching and living out what we believe? The Church of Christ is not an interest group. If we could convince people that artificial contraception does not really qualify as health care, then the USA would painlessly solve our entire healthcare financing problem. But even that doesn’t really touch the reason why we evangelize. We evangelize about chastity and true friendship and marriage and family because that’s how you get to heaven.

I think that the phrase “religious freedom” no longer amounts to anything. If bearing witness to the Gospel under the regime of the U.S. Constitution requires shaking hands in the Rose Garden with this notoriously dishonest man, then I for one would rather go back to risking the catacombs.

Complete Self-Gift

 

“If you sit down at the table of a king, note well what is set before you.”

Proverbs 23:1.  In one of his sermons, St. Augustine applied this to us, celebrating Holy Mass, at the table of Christ our King.  “Note well what is set before you.”

What is set before us at Mass?  What did the Lord set before His disciples in the Upper Room?  Nothing less than His complete, utter, total self.  His Body, Blood, soul, and divinity.

Here I am, given up for you on the cross, out of infinite love!  I give Myself to you, as your food and drink, as I give Myself to the Father!

Judas did not note this well.  If he had, he could hardly have betrayed the Son of Man with a kiss.

Every Holy Week, Judas’ kiss haunts me, pricks my somnolent conscience.  Since us clergymen kiss the King’s table to start every Holy Mass.  Fresh from renewing our vows, we priests had better kiss the altar with pure honesty, with chaste hearts, and with humility, noting well what the Lord sets on this table.  Otherwise, the Lord’s words to Judas will apply to us, too.  “Would you betray Me with a kiss?”

Not just priests, though.  All of us have to note well, have to behold, have to let ourselves be ravished by what the Blessed Sacrament of the altar really is.

Forgive me; I don’t mean to get crass here.  But we find ourselves meditating on how the Lord Jesus gives us His whole Self on the altar, holding nothing back, on the very day when one of the big news items in Washington is:  Catholic institutions go before the Supreme Court to object to artificial contraception.

The Lord gives us Himself, His whole self, all of Himself.  How could we not object to artificial contraception?  Could any of us note well what He gives us on the altar, and then turn around and play little games, interposing some artificial or chemical impediment in the middle of the love of husband and wife?  In the middle of the gift of self that gives the world the next generation?

No.  Or course not.  We could hardly be so dishonest.  Of course we object.

Lord, help us to note well what You give.  Help us to give You ourselves in return.

More HHS Mandate Considerations

Just when you thought that maybe we could forget all about it!

…Cathleen Kaveny of Commonweal has written an illuminating essay, which I commend to your reading.

Points she has made well:

1. She distinguishes: On the one hand, the Church’s teaching, as an expert analyst of human morality, that any sexual act is unchaste and wrong if it is intentionally rendered fruitless by human intervention. This applies in every case–Catholic, non-Catholic, Jew, Quaker, Presbyterian. No one will ever be able to stand before God and defend him- or herself for turning sex into an act of mutual masturbation.

On the other hand: the Church Herself does not propose that we should live under ecclesiastical secular rule.

We live in a republican democracy. The Church made Her case that the healthcare law should not include artificial contraception. Our duly elected leaders chose otherwise (having received, as Kaveny points out, the counsel of supposed experts–in other words, the government did, in fact, do its due dilligence). Result: they made a law that includes artificial contraception.

[Now, Kaveny does ignore one big elephant in the room here, namely that hormone contraceptives cause early abortions–or at least appear to do so with some frequency. Which means that, from a moral point-of-view, the issue at hand must be considered to include not just immoral sex acts, but also embryo-icide, which is a far graver moral evil. But let’s let that pass for now…]

2. She–to my mind, decisively–points out that “clarion calls for religious freedom” do not serve any real purpose in this context. The whole business must be analyzed in minute detail in order to arrive at a just conclusion.

In the first part of her essay (the link above is to Part II), she points out–again, quite decisively–that any claim by our Church to the effect that co-operating with the mandate is immoral cannot withstand scrutiny. Because we have already co-operated with such mandates in numerous states. Money in the coffers of Catholic institutions already winds up in other coffers that pay for artificial contraceptives, and it happens because of state and local laws that govern what healthcare coverage must include.

Now, perhaps this means that the moment has arrived for a careful scholar to outline precisely the moral problem with this phenomenon (of money moving in this way). I will be glad to read it. I haven’t yet come across it. And I have looked.

To my mind, the fact of the matter is: money moving in this way does not necessarily implicate anyone morally. It implicates only those who intentionally use artificial contraceptives, and those who wrongly counsel them to do so and facilitate their doing so.

But obeying a law about where I am required to send money to cover my employee’s government-mandated health services does not implicate me in any immoral use of that money later on.

So, in fact, there really is no moral problem for the institutions, businesses, employers, etc. So, in fact, there is no real religious freedom claim to be made.

IMHO.

Chime in, as you wish!

Just read…

one of the most wonderfully lucid expositions of the state of the pro-life question which I think I have ever read.

Everything Mr. Gray has written illuminates. I beg you, dear reader, to click through and read.

Mr. Gray simply neglects one fundamental aspect of the question:

Can “science” answer the queston of when human life begins? Depends on what you mean by “science.” The question of when human life begins must necessarily have recourse to the science of metaphysics, because a human body is animated by an immaterial, rational soul.

Taking as a premise the fact that an immaterial, rational soul animates the human body, the question then has to be: when does the soul begin to animate the body?

The study of fetal development could conceivably indicate some point at which this might occur. The fact is that such study does not indicate any such point, other than the beginning, i.e. fertilization.

Mr. Gray claims that a zygote must not be a living organism because the zygote does not respond to outside stimuli. For one thing, this statement itself cannot be admitted as fact. We do not know this; we merely surmise it, based on observation under circumstances other than the norm. Under normal circumstances, the zygote is not observed, and its interactions with its environment are certainly infinitely more complex than we can claim to know.

But even if we grant this assertion of Mr. Gray’s, it cannot establish that a zygote does not have a soul. Do people in comas not have souls?

It seems to me that the key fact here is this: Human beings certainly have souls; babies when they are born show solid evidence that they have souls; and once we reach the age of reason we give incontrovertible proof that we are not merely material beings.

The burden of proof, therefore, when it comes to embryology establishing that a zygote is not a human being, must lie on the side of disproving that the zygote has a soul. Granted, it would not be possible for observations to disprove it altogether, but a solid indication would have to be found.

In other words, observation of the stages of development would have to discover a turning point that indicates a transition from pre-human to human. Every attempt that has been made by embryology to establish evidence for such a transition has been disproved by the discovery of further evidence.

Absent such a solid indication of a stage of development where a zygote or blastocyst undergoes a transition to “humanity,” the reasonable person concludes that the organism has been human from the moment of conception.

Mr. Gray’s argument about organizational complexity simply begs the question: If the zygote were not adequately complex itself, then how could it develop into a blastocyst? There would have to be evidence of the introduction of some other factor into the original cell, which added to the zygote’s complexity, allowing it to develop. But science actually holds the opposite thesis: Namely, that the DNA present in the zygote possesses all the complexity necessary for the zygote to develop into a 5-foot+, strapping dude or dudette.

All of the consequences which Mr. Gray so lucidly presents do, then, in fact, follow. A reasonable and decent human being cannot have anything to do with abortion, artificial contraception, or in vitro fertilization. All of these involve (at least in many, or most, if not all, instances) killing a person with a soul.

In Butter. But Not Co-operating

1. Gold for Mexico in fút. 2. Gold for Team USA, worthily won in a Sunday-morning thriller, which was perfectly timed to unfold immediately after Mass. 3. Rental house has two porches, free bikes, skylights, ceiling fans. On vacation… Dude, I am swimming in the good sweet butter of life.

But I am like the (beach) dog that cannot let go of the bone. The religious-freedom-is-not-the-issue bone…

The National Catholic Bioethics Center produces precise moral analyses, based on incontrovertible principles and developed via careful distinctions. Few organizations in this world make so much sense so consistently.

When he discusses artificial contraception, President Barack Obama lies, flimflams, and cravenly tries to marginalize us Paul-VI feminists–i.e, kind-hearted, reasonable people (like Mahatma Gandhi) who think women deserve better than poison for the womb.

Can such a day come? Namely, a day on which campaign-stumping President Obama refers to some actual facts—facts which the careful analysts of the NCBC failed adequately to take into account in one of their expert moral studies?

Well, it happened. On Thursday.

The NCBC published a vademecum for business owners to guide their discernment about how to handle the federal contraception-coverage mandate (which has now gone into effect for all “non-religious” employers). While I do not hold myself out as an expert on the “health-care industry,” the NCBC’s essay strikes me as realistic when it comes to laying out the options which a business owner/operator has.

Two Attempts to Clarify Some Things

If you have grown tired of reading about the “hot-button” controversies, skip this one. Ignatius Reilly probably could have written what follows, but I take full credit for it.

Inconvenient and Uneasy

At first, St. John’s father Zechariah did not believe that his elderly wife could bear a son. But then, when Zechariah showed his faith and named the boy John as the angel had told him to do, the Lord loosened Zechariah’s tongue. The old priest had the privilege of singing one of the original Gospel canticles.

Zechariah sang that his son would be the herald of the Savior. And that the Lord would come to His people and set them free. The Lord will set us free to “worship Him without fear, holy and righteous in His sight, all the days of our lives.”

For freedom Christ has set us free. Every morning, to greet the dawn, the Church sings Zechariah’s canticle. But we sing it louder and prouder now, during our Fortnight for Freedom.

Independence Day draws near, and our thoughts turn to the Founding Fathers of our nation. When we hear the phrase in Zechariah’s canticle about God “setting us free from our enemies,” an echo sounds in our minds. We think of the war against the British which our forefathers fought and won.

Friend, Faith, Facts

[PREVIEW PREVIEW: Your unworthy servant gives his final apologia for not being on the Religious-Freedom bandwagon.]

Like any God-fearing person, I consider the red solo cup a friend. But: Can we really count on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution?

In my book, an idea is reliable as a friend precisely to the degree that the idea is clear. The clearer the idea, the better a friend.

“Stay out of trouble” makes for a good friend. But “keep the needle on the speedometer within 10 mph of the posted speed limit” makes for a better friend, owing to its greater clarity.

Now, I do not mean to suggest that

Congrefs shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

does not make for a respectable friend, as ideas go.

This sentence makes nicer with the Church than a sentence like “La ley, en consecuencia, no permite el establecimiento de ordenes monasticas”—by which the original Mexican Constitution of 1917 forbad religious orders.

But, as a friend, the First Amendment of our Constitution can get prickly. Quickly. Because what it actually means is, well, not clear.

Does the state have the right to bind believers with laws that impede the exercise of religion? Well, yes—when the protection of the common good is at stake. The Supreme Court has so ruled, I believe–as well it should.

But, of course, there is no telling how a court will rule in any given “separation of church and state” case. Because the idea itself is really quite opaque.

Does it mean that the President can’t appoint bishops? Or does it mean that he can’t appropriate money to support the work of Catholic social workers? Does it mean that the government can’t prevent me from praying in public? Or does it mean that no law can prohibit the ritual use of narcotic mushrooms? Or polygamy?

Having read somewhat widely on the subject, I am left with the following impression: The First Amendment is much more an object of faith than Pope Paul VI’s encyclical about artificial contraception is.

I applaud any couple who refrain from using artificial contraception simply because “the Church teaches it’s wrong, and I believe in the Church.” Beautiful exercise of faith.

But I would venture to claim that, for the most part, the great army of people who eschew artificial means of contraception do so because the practice is evidently unnatural, unwholesome, and unbecoming a mature person.

As I have tried to point out before, Pope Paul VI himself never proposed his doctrine on artificial contraception as an object of faith. Spilling semen intentionally is a bad business. We can read about this in Genesis 38. But we do not need to read the Bible to get the drift.

And killing an unborn child? Better to consult a sonogram than Scripture, if you want to know why no one should ever do it.

If it gets boring, please forgive me. But I cannot help but return to one of the great themes of my silly little life:

When it comes to sexual morality, what the Church teaches is a matter of sound science. It is based on a combination of the following: cold, hard biological facts and one simple proposition, “People who live as if God does not exist do not thrive.” (This proposition has been demonstrated repeatedly by psychological and sociological studies.)

The Church teaches many things about supernatural truths that must be accepted on faith—e.g., Christ in heaven, the sacraments, etc. But Her sexual morality is not one of these things.

On the other hand, it seems to me that “the separation of church and state” has become more of a shibboleth, mouthed religiously, than a clear idea.

So, here is my little apologia:

More on Health

The Son of God labored on earth as a physician. He applied His deft hands to the work of healing the infirm. In the beginning He made us out of moistened earth with the power of His Word. In the fullness of time, He healed blindness and deafness with the same clay and moisture and divine speech.

Why? Why has He opened the ears of the deaf and the eyes of the blind? So that we could believe in Him and live.

Perhaps you have heard something about the controversy between the Dept. of Health and Human Services and the Catholic health-care system. Many people see the business as a matter of religious freedom.

Don’t we also have to see it as a controversy over what health care is? What health is?

Doesn’t ‘health’ = thriving in the truth of who we are made to be? Isn’t health care a matter of imitating and co-operating with the Great Physician Who made us in the first place?

Is it healthy for a woman to poison her body with pills that maker her infertile and inhospitable to new life? What kind of health care is that?

The proponents of universal access to contraception try to characterize it as a “woman’s issue.” But if “pro-woman” health care involves poisoning the womb with chemicals, then I would hate to see what misogynistic health care would involve.

The divine Physician came to help us have a better life. Much better than a dead-end routine of work, eat, sleep, and work again, with occasional recreational sex. Artificial contraception fits into an Orwellian nightmare of dehumanized modernity, not into the beautiful truth of who we are in Christ. The children of God have inherited a better life than what the Department of Health and Human Services wants to envision.

The divine Physician came to us so that we could enjoy eternal health in the Kingdom of purity and light. May He help us all to open our eyes, ears, and lips to behold, hear, and sing His liberating truth.

Contraceptives, Medicine, and Conscience

Man has in his heart a law written by God. To obey it is the very dignity of man. According to it, he will be judged. (Vatican Council II)

[Rated PG-13]

Lately I have read somewhat widely regarding the federal-government mandate requiring free contraceptives. Forgive me, but B.S. alarms are ringing in every corner of my poor, little mind.

According to what law does the federal government have the authority to require this? I ask this in earnest, as I am no scholar of the “health-care debate.” Does it pertain to the vigilance of the federal government to control American medicine? Of course we must have laws prohibiting abuses.

But, in fact, contraceptives do not qualify as medicine. Being able to have a baby = healthy, not sick. To go to a doctor and say, “Doctor, I want to have sex and not get pregnant”—this does not qualify as a medical request.

An honest doctor would have to reply to such a request with a laugh and then a fatherly/motherly admonition: “My child, allow me to recommend better ways for you to spend your time…” (e.g. reading, hikes, frequenting church, frisbee golf, etc.)

Using artificial contraception is immoral because of the following fact: It is beneath the dignity of any human being to waste time masturbating.