I’ve always found this particular Bible passage (about how the devil that is cast out goes wandering in search of comfort, and, when he can’t find it, gets together a group of his evil buddies and goes back to invade the soul from which he was evicted) quite eerie. It actually seems to give us a bit of insight into demon psychology… but also to suggest that, after the demons are cast from the soul, it is ultimately in even greater danger since they are likely to return in force. Now, allowing one’s soul to be invaded by demons certainly doesn’t seem good. Our priest used this passage as an opening for talking about the importance of giving the devil no quarter, and keeping the door firmly closed to his influence. That doesn’t seem an unreasonable way to expand on the passage, but even so, I have to wonder: are people necessarily blameworthy when they are possessed?

Exorcism can, in some times and places, be a means for increasing the faith of many. Of course, the same could be said of many types of conversion, and that doesn’t mean the one converted bears no responsibility for his formerly sinful state. St. Paul was still blameworthy for his life of persecuting the Church, even though it all worked out well in the end. But possession seems a bit different, potentially. No doubt we can diminish the risk of it by wearing our scapulars and going to Mass regularly and surrounding ourselves by holy objects of the sort that demons would find distasteful. But after all, many cases of possession seem to involve children, and others of less than complete mental competency, and in the Gospels, Our Lord seems to treat possession as an affliction to be treated along with physical illness. (This observation has led many to interpret Biblical demon possession as being merely mental illness. I don’t think that stands up, all things considered, but I can understand why some would wish to read it that way.) Doesn’t this seem to suggest that, in some cases, God allows demons to invade (temporarily, at least) a particular soul?

In any case, it certainly seems that the assault comes much more heavily on some than on others. Presumably God takes this into account when assessing blame.

A classic example of what I hate cropped up at Mass recently where, at the Archbishop’s request, all the parishes have been playing a recorded message basically asking us to give money to the archdiocese. Now, in the first place, playing a recording seems tacky to me. If you want to send a letter for pastors to read out, fine. But do we have to have a little commercial, complete with cheesy, recorded music? It’s just not dignified.

But the really obnoxious part came from the segment on Catholic education, when various people were expounding on the virtues of Catholic schools. A few things were said about the value of Catholic education generally. I’m not unsympathetic to this point, but I couldn’t help but wonder: shouldn’t the schools be supported primarily on a parish level, and not by the diocese?

Just as I was thinking this, the financial officer of one of the local schools addressed the point. “Supporting (name of school) is first and foremost the responsibility of (name of parish.) But because we have chosen to be a diverse school, with the poor among us, all the parishes must contribute to our mission here.” Or words to that effect.

Ewwww. What an icky thing to include in the general diocesan appeal. And the first thing wrong with it comes from the use of the word MUST. I mean, basically, the bottom line here seems to be that this school wants to give out more scholarships than it can afford to poor students. They don’t specify whether the recipients are Catholic, or members of the parish, but I’m guessing not given the reference to “diversity.” Now, paying the tuition of poor, non-Catholic students wanting to go to Catholic schools might be a nice thing to do. But it seems a bit much to say that we must do it, based on the decision of that particular parish. Perhaps there are other worthwhile projects that we care about more.

Furthermore, though, I was somewhat disgusted by the obvious pride that this school was taking in being “diverse” by having “the poor among us.” Oh, hooray for you, agreeing to have poor kids in your school at other people’s expense. How exactly is this a noble action on your part, if the diocese is even paying their tuition? It’s almost as if they think they deserve credit just for putting up with these irksome poor people. Lovely.

Finally, I was irritated by the way that no explanation was given for why this was such a valuable ministry. If I could be sure that diocesan money was being spent to give the underprivileged a truly Catholic education, I would be pleased. Far better than material handouts, a good religious education might be just the thing to help some people out of the unfortunate conditions under which they are raised. Given the general tenor of the remarks made, however, I can’t help but be skeptical. People who boast about having “the poor among them” tend to be the same sort who want to do away with things like Rosary prayers, or just orthodox religious instruction, for the sake of making the newcomers more comfortable. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope that I am. But what I saw did not inspire confidence.

Unfortunately, in our society, it’s become necessary to be more discerning about what we give for the sake of “the poor.”

Bonifacius, following St. Thomas, contends that gender is accidental, on the way to making an argument that the female gender is (accidentally but still intrinsically) inferior to the male. It is my opinion that this argument is offensive and degrading to women generally and Our Lady in particular; it is a fact that it contradicts the explicit teachings of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You may read more of that discussion in the next thread. Here I just want to ask: how helpful is it to think of gender as an accident?

Gender is an odd thing. It seems to have properties of both an essential and an accidental trait. It’s easy to see why, given a choice, St. Thomas called it accidental. If women and men were of different essences, they’d be different species, but that can’t be right. On the other hand, calling it accidental is also odd. The usual smell test is to ask: could you change this and still be the same person? So, I could (given some growing tonic) get three inches taller and still be the same person. I could move to a different state. I could dye my hair. These things are accidents. But I could not be made incorporeal and still be me. I could not cease to be rational and still be me. These are essential to my nature.

So, could I become a man and still be me? We don’t, of course, have the power to make such a transformation (“sex change operations” change only very external characteristics – in effect, we have the power to turn a man into a mutilated man, or a woman into a mutilated woman, but that is all.) But put it all in God’s hands, and suppose that there was a question of making people the opposite sex in heaven. Doesn’t it seem rather wrong to suppose that Clara could become a man and Bonifacius a woman, without either ceasing to be the same people? Gender seems more fundamental than that, at least in a Catholic conception of reality.

In the preceding discussion, Discipulus and Bonifacius hit on some points that, I think, illustrate the difficulty of the problem. Discipulus suggested that, if indeed the male were intrinsically superior, it would be better for women to try as much as possible to imitate men… but obviously traditional Catholics tend not to favor such efforts. Bonifacius said that, no, it would be better for women to act like women, and unfitting for them to imitate men (even though they, in their perfection as women, would still on his argument be inferior to men who had fulfilled their masculinity equally well.) Well, it’s easy to see why he’d want to say that, but the justification seems thin. If masculinity is better, why should we not all want to be more masculine? If the answer is, “you should, but you can’t pull it off,” then that just doesn’t seem to be true. Some women can act very much like men. If the answer is, “it’s not in your nature to be manly,” then we get back to the different-species problem.

Complimentarity helps with this, because it makes a third sort of answer available. In general, women and men are better equipped to exemplify different human perfections. So, they can each best fulfill their human nature by fulfilling the perfections of their sex. (And, I think it should be noted too, that they’re not that different. The basic virtues are common to both, though they might sometimes manifest themselves in slightly different ways.)

But we’re still left with the essence/accident problem. I conclude that this is a case in which the traditional Thomistic categories just aren’t all that helpful for giving us a grasp on the truth.

I like to think I’ve always been pretty sympathetic to the needs of young families. When I’m on a plane and I hear a baby howling, I mainly feel sympathy for both parent and child. A break from routine is often upsetting for a baby. And what’s the poor mother supposed to do – take the kid outside? As far as the rest of the passengers go, well, that’s what headphones are for. In a hotel room, similarly, I don’t get too irritated if the sound of a crying child comes seeping through the wall. A blaring television or radio is a legitimate source of annoyance, but I understand that sometimes kids cry, and the parents are probably doing the best they can to restore calm.

There are certain settings in which annoyance at kid noise is justified. Nobody of any age should be brought to the symphony unless they are mature enough to sit still and absolutely quiet at all times when music is being played. (This would obviously exclude young children, but would also, unfortunately, exclude quite a few adults who seem unable to control the urge to whisper back and forth in the middle of a movement.) And since symphony-going is a treat, not a necessity, it’s reasonable to expect that young children (who wouldn’t enjoy it anyway) not be brought. The same rule mostly applies to movies, though a bit less strictly; some kinds of noise (primarily laughter, as well as popcorn-crunching) can be appropriate during movies, and particularly in movies intended for children, one has to be a bit more tolerant of kid noise. Even so, a small baby will not appreciate a movie, and if he starts howling, he should be carried out.

What about children at Mass? Technically, of course, young children don’t have to be at Mass; they don’t have a Mass obligation until age 7, and by that time they should be able to stay quiet for an hour a week. Still, few people leave their children at home until age 7, and there are plenty of good reasons for this. For one thing, the parents still have an obligation even if the children don’t, and it’s not reasonable to expect that parents should find a babysitter for every single Sunday and Holy Day. Conceivably parents could trade off childcare duties, with one going to an earlier Mass while the other goes to a later one. But this is troublesome (particularly if the distance to Mass is considerable), and people naturally tend to prefer that churchgoing be a family affair.

But finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the issue of wanting to initiate one’s child into the parish and the faith through early exposure to liturgy. Being a convert myself, I obviously don’t have early memories of going to Mass, but I do have old memories of being brought to (Mormon) church, such that I can readily appreciate what an impression this can leave on a child’s mind. Mass is the primary way that we appreciate the liturgical year, and also the main thing that brings the parish together. We want our children to experience this early, so that their sensibilities are well-formed, and liturgy becomes like second nature to them.

Let me just say right now that, even granting the importance of this early-initiation, I don’t think there’s much wrong with leaving babies at home so long as this is practicable. A 3-month-old probably isn’t profiting much from being at Mass, and if there happens to be a relative at home who prefers to go to a different Mass anyway, and who is willing to tend the baby while you fill your obligation… accept the offer. Everyone will be happier for it. Most people, however, do not have this luxury. The bottom line is that, unlike the symphony, Mass is a place where we should legitimately expect to find people of all ages. And since, as Catholics, we obviously want to support families and welcome children (Our Lord seemed rather partial to them, after all!) we have reason to want Mass to be family-friendly.

In addition to this, though, some other considerations need to be mentioned:

1) Mass is a place for prayer and worship. Extraneous noise from the congregation is legitimately bothersome, and can diminish people’s ability to pray. I think too that parents sometimes underestimate the amount of disturbance their child is causing because they are so used to child noise that it doesn’t bother them all that much. For those who aren’t used to child noise, the distraction can be much greater.

2) It would be unreasonable to expect very small children to behave perfectly at Mass. However, reverent and prayerful attitudes towards Mass are presumably the ultimate goal, and that goal will never be reached if there aren’t some intermediate steps. Although I’m easily forgiving when I see a toddler struggling to be reverent in Mass, it’s hard not to feel some disgust when the same difficulty is exhibited by an eight or nine-year-old. (This is something, I should say, that I pretty much never see in a Latin Mass, in either form. But I certainly have seen it in some of the more, err, Spirit of Vatican II-happy parishes that I’ve occasionally had reason to visit.) Bringing children to Mass, but not troubling about their behavior there, is an excellent way to form their sensibilities wrongly.

My suggested compromise is that parents and non-parents both try to be reasonable, and as charitable as possible. Don’t be too quick to roll your eyes every time you hear a baby babbling or a whispered, “Mom!” Try to give the parents the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. On the other hand, parents should not go overboard with the “love me, love my child’s noise” stance that I sometimes hear from them. They don’t need to hang their heads in shame every time Junior makes a noise in Mass, but they should really be trying their best to minimize the disturbance. And they should be making an effort to instill the right kind of attitude by insisting that children not run, play, or converse in the sanctuary, and by refusing to carry on conversations (even whispered ones) while in church. (This is occasionally a difficult point for me, because I really feel it best to avoid chit-chat in the sanctuary even when Mass is not going on, but when a person engages me in conversation at the back of the church it can be hard to say, “can we step into the vestibule?” without sounding insufferably self-righteous. The problem is further compounded when my interlocutor can’t really step outside… because they are nominally supervising a child who is running through the sanctuary or climbing on the pews. Awkward.)

As an example of the wrong kind of attitude: the Doctor and I went to a lovely All Souls Mass this year, of the sort where all the stops had been pulled. The choir sang Mozart’s Requiem, there were scores of altar boys, and I’d never seen so many black vestments… you get the idea. It was quite an event. And, as sometimes happens for such events, it got an excellent turnout. The church was packed, with well over a thousand in the congregation. About the time the choir got to the Rex Coelestis a baby started howling. And howled. And howled. That child must have gone on screaming for a good fifteen minutes. It was a large church and the music was pretty loud, but I doubt that any of those thousand-plus people were unaware of the little darling’s unhappiness. Now, why in the world didn’t the caretaker of this child carry it outside? I can only imagine that this was one of the set of people who like to argue that children should be accepted as they are, etc etc, and maybe even thought that some salutary lesson was being learned by the annoyed people who kept glancing around to see what the problem was. Sorry, but I think that’s rather selfish. Why diminish the experience for hundreds of people when you could so easily just take the baby out for a little while, comfort her, and then (hopefully) come back again when calm has been restored? (Or, if the child is really inconsolable, it might be best to take her home anyway, or at least to take her downstairs for a bit more personal attention.) Like I say, I try to give parents the benefit of the doubt, to screen out most child noise, and to assume that parents are generally trying their best. It’s very rare that I leave Mass feeling annoyed about the behavior of the children. But parents… don’t push it. People will naturally get exasperated when it’s clear that you aren’t particularly interested in sparing others from the joys of your children’s antics while they are trying to pray.

Well, those are my non-parent views on children’s behavior at Mass. We’ll see if they change at all once I’ve had the pleasure of trying to quiet my own little ones through a Sunday liturgy. :)

Is there anything more exhausting than moving? It’s a great allegory for Purgatory – anticipation of better things to come, but for the present, seemingly endless pain and toil. This was just a local move, and it still left me wanting to go into hibernation for the next five months. But the happy news is, the Doctor and I are now homeowners for the first time! Hooray for mortgages, property taxes and home improvement projects!

Anyway, just to get my fingers warmed up again, here are the things that I’ve learned over the course of this latest move.

1) Don’t have a realtor for a landlord if you can help it. Not nice people to work with in that capacity.

2) If you’re going to be without home internet for a long time, try if possible to be the owner of a smartphone. Makes things much more manageable. Smartphones are insidious, though; it’s the sort of thing that never for a second seemed necessary to me, but now the idea of living without one seems well-nigh intolerable.

3) IKEA rocks. Plan to eat a meal there whenever you go; like most things at IKEA, it’s very cheap.

4) When buying a house for the first time, look around for an informational class on buying/owning a home. The one we went to was called the “Home Stretch Workshop” but I imagine most places have something similar. This is useful, in the first place, because you’ll probably learn a bunch of practical things you didn’t know about buying a house, but also because you may (as in our case) learn about a rash of programs to give financial assistance to first-time (or not necessarily just first-time) homeowners. We were amazed at how many there were. Ended up saving us quite a bit of money.

5) If possible, buy a house when the government is, for no very good reason, handing out free money to first-time homebuyers. Hey, I don’t exactly approve of such programs, but as long as I’m going to be spending the rest of my life helping to pay off these massive deficits, I might as well take the check now. I doubt my remodeled kitchen is a less worthy cause than plenty of other things being sponsored in this so-called “bailout.”

So, okay, nothing in that list has much to do with our Holy Faith, but this is what happens when we’re forced to turn our attention to worldly concerns for awhile. I’ll get back to more important things in my next post.

Besides, I’m sure crowds of people have been waiting on pins and needles for the second installment of the vegetarianism debate.

For the present, however, I wanted to make a small report on the Cornell Catholic Community. We’ve kind of gotten away from our roots on this blog; reporting on the abuses of the CCC was one of the main things that brought this little clan together. Now that all but one of us have moved on to greener pastures, we haven’t much to say on that subject anymore. Of course, I personally never did. I arrived on the scene comparatively late, and was warned away from that unhappy organization. Thus, when I accompanied a friend to Mass on Cornell’s campus this last Sunday, it marked only the third time I had ever done so.

The old guard of CCC protesters will be pleased to hear that there has been a great improvement. The Holy Spirit has intervened on behalf of those poor, suffering Cornell students, sending his message in the form of… the H1N1 virus. You see, due to fears about epidemic, the Cornell Chaplaincy has implemented the No-Touch Mass. Hand-holding, hand-shaking and hugging are all forbidden until further notice.

Naturally, they also seized the opportunity to forbid communicants from receiving on the tongue. This is silly — provided that priest and communicant both know what they’re doing, there is no reason in the world why this should increase the risk of infection. If they really wanted to decrease the chance of spreading disease through Communion, they would get rid of Eucharistic lay ministers. Still, on balance this is definitely a net gain. I doubt almost anybody received on the tongue at Cornell Masses anyway; certainly it was not encouraged. But by cutting back on all the huggy, hand-shaky campiness, they involuntarily introduced a measure of austerity and reverence to the liturgy that actually made it quite bearable, at least as a one-Sunday event.

God moves in mysterious ways.

First of all, I should define my terms. For the purposes of this reflection, I regard as vegetarian a person who doesn’t eat meat on the basis of some kind of principle that they would regard as ethical. A person who rarely or never eats meat for pragmatic reasons (because they can’t afford it, because they have digestive problems, etc.) doesn’t count as a vegetarian for this post. I myself, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, was a de facto vegetarian for a time, simply because my apartment had no adequate refrigeration, forcing me to avoid foods that could easily spoil and cause disease. But this was never a moral position, and as a guest in someone’s else’s home, I would willingly eat meat if it was served to me. These sorts of commonsensical cases raise no difficult ethical questions that I can see.

A person who simply doesn’t like meat is also not, I think, vicious, though such a person would be subject to all the same strictures that would normally apply to food preferences. What I mean by this is that, while it is perfectly acceptable to take personal preferences into account when planning your own diet, there are limits to how much one may justifiably inconvenience others for the sake of individual tastes. Vegetarianism is widely regarded as a dietary preference that party hosts, conferences, school cafeterias etc. are obliged to accommodate, much like food allergies or religious requirements. That would not seem reasonable if a person’s only reason for avoiding meat was that he didn’t like the taste. We do not, for example, expect accommodations to be made for people who just don’t like green vegetables, or who aren’t fond of legumes. That vegetarianism seems to rank alongside serious medical restrictions and religious requirements as a “must accommodate” dietary rule implies that we acknowledge the decision not to eat meat as having real moral force. Does it? For this post, I want to consider the moral position of people who are vegetarians, not for pragmatic reasons, and not out of submission to religious tradition, but for what they perceive to be independent (in the sense of being knowable by natural reason, and not dependent on tradition per se) moral reasons.

The first thing I want to note is that giving up meat has long been a common ascetic practice, adopted by Catholics and Orthodox for particular fasts, but by some hermits, religious orders etc as a permanent rule. Far be it from me to gainsay the practices of those holier than myself! But this, again, is a bit different from the vegetarianism we see today. The desert hermits would not have said that eating meat was morally defective in any way, any more than, say, talking to people was inherently morally defective. Like all forms of asceticism, this one involves giving up a good as a means of furthering an even greater good. Against those holy individuals who have profited from this practice I will say not a word. However, I do not think it would be appropriate to permanently adopt such an ascetic practice as an ordinary person living in the world, particularly if it caused inconvenience to others. There’s a reason why certain ascetic practices have been left to those who isolate themselves from the main course of human life. Adopting one or two such practices piecemeal, particularly on one’s own initiative and at a cost to others, is not a good way to achieve greater holiness; it is much more likely to be a source of spiritual pride.

So, having set aside pragmatic reasons, personal taste, and religious asceticism as justifications for vegetarianism, what do we have left? Perhaps this would be a good place to state that, for a Catholic, I don’t think it is possible to justify an absolute prohibition on eating meat. Here are a few simple reasons that seem to me sufficiently persuasive:

–There are multiple examples in the Bible of holy people eating meat.

–It seems overwhelmingly likely that Our Lord ate meat. We know for a fact that the Resurrected Christ ate fish, but in addition, it seems he must have eaten at least the meat of the Passover meal, since are told he kept all the Jewish laws and practiced their customs.

–If eating meat were per se morally defective, the Church would have told us before now. It’s hardly a new thing to eat the flesh of animals, but the Magisterium has never said anything against it (except, as observed above, on certain occasions when abstinence is part of a fast.) I trust that the Magisterium would not make so glaring an error as to neglect to tell us, for two millennia, if Catholics worldwide were regularly engaged in an immoral practice. Thus I conclude that eating meat must not be wrong.

It seems to me that these reasons are strong enough to alleviate any worry that the killing of animals for human consumption is per se wrong, or that raising them for this purpose is definitely wrong. Both of these practices have been commonplace from Biblical times until ours, and in the parable of the Prodigal Son God the Father is himself represented as killing the fatted calf (that he has been raising) to celebrate his son’s homecoming. I doubt Our Lord would ever have described the Father as celebrating via an immoral practice.

I also think we can safely dismiss the possibility that eating meat is permissible in extreme emergencies only. The story of the Prodigal Son is just one example of an (apparently) divinely sanctioned use of meat in an obviously non-emergency scenario. Nobody was in danger of starvation, and the farm seems to have been prosperous; the meat was used in a celebratory way. I have heard it said that eating meat may have been necessary in earlier ages because it is a complete protein (one that supplies the human body with all the necessary amino acids) whereas today, given our greater variety of food, it is possible through careful diet management to get the necessary nutrients without eating meat. I think in the long run this is more of an argument in favor of meat than against it, but I’ll explain that in a moment.

First, I should give at least a moment’s consideration to one more possible justification for vegetarianism: some give up meat as a protest against commercial farming methods. The contention is, in effect, that animals are treated so brutally in commercial conditions (presumably for the sake of producing meat as efficiently as possible) that we ought to boycott their products. This is a hard argument for me to evaluate; on the one hand, I like animals. Obviously they’re God’s creatures, and I do think we have some obligations towards them. It is definitely wrong to cause them pain needlessly.

On the other hand, I also think it’s right and fitting for us to rule over the animals and, in some cases, subordinate their good to ours. So, what guidelines precisely should we have for governing proper treatment of animals? Frankly, I really don’t know. In general, ethical questions are decided with reference to the telos of the thing in question. But, as I’ve said above, I don’t think it can be absolutely wrong to kill animals to serve just human ends, and once that’s been established it becomes difficult to draw definite lines. After all, in the human case, “You may not deliberately kill the innocent” is the number one agreed-upon law, but if that doesn’t apply, what does?

Further complicating matters is the fact that, in my view, there must he a hierarchy of animals, with some having more moral value than others. We need better reasons for killing/frustrating the tele of the higher animals, and not such good reasons in the case of the lesser. Thus, when I see a hairy spider in my house, I kill it, for no better reason than that I don’t like having spiders in my home. I don’t really bother trying for a catch-and-release in the case of a spider; on the other hand, if I see the same spider on the sidewalk outside I’ll leave it alone. But if the animal that worked its way into my house were a stray cat or dog, I wouldn’t try to kill it. I don’t think there’s an absolute moral prohibition against killing dogs and cats, but better reasons are required than in the spider case. Unless the dog or cat is posing a serious threat to a human being, it should be caught or shooed outside.

So, what about chickens, pigs or cows? Well, they do seem to rank higher than spiders in the animal hierarchy; on the other hand, I also think it’s relevant that humans have traditionally used these animals for food, whereas cats and dogs have more frequently been pets. They are, as a friend of mine likes to say, “friend species”, which provide companionship in exchange for human care. Pigs and chickens don’t provide much in the way of companionship, but they are traditional “food species” and I think this makes it okay to eat them, and to raise them for food. Does it make it okay to view pigs or chickens in a completely utilitarian way, with no concern whatsoever for the animals’ own welfare? Probably not… but again, I don’t know how to decide which practices are beyond the pale. The fact that my contribution to this process is very indirect in any case (when all I’m doing is purchasing the chicken breasts at the store, or, even more indirect, eating what’s served to me at a dinner or other event) throws just one more ingredient into an already complex moral cocktail.

I guess I’m inclined to think, with a practice as widespread and traditional as eating meat, that the burden of proof is more on the vegetarian to provide some coherent explanation of how we should be handling these issues before asserting the legitimacy of their dietary preferences in a public way. But I admit that there’s potential here to establish limitations on the eating of at least some meat. However, I think it’s worth noting that this would not justify a complete vegetarianism. Animals raised under more humane conditions could still be eaten, as well as meat obtained through hunting. Eating venison, which helps keep the exploding population of deer under control, seems a positively good thing for those who are concerned about the welfare of animals. (Because deer have too few natural predators in the United States right now, their populations tend to expand out of control, which leads to severe suffering from hunger. Adding humans to the list of possible predators can only be a good thing for the hungry deer.)

Incidentally, I have actually met people whose families refuse to purchase commercially raised animals, but who do hunt venison for food in the proper season.

Anyway, this is my evaluation of the positive reasons for vegetarianism, which I guess could be summarized as, “inconclusive, but I’d need a better argument than I’ve heard to find the case very credible.” Stay tuned for my next essay, in which I consider the possibility that vegetarianism might be, not just non-obligatory, but actually vicious.

Cardinal O’Malley’s recent blog post justifying his participation in Ted Kennedy’s funeral was, in its way, almost as painful as the event itself. Signs of bad faith are everywhere. Consider, for example, his suggestion that many people have been upset about the funeral because Kennedy “did not publicly support” Catholic teaching and advocacy on behalf of the unborn, as though the offense were merely oversleeping through the March for Life instead of a longstanding, public commitment to supporting abortion legislation. Then, after some glowing (but very brief and unspecific) homage to the Senator’s life accomplishments, the remainder of the post is a study in irrelevance as he reminisces about other deceased members of the Kennedy family (apparently we’re supposed to be impressed that not every Kennedy was through-and-through depraved; Rose Kennedy, for example, had a lovely prayer card at her funeral), the beauty of the music at the funeral, and the charm of the Irish generally. He also made some mention of his own record of pro-life activities, as if to prove to the Catholic faithful that honestly, he isn’t pro-abortion.

The only thing that should really need to be said in this case is that Ted Kennedy was clearly and visibly a formal heretic — a man who had dedicated significant energies to directly defying Magisterial teachings in a very public way. Granting him, not only a Catholic funeral, but a large, overblown, red carpet Catholic funeral, is a terrible source of scandal and badly undermines the Church’s claim to value the lives of the unborn. We already know that a great number of American Catholics refuse to take this issue seriously, and this is exactly the kind of behavior that will ensure that they never do.

But, just to add a bit to the tally… Kennedy also defied Church teachings on a number of other issues, such as the disordered nature of homosexuality. He was divorced, a known adulterer, and a man who left a woman to suffocate in a car that he had recklessly driven into a river, presumably for the sake of preserving his own political career. Why is it that we heard constantly about the shamefulness of the Bush family, and George W’s “legacy” admission to Yale, while nothing is said about the fact that Kennedy was not only a “legacy” admission to Harvard, but was actually expelled for cheating… twice?

This was not a heroic man. Not even a very good one, for that matter. But perhaps the worst thing of all is that Kennedy never showed serious signs of remorse or a changed character. He was known to make jokes about the Chappaquiddick incident, and obviously he never publicly retracted any of his heretical views. And while it’s not for me to say whether he did actually repent for any of his misdeeds, a very public figure such as himself owed it to the American people (and particularly American Catholics) to make that widely known if such a genuine conversion took place, if only to help mitigate the grave scandal that he has caused both in life and in death.

Then again, it is obvious that Kennedy was not a particularly brave man.

We’ve all seen plenty of glowing pieces on Kennedy’s great accomplishments these last weeks, in light of which it is necessary to be a bit more honest than one normally likes to be about the recently deceased. It is nonsense to talk of the “incredible commitment to social justice” of someone who supported the killing of the unborn, or of the “great concern for the weak and helpless” shown by a man who wouldn’t even call the authorities to help a trapped woman suffocating in his car. That Bishop O’Malley could respond to serious concerns about the scandal caused by this incident with a rambling reflection on Irish charm and Rose Kennedy’s prayer cards only deepens the impression of a complete lack of moral seriousness on the part of Church leadership. I do understand, of course, that to deny someone a Catholic funeral is an extreme step, and one that would have caused an outcry of a different kind. I realize that the hurtful effects of such an action also need to be considered. But in this particular case, when the man in question was so extremely well-known, and so very public in his heresy, there are other serious consequences to be considered too. O’Malley’s post gives the very strong impression that they never were. His next-to-last paragraph reads as follows:

At times, even in the Church, zeal can lead people to issue harsh judgments and impute the worst motives to one another. These attitudes and practices do irreparable damage to the communion of the Church. If any cause is motivated by judgment, anger or vindictiveness, it will be doomed to marginalization and failure. Jesus’ words to us were that we must love one another as He loves us. Jesus loves us while we are still in sin. He loves each of us first, and He loves us to the end. Our ability to change people’s hearts and help them to grasp the dignity of each and every life, from the first moment of conception to the last moment of natural death, is directly related to our ability to increase love and unity in the Church, for our proclamation of the Truth is hindered when we are divided and fighting with each other.

So once again we see the phenomenon that prevailed in the sad incidents at Notre Dame this last spring. It’s important to show love and solidarity to everyone, to promote dialogue and friendship and to impute good motives to everybody… except of course when anger is expressed by those who are hurt by the Church leadership’s lack of a clear message about fundamental Catholic moral teachings. Those people are judgmental and vindictive and damaging the unity of the Church. No need to deal seriously with them.

The Truth is hindered when Catholics are divided and fighting each other. In this the Cardinal was perfectly right. But sadly, events like this make clear to us that such will be the state of affairs within the Church for a long, long time to come.

My problems with this were that 1) I really don’t do the candy-selling thing, 2) I wasn’t sure how I felt about the whole Protestant mission-trip business, and 3) This girl was crazy. Truly neurotic. I won’t elaborate, except just to say that she would be a dreadful emissary for Christianity in almost any setting. I was almost sorry she was going to a Muslim country instead of a Catholic one; as a representative of Evangelicalism, she might have been an excellent instrument for scaring Catholics back to Rome.

Feeling awkward about the whole affair, I discharged my implied duty by selling a few bars of chocolate to drunken girls coming back to my dormitory on Saturday night. I figured it served them right to lose a few bucks on candy in their intoxicated state. Then I returned the rest of the box and said that, sorry, that was all I could sell. I guess overall I probably only contributed about a buck fifty to this fundraising endeavor, so I didn’t feel too bad about it. Of course, today I would have flatly refused to be involved at all (but then, today I would not have been in the Bible Study group in the first place.)

From that time to this, I have always had some ambivalence about Protestant missions. It isn’t that I’m necessarily offended by proselytizing, though obviously there are some sticky issues to be dealt with on that front. Even quite apart from proselytizing, Protestant groups can sometimes do real good in the locations in which they work. In my work as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan I had some contact with a Protestant organization that had started an enormously successful development center in the region. Peace Corps had told us that they were religiously motivated and engaged in proselytism, but whatever work they did on that score must have been very subtle and discreet, because everyone in the city seemed to know and love the workers of this Center, and nobody seemed to know a thing about their religious mission. What people did know about was their affordable (but very good) English classes, their free library and internet access, the sports and summer camps that they organized for young people, and so forth. It’s hard for me to be too down on these Protestant missions after having seen the Andijan Development Center.

Nonetheless, I do think there is a problem with the Protestant attitude towards missions. The problem is something like this. These Protestants read the Bible, they get excited about the words of the Gospels, and they are attracted to the liminal lifestyle. They want to be the ones who go without purse or scrip, who leave everything they have to follow Christ, who suffer and maybe die for Him, holding nothing back. This in itself is a good thing. That they should dream of doing this through service in developing nations is, well, not a bad thing anyway. But then they go and… get married.

Protestants have never really done much with religious orders. Luther disbanded them with his Priesthood of All Believers, and few efforts have been made on the Protestant front to revive the custom. Celibacy has made a few appearances here and there, but in general Protestants haven’t had much appreciation of that, either. So it would never occur to most of them that a person who desires the liminal lifestyle should not get married.

But this is a real defect with Protestant missionary-type efforts. Capable, intelligent married Protestants go forging off into the unknown, perhaps with uncertain living conditions, often having to scare up their own funding, almost always neglecting possibilities for more secure employment. They comfort themselves, presumably, with the words of the Gospel about the lilies of the field, etc., but at the end of the day they are putting their children at risk unnecessarily, and insofar as they are living uncertainly off funding begged from private individuals, they are transferring to others a responsibility that should be their own: the responsibility to feed and provide for a family. Even if the intentions behind it are basically good, this can be a kind of culpable neglect.

There is, in addition, the fact that, as private individuals, these Protestants don’t take any vows or have any direct superiors. If there is anyone who needs direct superiors, it is those who seek out the liminal life; these are particularly inclined to error and excess of various sorts, and they don’t have the more plebeian tasks of everyday life to keep their enthusiasms in check. The yoke of obedience tames any dangerous tendencies and channels the burning piety of the religiously zealous in positive directions. But Protestants, lacking any such structure, put themselves at risk of all kinds of errors and indiscretions.

Every person should try, insofar as the circumstances of his life permit, to keep some part of himself free for God, ready to follow the divine command, and even to die for the faith if it should prove necessary. At the same time, no person should entirely throw off the salutary weight of natural human bonds. But, that said, there is great wisdom in keeping these two sorts of lives distinct. Those who enter into marriage and family life must make their family obligations a priority, and not allow other interests and pursuits to prevent them from fulfilling their obligations to spouse and children. Meanwhile, those who pursue the liminal life will reap countless other rewards, but in order to achieve those, they must make other sacrifices… first among them, marriage and family. These two sorts of lives can compliment each other. But they do need to be kept distinct.

Here was the part that alarmed me:

“Doerflinger said the bishops’ materials about health care reform have been centered on supporting universal coverage, but opposing mandated abortion coverage.

‘She keeps talking about how we’re trying to diminish a right,’ he said of Richards. ‘A mandate is not consistent with personal choice. If what she’s talking about is people’s personal ability to choose whether or not to buy abortion coverage, we’re not going to oppose legislation that allows that.’”

Sorry? Run that by me again? The USCCB is not opposed to elective abortion coverage, just so long as it costs extra? Of course we should note that, parsing words carefully, Doerflinger doesn’t actually say that the bishops are not opposed to personal abortion coverage; he only said that they are not going to oppose it, presumably meaning that they aren’t going to offer political opposition to the health care bill as long as it makes abortion coverage optional and not state-sponsored. This leaves open the argument that abortion coverage is still wrong but that, for prudential reasons, given the great benefits of nationalized health care blah blah blah, we should let this go. It’s not so bad that the state is greasing the wheels for people to kill their babies, as long as taxpayers aren’t footing the bill for the actual procedure.

I’m not appeased. In the first place it’s ridiculous for someone speaking on behalf of the USCCB to allow a Planned Parenthood representative to define the terms of the debate and make it about “women’s rights.” Catholics enthusiastically affirm that women, and pregnant women in particular, should have everything they need and deserve, namely care and support from their communities and families and especially the fathers of their children. The right to kill their children does not exist. There is no reason to engage in this kind of Jesuitical (in the pejorative sense) hairsplitting in order to cater to a Planned Parenthood worker’s grotesquely distorted notion of “rights.”

But that’s just a niggling rhetorical point. Far more important is the political question: what sort of compromise are the bishops willing to condone? Would they really give the green light to a nationalized plan that offers abortion coverage as an option (though for some small additional monthly fee)? This seems to me like a potentially disastrous mistake. In the first place, it sends a terrible message: that Catholics are willing to give up the fight for the lives of the unborn, just as long as we don’t have to be personally involved. But, even more critically, allowing ourselves to be appeased by such a subtle measure is almost certainly going to be a losing proposition in the long run. Once health care has effectively been nationalized, and the government is even managing the “abortion coverage” through their own plan, it’s simplicity itself to find some way to tweak things a bit to eliminate the extra charge.

If the Democrats were smart, they’d do this in as low-key a manner as possible, and pitch it with a purely practical, utilitarian argument. “It’s so much work to process the extra paperwork, figuring out who wants abortion coverage and who doesn’t. Then there’s the extra bookkeeping that comes from trying to separate out the different sources of funding. It’s costing more than the abortions themselves. Let’s just slide abortion into the umbrella plan and save all this logistical hassle.” And there it is — state sponsored abortion. Most Americans probably wouldn’t even know or understand what had happened.

The ease with which this sort of thing could be accomplished is one of several reasons why I think nationalized health care just is not a good idea. Even if the initial bill is amended to make no mention of abortion, it’ll be a temporary measure. Once the plan passes, it’ll only be a matter of time until we’re all paying for the routine slaughter of the unborn. The real obstacle — the line that Europe and Canada have already crossed, and that we haven’t fully yet — is in making government ultimately responsible for (and thus, in an important sense in charge of) every citizen’s health. Once your individual health becomes Uncle Sam’s responsibility, it becomes Uncle Sam’s business, and once that happens, the whole political landscape will be changed… and it will be almost impossible to go back.

Let’s consider, for example, the much-discussed “death panel” issue. Democrats charge that the talk of “death panels” is completely beside the point, a petty Republican scare tactic designed to frustrate real progress. Actually, this is an excellent way of getting at the real problem. Although the name “death panel” may seem overly dramatic, the bottom line (as Mark Steyn has been tirelessly arguing) is that, in a single-payer health care system, the single payer will be making all kinds of decisions about people’s health care — about what practices are and are not legitimate, about how to distribute resources, and ultimately, about who is and is not worth keeping alive. Whether this is accomplished through panels of administrators in suits, or through very detailed legislation going through Congress, or through Obama personally going through stacks of case files and sorting them into “yes” or “no” piles, makes little difference in the long run. The bottom line is that if the government pays the bills, the government will have to call the shots. This is the only way to keep costs out of the stratosphere (not that they won’t be high enough on any nationalized system.)

This leaves some very morally weighty decisions in government hands. The problem isn’t necessarily that Obama would “pull the plug on grandma” when goodhearted Kaiser would keep her alive. The problem is that the government will get to decide, and people themselves won’t have much of an option. Now, obviously, people find themselves in some pretty tough situations in the current system too. We’ve all got stories of people who outrageously couldn’t get their insurance to cover X, and given how much health care costs these days, paying for things out of pocket can be a frightening proposition. But at least in a more privatized system there are some options. Competition between different companies prevents any one from assuming complete control over Americans’ health options. Private medical savings accounts paired with high deductible plans, which more and more people have these days (including the Doctor and myself) require people to pay more of their own medical costs, but this also allows them to make more of their own decisions about what they are and aren’t willing to pay. (Incidentally, it also gives people incentives to stay healthy and not take unnecessary risks.) If you’re still feeling great at 80, and you think it is worth the major knee surgery to improve your quality of life, a government panel can’t tell you no.

But, most importantly, insurance companies are just, well, companies. Their powers are pretty limited. They could try to encourage you to exercise by, say, arranging for discount memberships to gyms, but they can’t pass legislation requiring you to jog every morning. They could encourage you to eat well by distributing information on the benefits of a healthy diet, but they can’t ban Doritos. There’s a limit to how sinister and intrusive an insurance company’s policies can become. Not so the Federal Government. There’s a real sense in which nationalizing health care is nationalizing you — your physical person. It’s all the government’s business from here on out.

Does this not terrify you? Given what we already know about the party presently in power, and the degree of respect they have for human life, it should. If a government board is authorized to determine that old Aunt Sally doesn’t have a high enough quality of life to be worth treating, it’s entirely conceivable that they could make similar judgment calls about others. What happens, for example, when they decide that Down Syndrome children don’t have a high enough quality of life to be worth keeping alive? Might parents of children with disabilities be told that they won’t be getting obstetricians or pediatricians because their offspring have too low a quality of life? We’ve already heard about the “counseling” that will be provided to the elderly. Why not to expectant couples whose unborn children haven’t made the cut? Frightening things might happen when we hand over our health and our life-and-death decisions to an already-powerful entity that has manifested several times over that it is not committed to life.

Don’t be distracted by apparent nuances and obvious lies about this plan, such as the claim that people who are happy with their current insurance plan will be totally unaffected. Once we start pouring taxpayer dollars into a universally available health care plan, it won’t be long before most all of us are on it. How many employers/private individuals will want (and be able to) pay for a whole separate health care plan of their own when they’re already effectively paying for one through their taxes? And, as ample evidence has already shown, once people learn to look to the government for care, whole societal attitudes are fundamentally changed. Dependencies develop, people become fixated more on their needs than on their obligations, and they lose a sense of personal responsibility. It’s not an accident that countries with lots of entitlements and legalized abortion also tend to have very low birth rates. When people lose a sense of responsibility for their own, and their families’, lives and welfare, the capacity for voluntary giving and self-sacrifices shrinks along with it.

I can’t really believe that the US bishops are okay with “abortion coverage” whether optional or not. Have there been any clarifications on this point? But in any case, I think they’re making a mistake in supporting the Democrats’ health care initiatives, even with certain expressed reservations. Even apart from concerns about cost and efficiency, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the Democrats can be trusted to create “genuine life-affirming health care reform” that the bishops have optimistically requested. And there are plenty of reasons to doubt it.

“The fetus, given the opportunity to develop properly before birth, and given the essential early socializing experiences and sufficient nourishing food during the crucial early years after birth, will eventually develop into a human being. Where any of these essential elements is lacking, the resultant individual will be deficient in some respect.”

Look at that! John Holdren endorses the metaphysical proposition that being is goodness! And you know what? His last sentence is exactly right. When essential elements are lacking in a person’s development or upbringing, deficiencies will result. A person who is insufficiently nourished will be deficient in some respect — deficient in health and physical development. An improperly socialized person will also be deficient in some respect, unable to fully realize the potential of human relationships. Of course, when it comes down to it, pretty much everybody’s “deficient in some respect” so those malnourished or improperly socialized folks needn’t feel too bad.

Holdren’s only mistake is in thinking that one must develop into a human being. Indeed, a small degree of reflection will show that this makes no sense. We want to say that certain individuals (though I’d say nearly all) are “deficient”… but deficient what? You have to classify them as a kind of thing before you can say that they’re a deficient thing, and if malnourished or badly socialized… or very physically immature… people are not “human beings” then I certainly don’t know what they are. Sounds like John Holdren is a little muddled on some things.

In other words, he’s deficient in some respect. Or, to put it in terms he might understand… not fully human.

Even as an adult, it can be a little bit tough to sort out the moral significance of complaining. On the one hand, everyone is familiar with the dispiriting effects that a constant complainer can have on a family, workplace or other group. On the other, we obviously can’t be expected to be little Polyannas all the time, and indeed, a failure to exercise discernment when necessary can itself be a grave fault. This, then is my best shot at breaking down negativity and suggesting where it is appropriate, and where dangerous.

At the core of the sin of murmuring is rebellion against God. It is a refusal to accept the crosses that He has deemed good for us to carry. Thus, it seems to me that an essential element of true murmuring is bitterness. One feels a sense of injustice that one should have to suffer in a particular way. Of course, this indignance will not necessarily be directed at God explicitly. It might be directed towards other people, likely authority figures of some kind (the Church, parents, pastors etc), or towards nobody in particular. But the signature of a dangerous or sinful form of complaint is the explicit or implicit idea that I should not have to endure this. This is an unreasonable trial. When one’s reacts to a particular burden, not just with grief or weariness, but also with anger, there is cause to worry that a sinful attitude may be involved.

Matters become complicated when one’s grievance does in fact involve an injustice, obviously not on God’s part, but on the part of another human being. Indignance and anger are not always in improper feelings, when directed towards other fallen mortals. Here I think the best indicators are those associated with forgiveness and forbearing. Am I interested in the reform of the offending body, or only in vengeance? Am I concerned with other sufferers, or mainly just incensed on my own behalf? It is right, at least under some circumstances, to work for the improvement of the world and the righting of injustice, but wrong to feel that we are entitled to succeed in these endeavors. God is the ultimate judge, and in the end all such matters are left to His care.

With that said, here are the different varieties of complaining that occur to me, together with my evaluation of the dangers and possible goods associated with each.

1. Bitter or vindictive ranting

While sometimes understandable, this is the most obviously bad sort of complaining. A bitter tirade virtually never does anything to mend fences or improve the situation, and it generally serves only to mire the ranter more deeply in his wounded feelings.

2. Pleas for support

This is a broad category, and in consequence, this kind of complaining cannot definitely be classified as good or bad. Very often, we’ll share our grievances with others as a means of getting sympathy, advice or some other sort of affirmation. Although it can bleed into the above category, I think this kind of complaining is different in that the person wants to be made to feel better, whereas the only kind of support the vindictive ranter wants is other bitter people to join his cause. Soothing or would-be uplifting words tend only to make him angrier.

We all need to engage in this sort of complaining at times. Everyone feels a need on occasion to “get something off his chest” or to have someone reassure him in a troubled time, and this kind of solidarity in suffering is one of the primary building blocks of close human relationships. A person who decides not to share any of her trials with others is liable to feel lonely and isolated, and to find the difficulty of those burdens increased exponentially. That kind of stubborn independence or stoicism can itself be a kind of defect. So we shouldn’t outlaw “support complaining,” but there are, nonetheless, various associated dangers. Sometimes this kind of complaining can descend into spiteful gossip. Sometimes it can become self-indulgent and narcissistic; we’ve all been wearied at times by the person who never seems to willing to talk about anything except her busy and overworked schedule, health problems, troubled love life, bad boss or supervisor, etc etc, with little or no apparent interest in anyone else’s lives or problems. Even this, though, may not properly be fit into the category of murmuring; in my experience, this kind of person does want to be cheered up, and often can be. The defect is more in a kind of selfishness, wanting constantly to draw social support from others (in the form of attention and sympathy) without having a similar willingness to give back. That is a failing, but a different failing, which I will not discuss further here.

Thus, with respect to the sin of murmuring, I think “support complaining” is primarily dangerous insofar as excessive or exaggerated complaining can eventually instill bitterness. Thus, we should take care of how much we complain to others in a plea for support, and we should also be careful about the responses we give to others when they complain to us. Of course it’s appropriate to give social support to our friends and families, but we should try to do this in ways that won’t lead to bitterness. How best to do this will depend heavily on the situation. Sometimes it can be appropriate to gently help a person to see that an offending party probably wasn’t so much in the wrong as he seems to think. Sometimes it may be good to help a sufferer focus more on what can be done about a situation, or to praise them for how well they’re handling a situation, rather than stoking angry feelings about the wrong itself. With very intense suffering, it can never hurt to be reminded that all is ultimately under God’s care. Obviously discernment is called for here, but as a rule of thumb, it’s rarely good if a person comes to you for support, and leaves more upset than when they came.

3. Complaining as a conversational gambit

The reality is, people like to talk, and conversation is one of our primary means of human interaction. One major source of conversational material is to diagnose what’s wrong with the world. It seems to me fruitless and probably counterproductive to try to outlaw this, although, again, there are dangers. I already mentioned gossip. Also, this kind of complaining can encourage showing off, sometimes in ways that are cruel or mean-spirited. Jokes at the expense of others are a source of real grist for the social mill, and obviously these have the potential to be unfair and unkind.

Even so, I don’t think humorous complaining, even at others’ expense, should be considered absolutely off-limits. Humor can encapsulate bitterness, but it can also be one of our greatest weapons for alleviating it. Observing the ridiculousness of the world can lead us very close to appreciating its goodness, and it is hard to feel too bitter when one is laughing. Thus, I think this is another kind of complaining that should be monitored, but permitted. One safeguard against an unhealthy mean-spiritedness is keeping a proper sense of perspective about one’s own failings — mixing in a certain amount of self-deprecating humor can keep things from getting too nasty.

4. Complaining as means to redress

Here we have the least dangerous form of complaining. Sometimes it is necessary to diagnose problems as a means to fixing them. Of course, prudence is needed to determine when, how and to whom to complain. But we certainly wouldn’t want people to refrain from pointing out problems to those who really need to know about them, merely because they’re afraid of seeming too “negative.”

Well, dear readers, there you have my best catalog of the various forms of complaints and their legitimacy. Any others I should have mentioned? Does this seem a plausible analysis?

First of all. We are constantly told that we should never apologize or admit fault after an accident, even if we are relatively certain that it was our fault. I can understand the need for caution in this area, because I know that some people are always inclined to regard themselves as being at fault after an unfortunate incident even if they may perhaps not have been. And of course, as we are repeatedly told, the person who apologizes at the accident scene can find their apology being used against them in court. So caution is warranted, especially for reflexive “sorry-sayers” (that is, those people whose impulse to apologize is so strong that you could whomp them over the head with a rolling pin and their automatic response would be, “sorry!”).

However. Sometimes a person can be relatively certain that they were in fact at fault. If you accidently ran a stop sign and thus crashed into a person who did in fact have the right of way, you can be pretty certain you were at fault. In which case, an apology is very much in order. I fail to see how the existence of an overblown culture of litigation can relieve us of such basic obligations of decency, and I don’t think we should allow insurance companies to bully us out of fulfilling them.

Next point. Some people, in an effort to avoid saying anything that might possibly jeopardize their chances of making a killing through lawsuits, refuse even to speak to the other driver(s) or passengers in other cars involved in the accident. This is unconscionable. Once again, I can see how answering the question, “are you all right?” in the affirmative might make it more difficult to argue later that you sustained life-altering injuries of a sort that would entitle you to half a million in compensation. But if you are, so far as you can tell, substantially unharmed, you can answer at least with a tentative, “I think so.” And enquire about the other person’s health.

How well we respond in intense, crisis situations is one important mark of our level of moral development. And for many of us, car accidents are one of the most likely “crisis situations” that may arise at some point. It really is terrible if we allow insurance companies to teach us that we must view them first and foremost as occasions for considering our legal liability, rather than as occasions in which we should be concerned about others’ well-being, and eager to help as far as we can. It also strikes me that, even though behaving decently may open a person up to certain legal risks, behaving abominably is also likely to enrage others and encourage them to use the legal system to their maximum advantage. Thus, a litigation-happy culture feeds itself, by further depersonalizing society until strangers automatically seem like enemies to us, and lawsuits become one of the only means for keeping us from each others’ throats.

By the way, in case any kind readers were wondering, there is no need to worry about the Doctor or me… the actual incident that provoked this reflection happened a year ago, nobody was hurt, and the subsequent legal proceeding wasn’t much more than a minor annoyance. But I still think this is a real problem for society at large, and accepting uncritically an insurance company’s word about accident etiquette is one way to give in to the negative pressures of such a culture.

I don’t mean to suggest that there are no remotely tenable answers to this question. In the first place, one might have prudential reasons for wanting to minimize abortions: because the procedure uses medical resources that could be better used elsewhere (but this is surely a minimal concern given the many, much more costly procedures that are regularly being performed at insurance companies’ or the government’s expense), because it eliminates potential members of the future workforce (which really is a serious concern in most Western countries today), or because it has negative physical and psychological effects on the women who seek out abortions. This last, though, raises some further questions, because if abortion is not wrong, at least the negative psychological effects are presumably just the product of misguided sentiment. All the woman needs is to be reassured that there is nothing morally problematic about what she has done. On the other hand, people who admit that emotional trauma is a natural and likely result of abortion ought to wonder a bit why that should be the case, if abortion is not wrong.

One might argue that abortion is wrong, but that it should not, for whatever reason, be made illegal. I can think of plenty of things that I regard as morally wrong, about which I do not think we need any laws. At the very least, though, it is not reasonable to argue that women have a right to abortion, if it is morally wrong, especially if (as seems almost certain to be the case) the reason for its wrongness relates to the fact that it is unjustly ending the life of another human being. Nobody could have a right to unjustly take another’s life.

Then finally, one might argue that abortion is a bad thing, but not in every case morally wrong. This is the sort of avenue pursued in Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous defense of abortion (not necessarily familiar to all our readers here, but a major touchstone within the philosophical literature on this subject.) Thompson concedes for the sake of argument that the developing fetus is a person with a right to life, but argues that this does not entitle it to place heavy demands on particular other people, aka its mother. Insofar as the mother has not volunteered to carry it (which she certainly has not in the case of rape, and in Thompson’s view even the woman who uses contraceptives may claim that she has “not volunteered” for the arduous job of having a baby) she may justly refuse the task, even if this means the child’s death. She may be selfish or callous or crass in so choosing, but that is not, Thompson supposes, a moral wrong, or at any rate not one of the sort the law can regulate. It is unkind to refuse a loan to a friend in need, to neglect to hold the door for the elderly person behind you with her cane, to slam the door on the schoolchildren collecting cans of food for the homeless, and to abort one’s child. But the we are still entitled to do these things if we so choose. Someone who buys into this argument might agree that abortion is sad and that it would be good to have less of them, while still arguing that women have a right to one.

They might. But there are some serious drawbacks to such views. First of all it should be said: if abortion is wrong at all, it is seriously wrong. Perhaps I should modify that slightly to say: if abortion is wrong enough to be worth worrying about, the wrong must be grave. For someone who thinks, like Peter Singer and others of his ilk, that a fetus has (depending on its state of development) a value somewhere equivalent to a goldfish, a blue jay, or some other small animal, then killing it is of no very great moral importance and we should stop bothering about the issue. On the other hand, if the fetus has the same moral worth that we normally attach to already-born human beings, killing it is a serious matter indeed, and pro-choice people should feel hard-pressed to explain why abortion is not murder, or, if it is murder, why we should not be treating it as such legally.

For followers of Thompson’s argument, a great many things can be said, but I would start with one that is well articulated by a British philosopher, David Oderburg, in his book. He asks: how much are we entitled to do to repel unwanted advances from other people? This is a question, of course, that can be applied to situations of many kinds, because there are many different sorts of burdens that can be imposed on us by others. Oderburg uses the example of someone who has been conditioned, under hypnosis, to follow you around wherever you go playing obnoxious music at a loud volume. This is an unjust intrusion on your peace and well-being, and you need not willingly submit to it. You may run away, and use such means as are at your disposal to throw the assailant off your trail. You may retreat to the most soundproof room you can find, and lock the door. If he persists for long enough, you may call the police and ask them to forcibly remove him from your presence. But are you entitled to pull out your shotgun and simply blow him away? Surely not. This would be a wildly disproportionate response to the inconvenience imposed on you. Your life is not being threatened, and while the intrusion is placing an unfair burden on you, this fact alone is not sufficient to justify using any means necessary for ridding yourself of the annoyance.

Similar considerations, surely, should apply to the abortion case. A response to an unjust intrusion, even when it unquestionably is unjust, must be proportionate to the threat. I won’t here get into the “hard cases”, because it does seem that this argument, in isolation, leaves open the possibility that abortion might be justified in cases where the threat to the mother’s life is severe. For the purposes of the above question, though, it is enough to observe that these cases will be a very small minority. Pregnancy and childbirth do pose burdens on women, and those burdens can be substantial, but in this day and age they very rarely pose a serious threat to the mother’s life, or even her long-term physical health. To maintain that she has a “right” to rid herself of the inconvenience at the cost of the child’s life is thus a highly dubious proposition, and it is reasonable to demand a more satisfactory justification from those who advocate “abortion rights.”

All of this is just to suggest that the “we can all agree to reduce the number” line should be taken as the starting place for some much more stringent questioning. Is abortion wrong? If not, why should we bother about it? If so, why aren’t we bothering more?

One of the great things about living in a northern state is that you come to have a great appreciation for good weather. We’ve had lovely weather these past couple of days, and my husband and I have gone down in the evenings to one of the local parks, where we toss a football around for awhile and then walk along the river. It feels like a real treat. And other people obviously feel the same way, because there are always plenty of others — mostly couples and families — out enjoying the summer weather with us, picnicking or fishing or playing with small children in the grass. With everything green and flourishing, one has the joyful feeling of being surrounded by abundant life.

I love all seasons (though I will confess that, up north where we live, I’m pretty tired of winter by the time it ends.) Maybe someday when I am old, I’ll want a Floridian condo wherein I will never again have to worry about heavy overcoats or frozen fingers. But even then, I suspect I would miss the seasons. Each one has its special magic, and I find too that, in each season, there is a particular time of day that I most cherish. In springtime, mornings are the most lovely. When they’re bright and sunny, the world seems bathed in freshness and hope, and on the wet rainy mornings, it feels that the whole world is being bathed and nourished and prepared for the good things to come. In summer, the evenings are my favorites, when the heat of the day has passed and cool breezes stir the leaves. At that time, the world feels alert and rich and full of life; there is something luscious and almost decadent about a summer evening.

It would be hard, though, to match the piercing beauty of a golden autumn afternoon. There is a tragic loveliness to those crisp fall days, as transitory as they are exquisite, reminding us how all of the joys and glories of this life must soon pass. Then finally, there is winter. In winter, I find the most memorable time is the dead of night with the snow falling heavily outside, and me inside, tucked warm in bed, or else cozy inside with hot soup or hot chocolate or buttered popcorn. There can be a certain exhilaration to outdoor activities in winter, but the loveliest thing about winter, I find, is the keen appreciation it gives us for comfort and security and warmth. There is no pleasanter time to cuddle up to the person you love than on a cold winter night!

The wonderful thing about the seasons is that, when the pleasures of one start to fade, the pleasures of the next begin as a kind of compensation. Up north where we live, as I’ve said, the winter does get a bit disproportionately long, and by the end of it I’m quite happy to trade the comforts of quilts and stews for the delight of warm sun and fresh strawberries. Still, it is certainly a great blessing to us that God made seasons, which, incredibly, allow each seasonal pleasure to seem fresh again when it makes its way back around. And of course, the liturgical calendar is just the same way. Impatient, fickle creatures that we are, we can’t fixate on the same thing indefinitely without losing our enthusiasm. So we have a liturgical calendar, which moves us round and round again, appreciating each fast and feast in turn and then moving on to the next one before we lose interest. And since the cycle continually repeats itself, we get the benefit of familiarity without the boredom of sameness.

But here’s the thing that worries me. In modern life, people have a lot less contact with, and interest in, the seasons. Not very many of us, these days, have jobs that require us to spend a lot of time out of doors. As an academic philosopher, you might think I would be the paradigm example of the sort of person who lives in dusty libraries and doesn’t know whether it’s December or May… but in fact, my job is a pretty good one for indulging my love of seasons. I have a very flexible daily schedule, and a good part of my “job” involves working things out in my head, which I often do best while taking my daily constitutionals. (Or sometimes I need to talk something through with my husband. This can also be nicely combined with a walk.) So, for a city-dweller with a basically sedentary lifestyle, I’m lucky enough to enjoy a respectable amount of exposure to nature and the elements. Other people I know get much less. I’ve had quite a few people explain to me, when I tell them that I wouldn’t like their climate, that, in effect, “it doesn’t matter for me, because I don’t spend any time outside.” Oh. Well, I guess if you never go outside, climate really doesn’t matter all that much, since we’ve gotten pretty good at manipulating indoor environments to make them comfortable. (Although, I find that most such people do prefer hot climates to cold. Hot climates only get oppressive when the heat must be endured over long periods of time. In very cold climates, it’s hard even for the sedentary office worker to avoid some unpleasant exposure, like for example in digging his car out of the snow after a blizzard.)

This, then, is my thought: might this not have something to do with our diminished appreciation of liturgy? For people who are driven towards perpetual sameness, and a world in which no one season is notably distinguishable from any other, it would be hard to get a proper appreciation of the liturgical calendar. The internal clock becomes increasingly inflexible, so that fasts and feasts start to seem like inconveniences more than refreshing changes of pace. People start to ask themselves: why can’t life just settle into a regular daily pattern? Why do we need all this irregularity?

It’s like your mother probably told you. You really need to play outside more often.

Sometimes, in trying times, the patriot is able to look backwards, and ground his love in an older tradition, and the memory of a proud nation and people who once did their country’s name more credit than they currently do. For American Catholics, though, this would be difficult. While I certainly think there have been times better than now, I also think we have to admit that our country was founded on gravely faulty principles, by modernist men who most certainly were not Catholic either in formal confession or in outlook. There is certainly no American golden age for Catholics to look back on with happy nostalgia.

And yet, and yet, and yet. There are a few things about the United States of America, surely, that even we traditional Catholics can admire? Aspects of our history and culture that we can look back on without shame? We devote plenty of words to complaining about the ills of the world, but, this being Independence Day, I thought I would open a thread and invite people to suggest some things (however small) that are good and admirable about this country. I have a few ideas of my own, but I think I’ll leave the thread open to others for awhile. What’s to like about the US of A?

I’d like to start with a few preliminary observations.

1) There is no question that, legally speaking, Roeder’s crime qualifies as murder. As a private individual, and with no authority whatsoever, he intentionally killed a person who had been convicted of no crime, and who was posing no immediate threat to Roeder or any other person. The action shows every sign of having been premeditated. From a legal perspective, then, this looks like a clear-cut case of murder. My question concerns the moral status of Roeder’s action.

2) Even if we were to decide that Roeder was not guilty of murder, it would not follow that his action was not wrong. Indeed, I think it was wrong. Regardless of the moral depravity of Tiller’s actions, Roeder had no authority to execute him, and, as if that weren’t bad enough, the prudential calculations were very bad indeed. That Tiller’s clinic is now apparently closing is, of course, a reason for great gladness. But incidents like this do real damage to the pro-life cause, insofar as they paint pro-lifers as violent and crazed. Had Roeder killed the doctor of death on his way into the clinic to perform an actual abortion, that would have been somewhat less bad. But gunning him down in church, while Tiller was engaged in that sinister activity of ushering? Come on. That just looks like a terrible act of cowardice, and also allows the liberals to obscure the core issue. Countless ridiculous leftist editorials made it sound as though the shooting was evidence of the pro-life camp’s unwillingness to engage in civil conversation. But of course, Scott Roeder didn’t shoot George Tiller because he was upset about something Tiller had said. The deed was done (hopefully, if we give him the benefit of the doubt) in an effort to protect the innocent unborn children that he had excellent reason to believe Tiller would kill if he were to go on living. Conversation, civil or otherwise, had nothing to do with it. But that would have been more obvious to the people at large if the incident had happened at Tiller’s actual clinic, and not in his church.

All right. Having established those two points, I think we need to start with a working definition of ‘murder.’ And I think a reasonable Catholic definition would be: the direct, deliberate killing of an innocent. Including ‘direct’ in the definition allows for cases of double effect, wherein a death is an anticipated but not intended consequence. ‘Deliberate’ of course rules out cases of manslaughter or other accidental killing. But the most difficult word of this definition is the last: ‘innocent.’ Who qualifies as an innocent?

In one ridiculous op-ed article that I read shortly after the Tiller killing (sadly, I can’t seem to find it now or I’d include a link), it was pointed out that, for Christians, nobody is innocent because we’re all tainted with original sin (and even after we’ve been cleansed, we’re still burdened by the secondary effects of that sin.) Well, on one level that’s true… but if that were the operative understanding of “innocence” with respect to defining murder, then there’s only been one murder in the history of the human race. Not a terribly useful word in that case, is it? So presumably if the concept of murder is to have any use whatsoever in ordinary civil society, we’ll have to use a somewhat narrower conception of “innocence.”

I suggest the following criteria. First, in order for a killing not to be murder, the person killed must be guilty of an offense that warrants death. And second, that person’s guilt must be the killer’s motivation for their violent act.

What offenses warrant death? This is a fractious question that could be discussed almost endlessly. Can it ever be right to kill someone for sexual perversions? For blasphemy? For heresy? I’ll just cut all that short by saying that, in this case, we needn’t puzzle too hard. If any crime merits death, it is the shedding of innocent blood. And if anybody qualifies as innocent in the relevant sense, it’s surely an unborn baby, who has committed no personal sins at all. A man like George Tiller, who specialized in the killing of the unborn, clearly qualifies as guilty in the relevant sense. Tiller was not an innocent, and since Roeder seems clearly to have killed him because of his guilt, I’m inclined to say that Roeder’s crime was not murder.

There is a further distinction that I’d like to draw, which I do think affects the wrongness of unlawful killing, but I’m not sure if it’s properly integrated into the definition of murder. This is the difference between executing a guilty person as a punishment, and executing them because they’ve proven themselves to be highly dangerous and a threat to others. A person who is dangerous but not guilty (someone with an infectious disease, say) certainly qualifies as an innocent, and should not be killed. If a person is guilty (of a sufficiently grievous offense), both punishment and prevention are potentially adequate reasons for the state to perform an execution (though, as we’ve discussed on this blog before, some may question whether the modern state has the authority to execute as a punishment.) But for private citizens these two motives need to be carefully separated. A private individual or organization is never authorized to kill another for punishment or revenge. If that was Roeder’s intention, his action was particularly egregiously wrong. On the other hand, private individuals are sometimes justified in killing for the protection of others… though only under particular circumstances, which are not met in this case.

Regardless of his motivation, then, Roeder is in the wrong. But the question is: would he, in either case, be guilty of murder? Under the definition I’ve proposed, I’m inclined to say not. He is guilty of vigilantism, of performing an execution without the authority to do so. That makes him a criminal, but not a murderer per se.

I’m not deeply committed to this position, however. Others might want to tinker more with the definition of ‘murder.’ So, to further reflection on this point, let me pose the following cases:

1) When a lynch mob kills a man known to be guilty of, say, multiple rapes and murders, is that murder?

2) Suppose my uncle is a particularly vicious mob boss, responsible for multiple deaths. I have it on very good authority (from the lips of his underlings, say) that he is guilty, but neither I nor the police can build a case against him sufficient to get him convicted. Now I get word that he’s plotting a particularly dastardly job that will probably lead to the deaths of several innocent people. If I decide to kill him myself, in the interests of protecting their lives, am I a murderer? (Note that I certainly would be if I killed him for some less noble motive — because I wanted to take his place, say, or because I was likely to lose money through the job he was planning.)

But for today, I thought I might start by throwing out this quote from a recent article in America magazine:

This polarization must stop; otherwise our identity as a faith community will be torn asunder and Catholicism will cease to be an elevating force for change. How can we decrease the polarization? A vital first step is to seek out our common ground in the major civic areas where almost all Catholics agree: religious liberty; the sacredness of all human life; the goal of reducing and eventually eliminating abortion; support for social programs that provide a safety net for the poor; the elimination of segregation, racism and discrimination; and respect for differing religious and social traditions and diverse cultures. Few are the Catholics who do not share these principles, which provide a ready-made common ground.

Okay. I don’t want to go into detail about the article itself; it’s precisely the kind of silly, hypocritical rhetoric you would expect from that publication. Mostly hand-wringing about the polarized atmosphere among American Catholics today (as if America doesn’t contribute plenty to that tension), and strong implications that evil conservatives, and especially the bishops, are mostly to blame, especially for being so stubborn and mean about tired old issues like abortion. I’ll leave you to pick that one apart yourselves, if you want to.

But I did find this list to be moderately interesting. It’s rare to find such a straightforward listing of all the issues that liberal Catholics take to be “settled” and thus “common ground.” It’s great to see that the list starts with… religious liberty. Ha! Could anything be further from a settled issue within the Church today? Then we proceed to the sacredness of human life. That, of course, is settled from a doctrinal standpoint, but is precisely the thing that orthodox Catholics feel has not been settled in practice, since a significant portion of American Catholics continue to work at undermining the Church’s position here. How the editors of America feel about this can be seen from the wording of the next item on the list, where they speak of “reducing and eventually eliminating” abortion… obviously they’re pretty fixated on this being a gradual process. Most of the Catholics I know would find a much stronger way to put that.

Elimination of racism is, I suppose, something most all of us can agree to be good, though we may not all agree on how significant a problem it is within our present society. I’m very happy to see racism dealt with in particular localities if it should arise, but there are much bigger social evils to be dealt with in our time. As for the last item on the list, respect for cultures, that’s mainly a collection of buzz-words, the actual implications of which would have to be more carefully defined before I could grant it to be a “common ground” for all Catholics. I think I have a genuine appreciation for many kinds of cultural diversity (which is one reason why I’ve done so much traveling in my life), but not all religious traditions and social customs command equal respect from me.

The item that I most wanted to discuss, however, gets dropped into the middle of the list: support for social programs that provide a safety net for the poor. We hear this thrown around a lot these days as a sine qua non of all Catholic thought. Sometimes this is used in connection with the Obama administration, with the idea basically being that, yes, his position on abortion is bad, but clearly everything else about the man, especially his support for social programs, is so obviously in keeping with Catholic tradition that we should all really love him, even if some of us feel we have to voice reservations on account of the abortion issue.

Well, naturally I agree that our president’s firm and enthusiastic support for the killing of infants is his most glaring and egregious failing. But I think we also need to push back against this supposedly obvious conclusion that more social programs for the poor are such a wonderful thing. I wrote about this a bit last fall in my brief post asking about the “preferential option.” (And as a little aside about that: a friend of mine was a bit shocked by that post and told me I should read the segment from the CCC on poverty. I duly read the suggested passage, and didn’t find anything very helpful with respect to my question about “preferential option” language (the origins of which I still regard as highly suspicious), though there were a few interesting quotes on the general subject of poverty. But of course, no context was given for the quotes, and they raised far more questions than they answered. I concluded that it was yet another subject on which the CCC is almost totally unhelpful, making certain provocative suggestions but not really explaining or drawing the distinctions that would be needed to make sense of the issue.)

Anyway, I thought now might be a good time for saying a bit more about why good faith Catholics certainly can, and to my mind should, oppose large-scale government entitlement programs.

I often like to begin such conversations by explaining that government entitlement programs are an attack on human dignity. This is of course startling to many liberals, because in their minds nothing could be more dignified than to be given everything one needs for survival and even comfort. Lack of food, shelter, medical care and education are to their minds the main threat to human dignity. A related concern, to them, is the possibility that people might feel that they have to beg or in some other way prostrate themselves to greater powers in order to obtain these fundamental goods. The foundation of dignity, to the liberal mind, is having one’s needs met, and not feeling beholden to anyone else on account of this.

If this is the foundation of human dignity, then government entitlement programs are the obvious answer. The rich are forced (but through a bloodless, mechanized process) to put their money into a giant pot, which is redistributed to strangers through a similarly regulated process. No human interaction is fostered on any side. The rich simply find themselves poorer, while the poor receive checks in the mail from a large, faceless entity for whom they are little more than a statistic. Thus, needs are met without anyone having to feel beholden to anybody else, and without interference in the organization of family or community life.

I concede that, at least in the natural order, having one’s basic needs met can help to foster a sense of dignity. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that food, shelter or education are necessary for human dignity (my patron St. Francis would surely object to that), but within the natural order, one way of respecting another’s dignity is to respect his basic needs. Depriving a group of people of basic needs is often a way of attacking their dignity; it is most often slaves, prisoners, or ethnic groups that are viewed as inferior, that are forced to live under harsh conditions. Providing for another’s wants, by contrast, can be a way of indicating, “you are a person with moral value. You are worthy of attention and care.”

But liberals are mistaken in thinking that the best way to foster dignity is to make these goods guaranteed, such that no one need feel beholden to another. This mistake presumably arises out of the core liberal idea that autonomy or self-actualization are some of the most central goods for human life. As Catholics we should not let ourselves become enamored with such notions. We should understand that it is fitting to feel beholden to those who provide for us, and the core of human dignity is not in inventing ourselves but in discovering what we have been created to be, and in learning to live in conformity with our God-given nature. Being provided with care, as we are in infancy, is an important beginning, because it is through that showering of gratuitous love that we come to understand ourselves as beings with moral worth. But if we are to mature morally, we need to move beyond the “I’m special” message, and come to understand ourselves as having responsibilities and obligations. At some point we must learn to see ourselves beings who are answerable for what we do, and who are rightly expected to contribute in various ways to our families and communities. For a mature human being, dignity involves much more than just having food and shelter. Dignity is being held accountable for one’s actions. Dignity is being expected to fulfill one’s obligations. Dignity is being respected as a contributor to one’s community.

There is no way to devise blanket, government-managed entitlement programs that does not attack this element of human dignity. Government programs don’t have the ability to distinguish who is “blamelessly” needy, and who is poor through some fault or failing of their own. And in truth, it is contrary to the very ideology of such programs to try to make such distinctions. All needy people are addressed in exactly the same way — with a handout. For some, this might be the appropriate response. For others, this should rightly be viewed as a personal disgrace. But the implicit message behind such a program is “don’t worry about it. All that matters is that you’re fed.” A parish priest or a small, private neighborhood organization could exercise discernment, giving generously to the widow with six children who has no other means for support, and chastising the young able-bodied father who just needs to stop drinking so he can hold down a job. A government program glosses over all these distinctions. Responsibility doesn’t matter. Respect doesn’t matter. All that matters is earthly bread.

In a way, everyone is degraded by such a system, even the widows or orphans or others whom we might think deserving of aid. When the parish provides for them, this can be seen as an act of love, and an acknowledgement that their needs are legitimate and not a cause for shame. A check from the welfare office provides no such reassurance — it is an acknowledgement only of poverty. And when that status as “welfare recipient” is shared with drunkards and fornicators and people who are simply too lazy to look for work, it would be difficult for the virtuous person not to feel some shame, even if his misfortunes are genuinely not any fault of his own.

Meanwhile, entitlement programs, because they are so systematized and faceless, teach many people not to feel shame in their moral failings. I think an excellent example of this is in the black “macho” culture that has become so prevalent within America’s inner cities. It’s interesting to note that, while African Americans have been statistically poorer than whites throughout American history, they have not always suffered from the breakdown of family and community life that we see in so many American cities today. In the 1950′s and before, black communities were noteworthy for their particularly strong family structures. Divorce rates were low, and a high percentage of households were headed by married parents raising their natural offspring. Then in the 1960′s we implemented much more comprehensive welfare programs, and things began to unravel. Today less than a third of black children live in two-parent households, and African Americans have particularly high rates of illegitimacy and abortion, together with multiple other problems that have followed from these. Now, obviously, the factors contributing to this are multiple. But we can certainly get a lot of clues as to where the problem lies from examining the expectations of young males within inner city black communities, for whom marriage and family life are often seen as unmanly or “white” pursuits. Having multiple women (and likely multiple illegitimate children) but remaining “free” and unfettered from family obligations, is the way to command respect from one’s peers (and even, ironically, from women, who are left to choose between high-status males who will probably abandon them, and low-status males who might stay.) Naturally, it follows on this that many unwed mothers are drawing welfare checks to help keep their single-parent households functional.

How likely would this be to happen in a world without welfare? A man has to be heartless indeed to feel pride in watching his children starve, or else spend their days neglected at home while their mothers scramble to work three jobs. The only way such a culture could arise is under the auspices of a welfare system, which keeps people far enough above water that they can learn not to feel shame in shirking their natural responsibilities. And when one grows up in a community filled with people devoid of any proper sense of human dignity, one learns not to feel the disgrace too sharply.

Of course, it isn’t only African Americans who exhibit these unfortunate trends. Inner city African American culture provides just one illustrative example of a tendency that comes with all large-scale entitlement programs. The important point is that we, as Catholics, should be extremely concerned about this assault on human dignity. We should be insisting that men be treated as men, and not as children. We should be disdaining the idea that, in a country as rich as ours, communities can’t step up and care for their own without the federal government reaching its hands into everything. We should be, but we aren’t. Instead, we’re talking about the wonders of entitlement programs as though this were a settled part of Catholic doctrine.

Whatever happens, I wonder, to talk of “subsidiarity” when liberals come to power? We hear much about it when capitalism is on the chopping block, but as soon as large-scale federal entitlement programs are on the board, that conversation suddenly stops. What happened to all those copies of Rerum Novarum that liberal Catholics were passing out so eagerly in years gone by? It seems to me that that conversation needs to be resurrected. Of course, none of the thoughts I’ve offered here are meant to suggest that government programs to alleviate poverty are never acceptable, or that these questions should be open and shut for any orthodox Catholic. Helping the poor is important, and figuring out how best to do it is one of the really difficult questions within Catholic social thought. This is not a subject like abortion or gay marriage, wherein the Church has already told us rather definitively what the moral implications are. There is some room for debate here… but let’s have one, shall we?

Name-piling is what I call it when a couple gives a whole list of names to their infant. A first name and a family name are obviously necessary, and I think middle names are acceptable, though frankly I have some reservations even about those (more on that later.) But I think a parent needs a darn good justification to put more than three names on their child’s birth certificate. And in fact, I favor a general trend towards greater economy in naming.

What is wrong with giving your child four or five different names, as some cultures seem to like to do? Ambrosius once insisted to me that this custom is endemic to Catholic cultures, and while I haven’t done a study to see how true that is, I still just can’t regard it as a good thing. The core of the issue, for me, is that a name should mean something significant, because it is significant. A name is the vehicle by which we identify (for others, but in a sense for ourselves as well) who we are. It marks us out as a valuable “someone” with a real identity, even before we’ve done anything significant to deserve to be thought of as a someone. Names connect us with the world. That is why Catholics choose saints’ names for their children; it does honor to the saint, of course, but it also gives the child a meaningful connection, not only to this imperfect world, but to the Church Triumphant as well. People can reasonably suppose that their name-saints will intercede for them and make them a particular object of concern. And a Catholic really should feel a particular connection to the saint for whom he was named, since every time he or someone else names him, they are also affirming his connection with that saint.

So, names are a good thing, for more than just convenience. Why, then, would it not be good to have more of them rather than less? My contention is that, in order to avoid cheapening the significance of names, it is important that every name we attach to ourselves should be a significant part of our identity, and should have real meaning for us. And I think there are limits to the number of names that can have that significance in an individual person’s life. The name by which you are actually called from childhood will naturally take on personal significance for you. And sometimes, as a person moves through life, it becomes appropriate to add other names — confirmation names, married names, or religious names for members of some orders. These names, hopefully, will have significance, in virtue of how and why they were taken. But a person who has four or five names from birth very rarely feels that same attachment to all of their names. Even middle names just seem to be random personal trivia for many or most people; in fact, people have sometimes told me, semi-seriously, that the best reason for middle names is so that mothers have an “angry” name by which to address their offspring when they are in trouble (as in: “James Robert Glover! You get back here right now!). Now, isn’t that a pleasant association to have with a name?

I say we should combat this cheapening of names by demanding that they not be distributed too easily or lightly. Here, then, are Clara’s Proposed Rules for Decent Naming:

1) A newborn infant may be given, at most, three names (first, middle and family.) Exceptions will be considered only for royalty for whom the piling of names may be essential to the good of the state.

2) Middle names shall be tolerated, but parents are encouraged to regard them as an optional extra to be used only when there is good reason. Again, in the case of middle names, the reason need not necessarily be dire. If both parents have their hearts set on a particular name, the use of middle names may be used to find a compromise. If there is a family name that must be used for tradition’s sake, but the parents greatly prefer another name, it is permissible to use middle names to appease all parties. Or, if a child is named for a parent, middle names might be helpful to sort out the one from the other. (Personally, I’m not hugely enthusiastic about the custom of naming sons for fathers, particularly once the numerals start piling up. It seems to me that the passing on of a family name should be adequate to preserve the family identity, so that reiterating the first name as well seems slightly ostentatious, or perhaps just lacking in imagination. If people want to do honor to their forbears, I find it much more charming — not to mention less confusing — to skip a generation. However, I recognize that this is a long-standing custom in some families, and I will not interfere.)

3) Names may be added for significant reasons. Confirmation names may be added to the legal name if the confirmand so desires. Married woman may of course take their husband’s name, and vowed religious may take new religious names. The Supreme Pontiff may take a new name. Other reasons will be considered on a case-by-case basis, with the governing principle being that the name must signify something important about the person, and must be intimately connected with their identity (in their own mind or the minds of others).

For those who want to argue that name-piling is more “Catholic”, I would point out that both Our Lord and Our Lady were initially given only one name. The number of names by which they are known has since then multiplied enormously, but always in a way that is significant and meaningful at least to someone. If simple names were sufficient for them at birth, I would think that simple names should be sufficient for us all.

I have no idea how likely this is to be true, but wouldn’t it be lovely to see Catholics stepping up to the plate like that? I won’t get into the specifics of strategizing about the Washington case, but I’ve got to say, it just tickles me pink to see liberal journalists actually worrying that Catholics might be a driving force behind a positive political movement. For quite awhile now, Catholics have been more or less just like the rest of the population in their voting habits, which is a great way to show that our faith means nothing. It would be refreshing for a change to see the enemies of life and family hating and fearing us the way they did the Mormons in California. (And yes, I’ll confess, even as an apostate Mormon, that did make me proud. Also, my parents, who are residents of California, were quite involved in the rather remarkable campaign to pass Prop 8, which also made me proud.)

Anyway, the opponents of the new bill apparently need to gather more than 100,000 signatures of registered Washington voters before July 25th in order to get their referendum on the next ballot. So, if you’re a registered voter of the state of Washington, make your mark!

In other happy news that some may have heard, Gallup’s latest poll apparently shows that, for the first time since they began asking the question (in 1995) a majority of Americans now self-identify as pro-life. At 51%, the majority is slim… but still notably higher than the 44% who self-identify as pro-choice. What exactly people mean by that label is, of course, a further question. Still, let’s take what we can get.

One thing to note is that the increase seems to come almost entirely from the Republican side of the line — that is to say, Republicans are becoming more consistently pro-life than formerly. The number of pro-life Republicans in the poll rose from 60% to 70%. On the Democratic side of the line, there is no statistical change; approximately a third of Democrats identify as pro-life, and that number seems to be holding stable. Sixty-one percent of Democrats describe themselves as pro-choice, as compared to 26% of Republicans.

We just need to keep repeating it. The Democrats have made themselves into the party of death, and until that party line shows some sign of budging, Catholics should not support them.