I’ve been considering the question this week since we had the Good Samaritan story as a Gospel reading on Sunday. The most common interpretation of this passage (which is more or less what we got in the homily) is that the answer to the lawyer’s question (”Who is my neighbor?”) was: everyone. I’m not sure that’s quite right, or, at any rate, it seems to me that it’s missing some critical points in the story.

Now, obviously, there is some rhyme and reason to this standard answer. The man who was robbed and left on the road was a Jew. Of the three men who walked by, the one who stopped to help was the least likely one, the one who seemingly would have had the least reason to stop and help the wounded man. This is surely not an accidental feature of the story, and it seems that we can at least conclude that, contrary to what some might like to think, everyone is potentially a neighbor. Nobody can be automatically screened out on the basis of superficial external characteristics.

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Today is the 40th anniversary of Humanae vitae. Though Paul VI has been and is widely regarded as a less than stellar supreme pontiff, this encyclical gives evidence of the supernatural foundations of the Church: even in the face of overwhelming cultural pressure, Paul VI stood by the perennial truths of the natural law. Even a critic of modern Rome as keen as Romano Amerio had words of praise for Paul VI in connection with Humanae vitae:

It becomes possible to separate conjugal relations from procreation, if one loses sight of the fact that the essential coexistence of the two ends of marriage means that in order to express a perfect union, conjugal relations must remain open to their natural procreative effect. But people now imagine that the full union in which marriage consists can in fact be separated from its natural effect, which is the generation of new life. This view was supported strongly by the majority of the advisory committee which Paul VI set up to examine the question, but the traditional doctrine was maintained despite its opinion. Humanae vitae and Mysterium fidei are the outstanding documents of Paul VI’s pontificate, because in the latter the Pope upheld the core of supernatural dogma, and in the former he upheld the core of the natural law, that is, by the two combined, he upheld the two levels of truth that the Church must maintain.
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This is disgusting (PDF warning). Incidentally, where was Joseph Bottum when they needed him? Surely, First Things and its wealthy, dangerously left of right of center patrons had enough money to fly in J. Bottum to do some counseling with the four dissenting justices on the United States Supreme Court! How was it that the Chief Justice and Justices Alito, Scalia, and Thomas failed to see that the death penalty - at least in the case of such a mild, humdrum offense as the rape of an 8 year old girl, which sent her to the emergency room for reconstructive surgery - is not in accord with “the evolving standards of decency which mark the progress of a maturing society” (Justice Anthony Kennedy, for the majority)?

Bottum’s pernicious position is based on the same gravely mistaken principle which, apparently, has guided the five justices of the majority in Kennedy vs. Louisiana. In Iota Unum (1985), the philosophical charter of the Catholic traditionalist movement, Romano Amerio wrote: “opposition [to the death penalty] can also stem from the notion that every person is inviolable inasmuch as he is a self-conscious subject living out his life in the world; as if temporal life were an end in and of itself that could not be suppressed without frustrating the purpose of human existence” (430).
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I’ve heard a rumor that my “Gifts of the Holy Spirit” posts were somewhat heavy sledding for the casual reader, so I thought maybe I’d try to offer something a little lighter. I say a little… but not too much lighter, because today’s topic is in fact quite a serious business. I want to say a few words about the heinous evil wrought on our society by that modernist monstrosity, the metric system. (I dedicate this post to the good Catharina Senensis, since we were unable to finish our conversation on this fascinating topic, but also to my high school friends, with whom I doggedly pursued it on many happy occasions.)

All through my grade school days I was regularly told about the wonderfulness of the metric system. So civilized! So easy to convert! The enlightened Europeans have taken to using it everywhere, don’t you know, and isn’t it a shame that we backwards Americans insist on clinging to our anachronistic old English (this must be said with the emphasis on “old”) units? As school children we were indoctrinated into the pro-metric camp through conversion worksheets designed to teach us how much “easier” metric really was. On one side, we were asked to make various conversions using the Imperial units; on the other side we were asked to do similar conversions using metric. “Don’t you see,” our teachers would ask when we were finished, “how much easier things would be if our whole country would use metric?”

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The Doctor and I enjoyed a rare and special honor last week. We got to see the movie Expelled in the same theatre where it was seen by the infamous Richard Dawkins! (But I wonder which of us enjoyed the film more?) It wasn’t something I was dying to see, but we were trapped for an afternoon at the mall, and as one who used to be quite attentive to the debate about Darwinism I thought I might enjoy seeing what Ben Stein did with the topic.

Having seen it, I would neither advise others to see it nor discourage them. If you want to enjoy cheap laughs at the expense of the minions of scientism (a perfectly respectable form of entertainment in my view), you should see it. If you mainly want to get some clarity on the crazy debate surrounding Darwinism, don’t. Mind you, I’m not calling Stein a liar. His most central point — that the academic community has systematically persecuted anyone who shows the least bit of sympathy with religiously-motivated critiques of Dawinism — is surely right. His evaluation of the science may be a little fuzzy. But at the end of the day, the debate about evolution gets into some very deep metaphysical questions, and there really wasn’t much chance that they were going to get neatly sorted out in a little film like this.

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An article appeared on the First Things blog yesterday written by Amy Julia Becker, an expectant mother whose older child has Down Syndrome. I’ve been hearing a bit about this of late, and her experience confirmed what I’ve been reading. Now that it’s possible to detect Down Syndrome in utero through amniocentesis, it’s becoming more and more widely assumed that parents should be willing — indeed, may be obligated! — to get tested for this “calamity” and, if the result should come back positive, to spare the child from the difficult life ahead… by killing it.

For the readers of this blog, I hardly need to explain how depraved this is. All the talk among bioethicists about what level of mental retardation would make a life “not worth living” is offensive and absurd. How many people with Down Syndrome, and how many of their families, would declare that their lives were “not worth it”? But, as Becker’s experience attests, many people have internalized this assumption so thoroughly that it doesn’t even occur to them that it might be offensive to ask her, the mother of a child with Down Syndrome, whether she “has done all the screening on this one to find out…”

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Over the past few days I have been leisurely perusing the writings of Pope Leo XIII. I do this partly out of general interest; I seem to hear his name thrown around quite often by liberal Catholics wishing to enlist his support for various liberal causes, and I would like to be able to respond intelligently to those claims. Also, I intend to write a post, perhaps later this week, responding to Vicki’s claim (which I still think erroneous) that Ron Paul is the rightful intellectual successor of Pope Leo. I always hesitate to charge into thorny questions of economics and political theory, mainly because they are so devilishly complicated, and my education (which has primarily been philosophical) hasn’t equipped me to discuss such things with much sophistication. Nonetheless, discuss them I shall, in a forthcoming post which shall also reopen the question of Dr. Paul and his fitness for our nation’s highest political office. For today, however, I wish to address an easier topic: dueling.

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Many of you probably read a few weeks ago about the Holy Father’s suggestion to the Italians that pharmacists should be permitted to refuse to dispense particular drugs — obviously contraceptives and abortifacients were the main things he had in mind — if they have moral objections to their use. Under current Italian law, pharmacists are required to fill any prescription given by a doctor (I’m not sure how this works exactly, since it seems strange that they should be required by law to stock every drug a doctor might conceivably prescribe, but perhaps they’re required either to supply on demand, or else to order anything they don’t immediately have available.) Now the Holy Father suggests that Catholics should be permitted to be conscientious objectors against medical practices that they deem immoral.

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Having just returned from visiting friends in Vancouver (a decidedly pro-homosexual city in which we saw, among other things, two burly men in kilts crossing a busy street while holding hands) I thought it might be a good time for opening a discussion of prudential considerations relating to homosexual people. Concerns about how to treat homosexuals are becoming a regular part of life for those of us who believe homosexuality to be disordered. It seems very likely that the difficulties will only increase in the coming years as homosexuality continues to be more and more socially acceptable. For those of us who work in liberal environments (i.e. academia) it is already highly unsafe to admit that we actually take the Bible and the Catholic Church at its word in condemning homosexual acts as sinful. Even when expressed in impeccably civil language, such views have come to be classified as bigotry and hate speech, and have in some cases cost working people their jobs or earned students suspensions. If there is one Catholic belief for which we are likely to be persecuted in the course of our lifetimes, this is it.
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Don’t we have a certain sympathy with the ideology of radical Islam? I don’t mean in the way of earning virgins with a suicide belt or in advancing the cause of a desert loon named Mohammed, but in a desire to promote public decency in dress and morals, especially between the sexes. Maybe this is too much to ask of folks; maybe if the government doesn’t allow immodesty between the sexes, fallen human nature will break out in unnatural lusts, as seems to have happened in places such as Saudi Arabia.

But it still frustrates me when I read conservative authors, with whose views generally I otherwise agree, making sport of radical Mohammedans for their loathing of Western mores. Of course, some of them profess to loathe these behaviors while they enjoy a fair share of them on their way to martyrdom - you know, getting a foretaste of their Heaven and all that. Yet I imagine that some others of them are really in earnest when they express offense at the lewdness of our young women and our depraved notions of sexuality.

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