At the risk of overdoing it on the silly moral questions, I’m going to pose another that has been puzzling me. Is it wrong to sterilize animals?

The United States Humane Society offers several tips as to why it’s a good idea to spay or neuter your pets. It helps them to live longer and avoids certain cancers or infections to which they might otherwise be prone. It makes them more affectionate and less moody, and keeps them from certain irritating behaviors (i.e. spraying to mark territory, fighting over females). Also, it keeps them from breeding! which the Humane Society, as the organization responsible for excess cats and dog, likes very much indeed.
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In connection with this interesting story, which calls to mind some of our discussions (here and here) about the nature and extent of the Catholic observance of the 3rd Commandment, Catharina Oxoniensis drew my attention to a passage from Fr. Ripley’s This is the Faith. From the CWNews story, we learn that

Archbishop Tadeusz Goclowski of Danzig supported the aims of the Solidarity movement, but questioned whether a strike was the best way to persuade the public. He said, “We should fight to close stores on Sundays and holy days, but there remains the question: Is a strike the preferred weapon?”

Fr. Ripley’s has the following to say about the use of strikes:
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The Cornell Society for a Good Time is very grateful to our friend, Simplex Sacerdos, who has given most generously of his time in granting us a lengthy interview. For those of you who do not know Simplex Sacerdos, he has asked me to introduce him as a Navy Chaplain who has served with the Marine Corps in Iraq.

The questions in this interview are wide ranging. Tobias Petrus, Iacobus, and one other besides myself supplied the questions. The first part of this interview will cover the questions we had for Simplex Sacerdos about the current war in Iraq. Part 2 will address Simplex Sacerdos’ ministry in Iraq and Part 3 will include questions about Catholics and the U.S. military culture generally.

CSGT: What is your reaction to the Pope’s position that the initial invasion of Iraq did not meet the criteria for a just war? Specifically, what is the morality of a preemptive strike? If it can be moral in certain circumstances, did those circumstances exist for Gulf War II? If a preemptive strike cannot be moral, is Gulf War II justifiable on other grounds?

Simplex Sacerdos: I preface my answer by saying that in treating this question, I intend to analyze it as a theologian and not, specifically, as a military chaplain. I would further disclose that my theological education was of the strictly Thomistic, and therefore necessarily Aristotelian, school, including the sound tradition of St. Thomas’s commentators. Also, I should say that I did my best to read the Holy Father’s own words in speaking about the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan, for that matter), that is, both those of the present Holy Father and of his predecessor.

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When necessity forces two Latin Mass Catholics to attend a Pre-Cana workshop under the direction of Novus Catholics in the heresy-steeped Diocese of Rochester, you have to expect a bit of a horror show. My fiancé, the inimitable Doctor Asinorum, is not one to sit on his hands when Holy Mother Church is being attacked or the great Sacrament of Matrimony denigrated. So I arrived at All Saints Catholic Church last Friday night relaxed, cool and wearing comfortable clothes, determined that whatever was in store was not going to destroy the very excellent mood that I’ve been in lately as I look forward to our impending wedding and honeymoon.

The parish hall where we were greeted and seated was more or less what you’d expect. Photographs, posters and colorful banners of various kinds decorated the walls, and the tables were adorned with candles in glass holders that depicted what was evidently the church logo: a lot of people holding hands underneath the words WE ARE ALL SAINTS.
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In honor of the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, I thought that I would post some material from Romano Amerio’s Iota Unum which sasses new attitudes towards work which gained currency in post-conciliar thought. Of course, these new attitudes and ideas are not limited to theological circles, but are generally diffused through Western thought today. I cut straight to the point: though Amerio has no beef with Pius XII, he does point out that the idea of having a feast to honor St. Joseph qua worker is a theological novelty (and not a good one).

The doctrine of work has undergone important changes in post-conciliar thought. [Footnote: The encyclical Laborem Exercens of 14 September 1981 states in paragraph 2 that new meanings and purposes should be found for human work.] These changes affect three points, and all display a certain anthropocentric and subjectivist tendency.

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In a recent newsletter from the F.S.S.P., Fr. James B. Buckley, F.S.S.P. takes up the subject of periodic continence (NFP). (I should have begun by saying - WARNING: NFP will be discussed in this post. The faint of heart need read no farther.) Interestingly, his column does not appear to be aimed at those who need to practice NFP and so require some advice about when and how to implement it. Rather, he seems to be targeting those of us traditionalists who have sometimes taken a derisive tone when speaking of NFP. His column isn’t too long and I hope that I will not offend if I reproduce it in its entirety here. Since my purpose is to ask some pointed questions about the column, I wouldn’t want to do it a disservice by quoting portions of it out of context.
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Having just had such a scintillating discussion of the moral value of poverty, I thought it might be interesting to consider what position a Catholic ought to take on slavery. I expect our readers may be somewhat divided on the relevant moral questions, so I might as well put my cards on the table from the beginning. First of all, I think it’s perfectly clear that slavery as it existed in the American South before the Civil War is morally indefensible. But secondly, I think that slavery probably can be defended under some circumstances.
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I’ve never really been confident that eating out on Sundays is a good thing to do. I’ve heard, however, from at least two F.S.S.P. priests that it’s all right. I think that the reasoning is supposed to be something like this: (1) people have to eat; (2) a tavern or other eatery does what people would normally do for themselves on Sundays in terms of providing the basic food stuffs; (3) and they can’t do it for themselves on some given occasion for whatever reason. If these are really the ideas behind the claim, I don’t have a problem with them, so much as with the frequency with which this “emergency” dining is needed. “Clara,” I say, “I’m about to die of hunger, please pull over the car - ah, look! there’s a Texas Roadhouse!” Then after the Texas Roadhouse has done good business by us, Franciscus has an emergency hunger attack and we pull off the highway a couple miles down the road for Krispy Kreme. Sundays are feast days after all!

We routinely spend four hours in the car on Sundays, and I’m the last person who would want to part from the Roadhouse, Don Pablo’s, and Krispy Kreme. But even we know that we don’t absolutely need these places; we could, for example, make sandwiches and bring them with us; and in the olden days, when there wasn’t a plethora of national chains to cater to our needs 24-7, this is probably what we would have done. Or, better yet, we would have eaten with one of the families in the parish.

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Apparently it’s been raging for quite some time, but I just heard about it: the controversy of the homosexual sheep. A researcher named Charles Roselli, from the Oregon Health and Science University, has been working to discover why about 8% of rams appear to be gay (that is, to prefer the company of other rams and to that of ewes.) Both PETA and a wide variety of gay/lesbian groups started a firestorm of criticism, and sent floods of hate mail to Roselli. Why are they so upset? They imagine, against Roselli’s protests, that he might be attempting to discover the cause of homosexuality so that homosexual human beings could be diagnosed and, possibly, changed.
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I recently finished reading (okay, listening to) a recently released book and I thought it might be worth writing up a review for the benefit of our readers. It isn’t a Catholic book really, but I can make up for that by writing a Catholic review of it. I’ve just discovered that it is also (cringe) a Starbucks book and (double cringe) an Oprah Winfrey selection. Sorry about that. I swear it’s not at all like me to be so trendy; I almost never read new books. This one, though, was purchased by my brother on the Audiobook account that we both share. Part of the fun of sharing an Audiobook account is being able to listen to some of the same books and then talk about them together, and since it was relatively short anyway I thought I’d give it a shot. The book is A Long Way Gone, by Ishmael Beah. Beah was a soldier for the government of Sierra Leone between the years of ’93 and ’95. These are his memoirs of his experiences in his country’s civil war. He is currently 26 years old – around the same age as the members of the Cornell Society for a Good Time.
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