(This article is not about anything explicitly Catholic.  But often liberals complain about how the white man supposedly made this continent worse.  They say that the coming of Columbus made life worse for the Indians.  We know that he brought many evils along with the *greatest good* — the Good News of salvation.  So the Indians benefited.  This article points out that there are other ways in which the Indians benefited.)

You may recall the movie “Alive.”  It was about a group of Uruguayan soccer players whose plane crashed in the Andes.  A number of them died.  Those who survived did so by devouring the flesh of the dead.  They did this only after great and solemn debate.  They ate only the flesh of people who had already died and would not have killed anyone in order to eat  their flesh.  All of the people in question were Catholic and they attended a Catholic college.  When the survivors returned to civilization, officials of the Church said that they had done nothing wrong.  From what I can understand, the position of the Church is that one may permissibly eat anything in extremis.  You may not kill people in order to devour their flesh, but eating the flesh of those who have already died is permissible.  In extremis, this is not inconsistent with the necessary respect we owe the dead.  The people in the Andes respected their dead comrades.  When two of them reached civilization, they buried the human flesh they had brought with them as rations.  At the same time, one student refused to eat the flesh given him and starved.  The Church officials said that he did not die of suicide.  This was a case of double effect; he intended to refrain from cannibalism, not to kill himself.  He could have eaten the flesh morally, but he was not obliged to do so. 

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I am not bothered by teenage pregnancy as such.  I am bothered by the way our society defers marriage.   The  time when reproduction is healthiest is the time when women should do it.  Let me repeat that.  Biologically speaking, the time to reproduce is when the body is ready, willing, and able.  Most societies have prepared men and women to be spiritually and mentally mature about the time they become physically mature.  For women, there is no good biological reason to defer child-bearing past the completion of puberty.  In fact, there is every reason to do it (in the literal sense of “do it”) at that time.  Time was people were ready to support themselves at that age or not very long after it.  None of my grandparents had a high school diploma.  One of my grandmothers may have spent a year in what we would today call a high school.  Back then high school was called “high” because, well, it was the highest education most people could reasonably expect to get.  People were functioning as adults well before reaching the age of 21. Continue reading

Traditionalist Catholics talk a lot about the abuse of language. Here I will protest that many traditionalist Catholics also abuse language in a particular instance. There is a movement afoot to say that Catholics “don’t date,” they “court.” The idea is that dating is what the world does — easy sex, no commitment or commitment entered into too hastily, no thought of marriage, contraception, abortion. “Courting” means that you are looking for marriage in a chaste way. Continue reading

Some atheists are saying that Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta should not be on a U.S. postal stamp because her work cannot be separated from her being a nun and a Roman Catholic. While Mother Teresa should be on a stamp, they are quite right that such a stamp can only possibly honor her work *as a nun,* for in truth her work is not separable from her religion. Some have noted that MLK and Malcolm X both have stamps. But they are honored for their secular work, not for being Baptists/Modernists or Black Moslems. Mother Teresa did not change the secular culture of Calcutta in any big way and never intended to. She performed Christian works of mercy and for that she deserves a stamp.

“Judge not lest ye be judged.” “The measure wherewith ye judge, by that measure shall ye be judged.” I am a judgmental person. I pretty much divide the world into two groups: the hopeless sinners I don’t like and the ones I do. Which category I place myself in depends on my caffeine and serotonin levels. Seriously, though, I have questions about judgmentalism. We are told not to try to read other people’s souls. We are told that this is one of the greatest commandments of all. And yet we are told to judge people’s motives — to determine whether someone did us wrong through ignorance, or weakness, or malice — when we make friends or do business with people.  But if we can determine malice — and hence intent — when making and keeping friends, does that not require us to judge? Continue reading

Protestants generally do not like crucifixes.  There are a number of reasons for this, but I will not deal with them.   I am interested in one lie they often tell in order to justify their strong tendency toward displaying crosses devoid  of a corpus.  The excuse they give is that Christ is risen — He is no longer on the Cross.  So they show the Cross from which Christ has been taken down, not Him hanging on it.  What a bunch of lamesauce.  I quote  I Cor. 1.23:  “But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews indeed a stumblingblock, and unto the Gentiles foolishness.”  These Prots should cluck their tongues at St. Paul:  “Why preach Christ crucified?  He isn’t crucified any more!  He’s risen!  Preach not Christ crucified but rather Christ risen!”  If after the Resurrection the Crucifixion is still worth preaching about — worth representing by means of words – then it is worth representing by means of sculpture.  If the Prots have a problem with all sculpture, that is another objection altogether.  But a cross is itself sculpture, so that retort should not fly.  If a cross is worth displaying, then it is worth displaying the sufferings that took place upon that cross. The sad reality is that these anti-crucifix Protestants are guilty of what St. Paul accuses the Jews and Gentiles of:  treating the Crucifixion as a stumblingblock and foolishness.

Consider this a Steve Sailer-ish type post on culture and reproduction. By now we should all know that the new senator from Massachusetts’ position on abortion is ”nuanced” but still “pro-choice.”  I fear that thanks to his election there will be attempts by the Republicans to pick up more seats this year by selling out the unborn (even more). However, Scott Brown apparently favors some restrictions on abortion (there’s where the “nuance” comes in) and is not as extreme as Martha Coakley, aka the second coming of Geraldine Ferraro. And given that he will kill the health care bill, I think voting for Brown in the general election was probably worth it. But that’s not the topic of this post. I wish to point out a difference in the public image that Brown and Coakley presented and what it reveals about different constituencies in this country. Continue reading

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday was recently celebrated as a national holiday. Rather than go on about King’s plagiarism, or his Protestant and Modernist heresies, or his adulteries, or his socialism (as Clara has done in the past), I’ll attack the myth of his “non-violence.” King officially condemned violence on the part of his marchers. Many people may labor under the delusion that King’s project was largely to peacefully convert people to his position. Now, my father (R.I.P.), who was a young adult during the 1960s, said of King, “He preached peace but everywhere he went he started riots.” My dad was right. Here was King’s true project. Continue reading

Here is another one of my hit-and-run pieces, no footnotes, no citations. I propose that America has one of the most conservative political cultures in the Western World and the reason for this is that we are a “proposition nation.” This may surprise many so-called paleocons and fellow-travellers, and I consider myself in a few ways to be a paleocon fellow-traveller. What I mean is that almost everyone in this country justifies (or rationalizes) his political viewpoint with reference to the Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and Constitution. They will distort the texts in any way they want, but they will still refer to the texts. Very few will appeal directly to Marx or any other political philosopher outside of the American tradition. We stick to our own. Continue reading