"One truth: that the mind is below truth, not above it, and is bound, not to descant upon it, but to venerate it; that truth and falsehood are set before us for the trial of our hearts." ~Bl. John Henry Newman
The official day of prayer and penance was this past Saturday, but today thousands are marching (in sub-zero temperatures... talk about penance!) to commemorate the tragedy of Roe v. Wade. I can hardly begin to find words that describe what abortion is... so I will let Mother speak for me.
"America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts -- a child -- as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters... And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners. Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign." ("Notable and Quotable," Wall Street Journal, 2/25/94)
"'Asked if the church position prefers the mother and child to die, rather than sparing the life of one of them, [James J Walters, professor of bioethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles] said the hope is that both would survive.'
Exactly right. The church hopes for nothing but life, lived in love, but with the clear-eyed understanding that pain is a part of the whole."
Read the whole thing--and the discussion that follows!
There are a myriad of options for you to register your own complaints with your representatives. I like the Susan B. Anthony List. Whatever your politics, I think we can find "common ground": No one should be forced to fund abortion under the aegis of "healthcare."
And, not that we should be indulging in nightmares, a little moral imagination is always helpful to light fires under our seats. And Sometimes Tea imagines a scenario that is all too real for some of us. OB's already give women a hard time for these sorts of things, it's just that right now we have a choice whether to cave under pressure or not.
Well, she's topped it: Elizabeth Scalia over at First Things has improved upon Reno (see yesterday's post), so please give her a read. She ties in all sorts of ideas, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer's involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler as well as our understanding of Humanae Vitae, Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on human sexuality. It's not an easy read, but it worthy of our time. Here is an excerpt:
"Most people have not read Paul VI's short, prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae, but everyone has an opinion on it. But all who identify themselves as pro-life should read it. It demonstrates with startling clarity the way in which small ideas that some may call "unpleasant but necessary," grow ever larger. Once you read it you can see how the seeds of the culture of death can reside in the tiniest tools doing what some would call the least damage. A pill grows to an IUD, an IUD grows to a suction or curette, that grows to a row of ever-larger forceps, all to deliver death, death, death-death with which we have quickly become so comfortable that we don't even realize the tools of destruction have grown so large or become so light in our hands.
We are all currently watching the inexorable creep from the largest of forceps to the next step: large human beings who will be refusing medical treatments to the expensive-to-keep-alive elderly, or injecting "compassionate" needles to the terminally ill or the children whose quality of life they deem insufficiently productive, or to people with an extra chromosome.
Of course this appeared over at First Things' On The Square. RR Reno gets it exactly right, with the necessary distinctions on the Tiller murder: The murder must be condemned and it must be condemned for the right reasons. The wrong reasons are, of course, that the doctor was serving women and being "a hero" for continuing to abort late-term infants in spite of threats. You can be a martyr for the wrong reasons. You can condemn murder for the wrong reasons, too.
The right reasons, of course, are that (1) only a just authority has the right to take a human life and that (2) no individual has that authority in cold blood (self-defense is a horse of a different color). Here is Reno:
"The emphasis on "unlawful use of violence," the evocation of "vigilantism," and the description of Tiller's killer as a "vigilante killer" are all exactly right. We are all sinners, but it is painfully obvious that Dr. George Tiller acted in wanton disregard for the sanctity of life. Killing him did not violate the principle of innocence. Moreover, he gave no evidence of stopping. As a result, perhaps something like the principle of necessity can be satisfied. But it is certainly obvious that his killer was acting as the law unto himself. He arrogated to himself the roles of jury, judge, and executioner. He violated the principle of legitimate authority."
The news made me literally sick to my stomach, and I still can't write too much about it, so I'll use Reno's conclusion:
"I have always loathed revolutionary vanguards, terrorists, and assassins. I have never felt any attraction to John Brown. On the contrary, he strikes me as a dangerous man who was capable of horrible crimes. The same holds for Che Guevara and others. They have imagined that the noble truth of their cause justifies their disregard for the laws of society. But law transcended is law destroyed, and law destroyed invites barbarism, as the history of the twentieth century so sadly illustrates.
Pro-life leaders rightly condemn vigilante violence. It is a principled stand, not a public relations maneuver. Legitimate authority restrains the grossest forms of evil. The existence of a civil society allows us to exercise our consciences on behalf of the unborn rather than being absorbed by the cruel need to fight for our own survival. The rule of law provides the fundamental condition for any right-to-life movement that seeks to protect real lives rather than to congratulate itself on its moral purity."
I watched both Fr. Jenkins' and President Obama's speeches at Notre Dame this past Sunday. My first impulses were predictable and certainly nothing not felt by hundreds of thousands of Catholics across the nation.
The president's discourse was predictably lofty and vague. He urged us to respect all human life, equated adult and embryonic stem-cell research, insisted on his complete sincerity, on and on. I have no doubt of his sincerity. I also have no doubt that, when respectful dialogue must end and action must be taken, that he will always--barring the road to Damascus--decide for the will to power over and to the detriment of human dignity.
UPDATE: To see what I mean, read Wesley J. Smith over at the First Things blog. Talk is cheap. Theater is just ... theatrics.
Fr. Jenkins was nauseating. The man should know better. Archbishop Chaput reprimands him so eloquently, that I really can't add anything. The blog is superfluous!
Chaput:
"Let’s remember that the debate over President Obama’s appearance at Notre Dame was never about whether he is a good or bad man. The president is clearly a sincere and able man. By his own words, religion has had a major influence in his life. We owe him the respect Scripture calls us to show all public officials. We have a duty to pray for his wisdom and for the success of his service to the common good -- insofar as it is guided by right moral reasoning.
We also have the duty to oppose him when he’s wrong on foundational issues like abortion, embryonic stem cell research and similar matters. And we also have the duty to avoid prostituting our Catholic identity by appeals to phony dialogue that mask an abdication of our moral witness. Notre Dame did not merely invite the president to speak at its commencement. It also conferred an unnecessary and unearned honorary law degree on a man committed to upholding one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in our nation’s history: Roe v. Wade.
In doing so, Notre Dame ignored the U.S. bishops’ guidance in their 2004 statement, Catholics in Political Life. It ignored the concerns of Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon, Notre Dame’s 2009 Laetare Medal honoree – who, unlike the president, certainly did deserve her award, but finally declined it in frustration with the university’s action. It ignored appeals from the university’s local bishop, the president of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference, more than 70 other bishops, many thousands of Notre Dame alumni and hundreds of thousands of other American Catholics. Even here in Colorado, I’ve heard from too many to count.
There was no excuse – none, except intellectual vanity – for the university to persist in its course. And Father Jenkins compounded a bad original decision with evasive and disingenuous explanations to subsequently justify it."
Margaret Sanger or Mother Teresa? This should not be a difficult choice. Cilnton's response at the end puts the decision we must all make in the starkest of terms: Is it the role of the state to protect the radical will to power of a few select human persons or is it to protect those conditions (including life itself) necessary to human excellence? One could (and I do) argue that a woman cannot attain her feminine excellence while being, in many cases, coerced by the culture surrounding her to abort her unborn child.
Well, you either laugh or you cry. I think it's time to laugh. Here is Colbert most wonderful interview with the increasingly limp Douglas Kmiec, who infamously made the case that now-President Obama was the most pro-life candidate available to Catholics last year. As mentioned once or twice on this blog, Kmiec's arguments on that score resemble a rather wistful Swiss Cheese. Colbert pokes a few more holes in him.
While Kmiec's theological and pastoral contortions may provoke pity, Mary Ann Glendon's decision to turn down Notre Dame's Laetare Medal at this year's commencement inspires hope. Her letter to Fr. Jenkins, the university's president, is articulate, gentle, and yet unambiguous. The NC Register has great commentary from Fr. Raymond de Souza. May her tribe increase.
(American Papist has a list of bishops--with links to their statements--who have responded to Notre Dame in kind.)
I find it difficult to express--and, more fundamentally, to fathom--the tremendous leaps in scale employed in the "Culture War" arguments.
A favorite pro-abortion argument centers on the suffering of a particular woman, the victim of violence, who needs our loving support and encouragement to make the difficult, but necessary, choice and end her child's life.
Then there is the favorite atheist/agnostic argument that appeals to "science" and "scientific fact," the power of "progress," and the imbecility of "religion" and "religious experience." All these are categories so broad as to be entirely devoid of meaning. Similar non-concepts include: "nature," "quality of life," "tolerance," and "green."
I see, too, there's been an uproar over Dr. Jeff Steinberg's fertility clinic, which offers hair- and eye-color selection to prospective parents. This in the very same society in which Down Syndrome fetuses are aborted at a rate of 90%. Apparently, eye-color genes are off-limits, Down Syndrome genes are up for grabs.
Finally, with the advent of our current economic crisis comes the not-too-shocking revelation that perhaps the baby-boomers ought to have invested in children rather than lattes, put up with anything rather than divorce, and flushed those birth-control pills (which, incidentally, are killing frogs in suburban America--so much for "green"). The reaction, in my limited social circles, however, has largely been: shrug. Yes, someone really should start reproducing, but, ho-hum, how would I ever pay for college for more than one kid? The leap from "we need a next generation" to "I should consider having children sooner rather than later" is not made.
The fuzzy thinking is overwhelming. The rapid leaps from the particular to the general, and the inability to apply either one to me, here, now, render us mentally, spiritually, and emotionally obese and atrophied. Like the inert humans in Wall-E. This has been up until now an exercise in Rage Against the Machine. But what is to be done? In order to escape the vicious cycle, the answer is for me, here, now to live the culture of life. All the mushy-brained arguments for our culture's ridiculous ethic spring from the basic error: That man creates himself. That our self-actualization is our highest ambition. That God is in my image. There is no one to answer to at the end of all things. Few are the ones who connect these thoughts to their misguided compassion toward the unwed mother, their devotion to nature, their "well-done" divorces, their 2.0 children. But this is the connection.
I must live in opposition to those convictions. Obedience to divine authority is our highest lifestyle choice. I am in God's image, an image not of my making. I will face him at the end of days. My life is his to do as he has asked: not just to reproduce (although I am particularly fond of reproducing), but to love and enjoy my children. Not just to witness to the world, but to suffer and pray for the world. Not just to plant my organic garden, but to take a holy pleasure in the gifts of the earth and the gift of a simple life. Making the connection and living the connection.
Yes, Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of a Pius X bishop who, among other mind-boggling gaffs, denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers. This has, of course, inspired an almost-as-mind-boggling pile of crud in the blogosphere, accusing the pope of being himself a Nazi. Not worth linking to.
So, it was refreshing to read an account of a truly heroic Catholic priest who has made it his life mission to commemorate the forgotten victims of the Shoah (or "Holocaust"):
"As the unmarked mass graves are slowly located, one by one, and sanctified with the recitation of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning for the dead, the cries can at last be silenced. Are we our brothers' keepers? To Father Desbois, the answer is a resounding 'Yes.'"
How beautiful are our keepers. This is not voodoo or superstition; this ministry reaches to heaven. We must all expose the unmarked graves in our lives, beg mercy for those deaths and God's grace to begin a new life.
Kathryn Jean Lopez had a wonderful column up after Thursday's commemoration of Roe v. Wade. She makes so many excellent points in such a lovely, feminine way that--in spite of being three days late--I had to add it in for you.
Watching the inauguration yesterday, there was a strong sense of the fulfillment of the civil rights movement of the 1960's. Not that there are no battles left in the war on racism, but there is now clearly a new message about what America is. The message is this: insofar as you cling to racism, you are not American. Americans accept a man on the basis of his credentials and the integrity of his word, not on the basis of his color. That is the American attitude.
Now we turn to a harder war: the civil rights movement of the last three decades. The unborn are in need of that same protection by law and culture. I hope that I will see the day when the message is this: insofar as you disregard the small ones, you are not American. Americans accept a baby because it is human and they support the mother and father because they have been given the gift of life. That is the American attitude.
It's a good, level-headed reflection on the irony that it is now the pro-choice contingent that enjoys the status of status quo and its attendant intellectual atrophy and refusal to engage in "meaningful dialogue." Neuhaus knows what he's talking about: he himself was active in the civil rights movement of the 1960's; he can recognize the striking similarities (and some differences) between the struggle for racial equality and for the rights of the unborn.
I wonder especially about his analysis of the two cultures here at war:
"Well yes, the abortion battle is over abortion and whether the unborn child counts as a human person, but where one comes out on that question is, I believe, powerfully influenced by a host of other beliefs and attitudes aptly summarized in the pro-life language of a culture of death versus a culture of life. There are two cultures, one focused on rights and laws and the other on rights and wrongs; one focused on maximizing individual self-expression and the other on reinforcing community and responsibility."
When he puts it that way, I find myself re-calibrating just how we ought to be defending our own "rights"--the right to homeschool, cultivate our land, practice our faith, wear religious emblems, etc. Any battle against injustice cannot just be a matter of "get the government out of my business." That maxim is true ot a certain extent, but we need to cultivate a more nuanced understanding of "my" rights and "my" business; we can't fall on the side of the culture war that focuses on "rights and laws ... maximizing self-expression." The push in any fight, in other words, needs to be for an understanding that our freedom is for a certain purpose: the good of every human being with whom we live. Or else we end up on the wrong side of the culture war. We need a healthier libertarianism, or our light dims; just as so many proponents of civil rights--who fought for a great good--have fallen into an apathetic shrug over abortion rights. Day became night.
I love Neuhaus's final perspective: "[A]ll of us would do well to ponder the wisdom in the observation that there are no permanently lost causes because there are no permanently won causes." That is his conclusion, and what precedes it is worth a read.
Jen over at Conversion Diary has said it so well. I've been mulling over the historical analogy between abortion and the Holocaust, especially since some in-laws took exception to it during election debates. The obvious difference between the two slaughters is the awareness and emotional/spiritual suffering of the victims: a tiny fetus can't experience the dread or terror of a Jewish mother or father. Another difference is the sheer number of victims: abortion has claimed nearly 50 million lives in America alone since its legalization.
But, as Jen writes so well, the root is the same:
"What I came to see, though, was that for all the many differences, there is one thing that is the same about the Holocaust and the modern practice of abortion, and it is something critical:
At the root of both scourges is a particular strain of evil, the most virulent that the devil possesses. It is the kind of evil that works to take away the humanity of human beings. It whispers in the ears of one group of people that a certain other group of people are something less than human, less worthy of life because of race or religion or physical ability or age. And once this is accomplished, once a group of people have been thoroughly dehumanized in the mind of their society, evil can run wild while the populace yawns."
More disturbing to me--in my recent conversations--has been the ability of some to insist that, no matter how horrible abortion is, we must not work to change the laws regarding abortion "rights." In a strange twist, they tell me that, yes, abortion is another Holocaust. But we have no right to do anything about it. Has anyone else encountered this line of reasoning? This philosopher mom shudders at its implications, and hopes it is a case of invincible ignorance.
A friend of mine recently read Cardinal George's letter to his faithful, and asked the following:
Would you please, in as many words as it takes, synthesize the following two ideas for me, please: "One cannot favor the legal status quo on abortion and also be working for the common good." and "The teaching, which covers intrinsic evils such as abortion and many other issues that are matters of prudential judgment, could not be clearer; the practice often falls short because we are all sinners." Or, to phrase my question differently, why is George "Unnecessary War" Bush pursuing the common good with his spate of misguided policies but Obama with his misguided views on abortion is not? I am assuming you're going to tell me about what it means to be intrinsically evil etc., but I'm really having some trouble with this idea. At a very practical level, how is pursuing an end to war not pursuing the common good, irrespective of one's views on abortion?
And here's my tome of a response!
I'll begin with the GW vs. Obama question and move to the more general principles. There are kind of two questions, there, I think. One is about GW's pursuit of the war: is it just or not? Another is about voting for Obama, who has promised to end the war: isn't he pursuing the common good in that way, even if not with regard to abortion? In other words, how does one's view on abortion disqualify you from pursuing the common good absolutely speaking?
GW: He may very well not have been pursuing the common good when he (and most of Congress) decided to pursue this war in Iraq. History may or may not tell (I assume we will know at the End of All Things!). Warfare against other nations, however, is not an intrinsic evil. It is always tragic and ugly, but it can in the context of human sinfulness be "just." The criteria for a just war are four: the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain; all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective; there must be serious prospects of success; and the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. (The power of modern weapons weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.)
This teaching does not and does not profess to pass judgment on any particular war in history. Catholics of good will can accept these criteria while disagreeing on their particular application. War is in some cases a just weapon to use in pursuit of the common good. If, in this particular instance, you do not believe the war in Iraq to be just, you can deplore the war but still recognize the possibility of your own error in judgment as well as the fact that, in spite of waging an unjust war, GW's fundamental political philosophy is not intrinsically inimical to the common good of the nation's citizens (even if he's a clutz in trying to promote it!).
Likewise, Catholics of good will can disagree on Obama's proposed measures to end the war. It's an issue of pragmatic strategy, opinion, and our limited access to facts. I would, personally, wonder whether pulling out at this juncture (however wrong it was to leap in) would only make an unjust situation more unjust.
Abortion, however, unlike war, is never a just weapon to use in pursuit of the common good. It is not a defensive measure taken against an aggressor, real or imagined. There is no end or circumstance that justifies the taking of an infant's life. Barack Obama is committed to the idea that an entire class of human beings--which includes some infants separated from their mothers' bodies--is not worthy of the protection of the law. Human beings have no rights until after birth, and some not even then. (Per Robert George, I would describe him as pro-abortion, more than pro-choice, because of his repeated promises to sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act, to re-instate the Mexico City Policy, and his opposition to the Hyde policy and the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. He is actively against this class of human persons.)
Does this mean he is incapable of pursuing the common good in areas such as housing, the economy, and the war? Yes. You cannot support an intrinsic evil--deliberate killing of the unborn--and be pursuing the common good.
Here's why.
The good society is one ordered by its laws, culture, customs, to the common good of its members. The "common good" in Catholic understanding means those goods which are realized only in the individual members of society but not without the support and fellowship of other members. The common good does not diminish because it is distributed, but increases because it is protected and shared by all. Good multiplies; it is fruitful.
That is why we come together naturally in society--to enjoy those goods which, without the society of others, we could never attain. Now, because we are both Christians, I can speak in this way: The most basic and common good of all is the good of human life. "And, behold, God saw that it was very good..." All our confidence in our own salvation and in salvation history rests on this trust: that God sees life as an absolute good. Human life is a common good: it is enjoyed by the individual members of the human race, but we cannot enjoy it in isolation. We depend first on sexual intercourse, then the family, and then on society for this good. The infant, the disabled, and the elderly are simply stark reminders that, without society, we would all either be dead or even never have come to live in the first place. They are most at the mercy of the good society; therefore, the good society's ability to foster and increase the common good is in large part measured in how well it will vouchsafe that most basic good for its weakest members.
Any law-giver who orders the laws of a society against the lives of its own members cannot, de facto, order that society to the true common good (that is, according to God's justice). Aquinas writes:
"If the intention of the law-giver tends toward the true good, which is the common good regulated according to divine justice, it follows that by the law men become good in an unqualified sense. If the intention of the law-giver tends to something which is not good in an unqualified sense, but is a useful good, or something that is pleasurable to him, or something that goes against divine justice; then the law does not make men good in an unqualified sense, but in a qualified sense, that is, in the order to such a rule." Summa Theologica I-II, q. 92, a. 1, c.
Taking members of our society and saying that they are non-members and therefore may be killed by the most brutal means imaginable (saline burning, dismemberment while alive, brains sucked out while alive, etc...) is inconsonant, to say the least, with "good order." Obama may be able to bring about some housing for poor people or lower the deficit (doubtful), but his law-making and ordering of our society will never be good in any sense but an absolutely relativistic one: the common good belongs only to those of a certain size or viability. There's no justice guiding his justice beyond his own sense of expediency. There's no absolute good ordering all his various goods. And we know from history what happens to a society that judges itself based on its own opinion of right and wrong: cf. the genocides of the 20th-century.
Now, what's the difference between the lives of the unborn and the lives taken in an imprudent war (and I use the word "imprudent" because it is a matter of prudential judgment, not absolute good)? Before God, nothing--except perhaps a measure of innocence and defenselessness. But, as Augustine points out, the City of God is not the City of Man. As long as human societies exist (and they will until the Four Last Things, eh?), the common good will be pursued within the particular societies and poli. The burden of protection for the President of the United States lies in the human lives within the scope of his polity. Those lives are his first responsibility; the measure with which he saves and blesses the lives of those existing within his polity is the measure by which he is judged a good law-maker. Again, a war with another nation may or may not be just; war on your own members is never just. The common good is lost when one citizen takes another's life with the blessing of the country's laws and law-givers.
I'll leave you with Obama's speech on the floor of the IL Senate the day he opposed the BAIPA. They are, I believe, most telling: ''As I understand it,'' Obama said during the floor debate, ''this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child - however way you want to describe it - is now outside the mother's womb and the doctor continues to think that it's nonviable but there's, let's say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they're not just coming out limp and dead, that, in fact, they would then have to call a second physician to monitor and check off and make sure that this is not a live child that could be saved.''
The official day of prayer and penance was this past Saturday, but today thousands are marching (in sub-zero temperatures... talk about penance!) to commemorate the tragedy of Roe v. Wade. I can hardly begin to find words that describe what abortion is... so I will let Mother speak for me.
