A reply to the HP

Dear HP - I enter my reply to your remarks here, rather than in the combox.

I really do not know what to think about Gen. McChrystal's remarks.

I think it possile that he wanted to "fall on his sword" in order to dramatize what he considers to be an appalling lack of competence and conviction at the highest level of civilian leadership.

There are ways to do that, which do not compromise the absolute and indiscutible principle of civilian control over the military.

So, it was folly: either a perplexing lack of discretion, or a consternating failure of prudence.

More alter...

LD

Unbecoming: a consideration of the Catholic League's involvement in the Empire State Building controversy

Dr. William A. "Bill" Donohue, in his official capacity as President of the Catholic League, has engaged in a campaign against the ownership and the management of the Empire State Building (ESB).

In his campaign, he accuses the ESB operators of anti-Catholic bias in their decision not to accept the Catholic League's request that they illuminate the ESB with the colors of the Missionaries of Charity on August 26th, to mark the centenary of the birth of MC foundress, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

Donohue's campaign is inconsistent with the nature, purpose and traditions of the organization he leads; Donohue's conduct of the campaign is unbecoming a Christian gentleman.

The following considerations are offered as substantiation of the critical observations, which I have made of Donohue's behavior.

Controversy in Context

The Jesuit priest and professor of political science at Marquette University, Virgil Blum, SJ, founded the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in 1973.

The Catholic League tells us that its purpose is:

[To defend] the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.

This is a cause around which all Catholics have a right and a duty to rally. Immediately following this mission statement, we discover the following specification:

Motivated by the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, the Catholic League works to safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened.

In the broadest sense, then, the Catholic League exists in order to defend the place of the Church and of her members in the public square.

We find this understanding confirmed in the following words, taken from the "What do we do?" header of the "About Us" page at the League's website:

In essence, the Catholic League monitors the culture, acting as a watchdog agency and defender of the civil rights of all Catholics.

The Catholic League has often acted in keeping with its mission statement, bringing violations of and encroachments on the rights of Catholics and of the Church to the attention and the scrutiny of the broad public in a manner consistent with Christian charity and the common morality of all people who fear God.

The Present Case Considered

The Catholic League has, under Donohue's leadership, sought a secular honor for Mother Teresa, one of the Church's blessed. To seek such an honor is not to preserve the Church's place in the world; rather, to seek such an honor is to desire the approval and even celebration of the world - and this is not in keeping with the stated mission of the League.

Peculiarly distasteful is Donohue's use - as a trope - of a daughter of the Church, who so perfectly despised such dappled vanity while she was on Earth.

Donohue's ungrounded insistence that the ESB operators must have been motivated by anti-Catholic bias in their refusal, bears none of the marks of prudence, temperance, or justice.

Donohue, in leveling an accusation of mendacity against the ESB operators - an accusation based on the most uncharitable possible reading of comments torn from a statement published to the building's website in shocked response to Donohue's unexpected vitriol, and with the most exquisitely studied disregard for the full circumstances of the statement's publication - has behaved in a manner that is frankly indefensible.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Donohue's commitment, nor do I believe his intentions were dishonorable.

Nevertheless, his behavior has weakened the credibility of the Catholic League; he has done a real disservice to Catholics; he has wounded our national discourse.

LD

The Pill's fiftieth anniversary

I'd like to keep on with the argument of my previous post, and I invite the LD to join in.

An occasion is offered by an article in the last issue of Time, devoted to the 50^th anniversary of the introduction of the Pill, its discovery and its effects, especially on the "sexual revolution" of the following decades.

In 1968 Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humanae vitae, which raised an uproar of protests among Catholics, in particular in America.

What did it say that was so offending? The right answer might sound more or less like this: it reminded men, male and female, that they are by nature bodily beings, with all that this implies.

I heard said that the Pill represented a liberation of women from the burden of unwanted pregnancy. Well, the same Time's article remarks, women have always known how to avoid pregnancy when they didn't want it. Yes, contraception might have been less secure, but was available. Then we could say that it liberated women from the fear of unwanted pregnancy. Even this, I think, is relative. A decade later a much more dreadful way to liberate themselves from unwanted pregnancy was allowed, by the Supreme Court in the States and by the legislature in Europe.

No. I think that the long term effect of the Pill, foreseen by Pope Paul, was another.

It contributed to change the imagery of men. So that being bodily didn't require anymore the acceptance of the limits involved in it. What else could it mean to say that women were liberated by the Pill from a burden? Which burden, if not that of being women? A similar liberation was there expecting men.

No need consequently to identify with our own body (if you know what I mean).

However, it wasn't the Pill to start this change. It actually started already four centuries ago, when Descartes drastically distinguished, nay, separated res cogitans and res extensa, mind
and body, and saw men not as a unity of both, but as made by a strange connection of them of which he didn't know how to account.

Corollary: if sex belongs to the body, this means then that mind is asexual and can dispose of the body the way it wants.

Call this Cartesian dualism, or, with a more sophisticated notion, gnosticism.

HP

George Weigel Replies to Fr. Hans Kung (quanno ce vo', ce vo')

George Weigel has written an open letter to Fr. Hans Kung, in reply to Fr. Kung's unfortunate piece in the Irish Times, itself an open letter to the world's bishops.

Weigel's letter contains at least one error of fact, i.e. an erroneous identification of then Proff. Ratzinger and de Lubac as Council Fathers (they were periti, "theological experts" who acted as consultors to the Council Fathers), which unfortunately requires us to withold absolute and unqualified praise of Weigel's effort as a paragon of polemical elegance.

Even so, Weigel's essay is more than an excellent polemical exercise - it merits consideration as one of the finest contributions to its literary genre in recent memory.

It also happens to hit the nail on the head.

Money quotes:

"[Y]ou have lost the argument over the meaning and the proper hermeneutics of Vatican II. That explains why you relentlessly pursue your fifty-year quest for a liberal Protestant Catholicism, at precisely the moment when the liberal Protestant project is collapsing from its inherent theological incoherence."

"I understand odium theologicum as well as anyone, but I must, in all candor, tell you that you crossed a line that should not have been crossed in your recent article, when you wrote the following:

'There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005).'

"That, sir, is not true. I refuse to believe that you knew this to be false and wrote it anyway, for that would mean you had willfully condemned yourself as a liar. But on the assumption that you did not know this sentence to be a tissue of falsehoods, then you are so manifestly ignorant of how competencies over abuse cases were assigned in the Roman Curia prior to Ratzinger’s seizing control of the process and bringing it under CDF’s competence in 2001, then you have forfeited any claim to be taken seriously on this, or indeed any other matter involving the Roman Curia and the central governance of the Catholic Church."

As enticing, as polemical engagement is, and indeed precisely because of its ability to inebriate - even intoxicate - I do not generally advocate it. The Romans have an expression, however, reported in the title of this post: quanno ce vo', ce vo', which roughly translates, "Sometimes, you've just got to have at it."

This was one of those times, and Weigel has acquitted himself admirably.

Read the rest here.

LD

History is history

History is history, which means that it happened and nothing we can do about it, save try to understand it.

For centuries the Church acted in a secular context characterized by a monarchical and aristocratic articulation of society. There it became, in spite of the initial opposition, the main culture of the people, so it was in her that the princes searched for a justification of their representation, that made them other than tyrants. Of course, so the history goes, at the same time the princes tried over again to make of her just the spiritual side of their power: in a word, to subordinate her to themselves as to the true anointed by the Lord.

But there is a little particular: every Christian is, in the Church, anointed.

So for centuries the only one to remind the princes of this little particular was the Pope: the papacy was, over again, the only bulwark to the absolutism of secular monarchs, who in turn claimed exclusive holiness for their kingdoms.

By itself, I could say, the Church (the only one, holy catholic church) is a transcendent monarchical institution, established by God through Christ, leaving Peter and the other apostles with their successors, the Pope and the Bishops, to spread his Spirit through the people, so to have everybody share, once anointed, in his divine kingship.

Things have not changed even after that, also because of the long term effect of the Church's work in society, monarchy left the way to democracy in the secular constitution of states.

In Europe, this required in order to happen a series of revolutions, from Luther's protest to the juvenile movements of the late Sixties. It happened that people, moved by the sense of the equal personal dignity they owed to the Church, saw her on the side of the monarchical and aristocratic powers that be, and so turned also against her as an impediment to their divine freedom. But in this way, having deprived their dignity of its transcendent justification, they followed the way of the old princes, and tended to turn into tyrants.

This again is history, and I don't need to remind the ways this turn to tyranny took. But perhaps I do need to remark that this turn can take a soft as well as a hard face: a needed reminder now days, when the soft character of tyranny risks to make it invisible to us.

Different was the experiment in democracy made in America: not against the Church, but leaving the churches free to educate people to the required royal virtue. Of course, perfection is not of this world, and even the American experiment is subject to the temptation of soft tyranny.

That tyranny it is, is recognizable precisely by the attacks moved to the Church and the Pope.

There are derailing priests, betraying their order by indulging in "paiderastia" (today it is called "pedophilia")? So what is new: that men are sinners, and such unfortunately stay also within the Church, is again history. Nothing to marvel about.

I would marvel only if it were a phenomenon of such diffusion in the Church to exceed by a long stretch its presence in other sectors of human society. Which is in no way the case, quite the contrary.

This means therefore that the Church is attacked for the same old reasons, that she is there to remind people of belonging to a higher society than the one represented by any state of this world. Thus she reminds them of their freedom of children of God, being, because children, heirs, and sharing, because heirs, of his sovereignty.

Hence the royal liberty that makes democracy – the democracy we cherish – possible, keeping us from the otherwise inevitable servitude, to others as well as to ourselves.

HP

Closed and open witness II

It's a week that I am brooding over the conclusions of the previous post, and consequently the title I gave to it, thinking they need some explanations, while, taken by other business, I didn't find the time to give them.

The other business is my teaching cultural anthropology. Now, we all know how close the question of culture is to that of religion, to the point that I dare say that religion is nothing else than culture, i.e. the understanding of the world out of which we live in its ultimate implications.

Multiculturalism is therefore nonsense. Even to declare all cultures equally legitimate, it's a way of affirming one's understanding of the world, and hence one's culture.

So, these days I was trying to introduce my students to cultural anthropology by explaining them this simple fact: simple, and though hard to accept in our liberal society, where what we call science is actually the culture by which we are taught to understand the world.

Thus, believe it or not, the problem we face with science is specular to the one raised by the religion of the book.

With the name of science it is brought forward a knowledge that is claimed to be based on evidence, and not on faith in someone, let's call him a prophet.

From Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century to Karl Popper in the Twentieth Century, the objection advanced to any talk of revelation is the same: you claim to have had an experience of God speaking to you; I don't say you didn't, but neither I can say you did, because I have no way to tell, being the evidence you appeal to foreclosed to me.

That's because you don't want to see the evidence available to you as proof of where my words come from – could the prophet retort, and throw the ball back to the scientist: your evidence is good enough to build atomic bombs, but not to prove that by so doing we achieve control of nature, because there is no such thing, but only God's will, to which we submit ourselves even when building such bombs.

Here it is the result of direct witness for alleged evidence: two kinds of "prophesy", speaking in the name of God or in the name of Nature, set the one against the other.

Reciprocally closed.

Cultural anthropology, instead, at least as I understand it, withdraws from such a confrontations of opposing prophetic claims. It's task is to take comparatively into exam men's witness. By way of this, the evidence it appeals to is neither immediately of God or of Nature, but of what human beings represent for each other.

Should we say their divine nature? God's potentia present in them and among them?

HP

To account for knowledge

You are always asking questions, and rarely give answers. It's right, how could I if there were no questions raised? After which anybody could see that at the heart of all political debates is the understanding of religion and science: what science is, and, correlatively, religion.

Let me give an answer: science is
a knowledge capable of accounting for itself.

Everyman, to whatever society he belongs, is convinced to have knowledge of the world he lives in, and accounts for it to the other members of his society. Are we able to do the same and to account for the knowledge of world in a society become planetary?

Well – so runs the average reply in liberal society – we have to distinguish: yes, for science, no, for culture and religion.

The trouble is that such an answer contains a petitio principii: it presupposes that there is a knowledge for which it is already reserved the name of science, while it is precisely the use of such a name that is in question.

We saw a couple of years ago, in occasion of the sentence of a tribunal in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, where this leads to: the demise of any rational discourse, by which knowledge could account for herself. As the sole justification for his sentence, stating that only the most accredited theory of evolution by chance is scientific, while any talk of intelligent design is a matter of religious faith, the judge gave the fact that such is the current use of the two words, science and religion.

It was like saying, on his part: I am competent to judge of a similar question because after all even the experts have no reasons to give, one way or the other.

Because there are no reasons to be given, not just for culture and religion but even for science, so called, all knowledge remains unaccounted for.

If the definition given above is correct, as I think it is, present day Western society appears, in spite of all the boasting for scientific achievements, very poor of real science.

To close, just a hint to further answers: only by turning to the Word made flesh, as the key to a comparative study of culture that includes together science and religion, so called, we can achieve a knowledge capable of accounting for itself.

HP

“Host” and “guest”

I kept on thinking on the question raised by Fr. Zuhsldorf about the right translation of the cumsubstantialem Patri of the Latin creed: whether it is better "one in being with the Father" or "consubstantial with the Father".

Now, from what I understand the question has been settled, by those who have authority to do it, in favor of the second option. If nothing else, this has the advantage of being closer to the Latin creed previously in liturgical use.

This granted, and convinced as I am that there is no substantial difference in the meaning of the two formulas, there remains, as a good topic for a blog salon, the question why Fr. Zuhsldorf should find the first one offensive.

A lady expert in translation (actually my wife) gave me the cue.

Schleirmacher, among other things translator of Plato into German at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, remarked that in translating one has to make a choice: between giving prevalence to the "host language", so to make the translation sound as smooth as possible, or to the "guest language", which can make the translation sound awkward.

In our case, consubstantial is certainly faithful to the Latin "guest", but not so familiar to the English "host". One in being might be more consonant to this last.

Even too consonant, if we share Fr. Zuhlsdorf's reaction, suspicious of English as metaphysical language: its lack of precision could lead to confusion, nay, confusion is already there!

In the way of conclusion, a maxim: he who wants to be confused, will certainly succeed in finding something to confuse him.

HP

"Does God Exist?": some thoughts for a young reader

Some time ago, one of our readers, a young man, submitted that he does not believe in God.

A sample of the reasoning our reader offers would contain some of the following observations: God is a crutch - a metaphysical security blanket there for us when we are weak and helpless, or feeling so; mankind have so many names and such contradictory notions about God (or the gods), that it is impossible to take any of them seriously; church services are boring, and best when over quickly.

These are only a few of the objections, to each of which I am tempted to reply at length.

I will resist the temptation, because I would like to take the observations, offered in their original form as objections to the idea that there is a God, and show how each might just as easily (at least) be taken to show that God might exist.

I shall do this, and then conclude with some of my own considerations regarding our reader's situation, which he describes as one in which he has many questions and few, if any answers.

With regard to the first objection, I would urge that, granting the supposition, i.e. that many people turn to "God" when feeling weak and helpless, might be indicative of a sort of innate tendency, which may in turn have been put there by the divine creator of mankind. On its own, the fact does not prove anything, and really cannot be taken in isolation. What about expression, "Thank God!" which is a frequent and seemingly natural reaction to unexpected and/or unexpectedly good news? If we take the tendency to invoke the divine in moments when we are beside ourselves with distress and joy, might not a reasonable observer of human nature conclude that there is in man a tendency to invoke the divine in such moments, and would it not be reasonable then to hypothesise that God our creator has placed this tendency in us?

This line of questioning shades perceptibly into that, which is properly a response to the second objction, namely that God's nature is everywhere disputed. Let this statement of fact go unchallenged. That God's nature is everywhere disputed in fact depends on a prior and basic fact: that His existence is everywhere supposed. Might this fact, i.e. that no society of men has ever based itself on the denial of the proposition that God exists, but rather every society of men throughout history has organized and qualified itself precisely in terms of its members' understanding of the divine nature and the way in which they offered divine cult (worship), be taken to suggest that human society as such is an expression of the basic human impetus to be united with the creator?

Thirdly, and most briefly, I agree. Church services are often boring. I confess that I go more often than not out of a sense of duty or obligation. I would ask, however: whence the sense of duty, of obligation? I do not mean the sense of duty or obligation to attend church at the appointed times. I mean to inquire into the origin of the sense of duty as such. Before taking the tedium of church services as evidence of their empiness, one must first offer an adequate account of why so many have gone and continue to go to church, at all.

Now, let me offer one further consideration to our young reader: before you let yourself be discouraged by the multiplicity of questions and the apparent lack or elusiveness of answers, ascertain for yourself that you are asking the right questions, and in the right way.

For example: from the fact that things just seem to be a certain way, that people have certain inclinations, that there are observable and predictable cycles in nature, might one conclude that there is order in the universe?

To be sure, either there is order or there is not. If there is order, then has some power or principle ordained it? In everything we perceive as ordered in the universe, we certainly do not claim to have understood the order until we have arrived at a certain knowledge of the power by which the order is established - and this woudl tend to suggest that the presence of order implies of needs an ordering power.

I submit to you, young friend, that this ordering power - not of this or that thing, but of all things - is what all men call "God".

Best,
LD

No individuals of a species

I am appalled by what passes as science, when it concerns "man".

So, while my friend LD discusses the battles of the day, I keep on the issues of the war.

It makes my heart cry when I see how American universities waste their money to finance research and teaching on nonsense.

First question: why does a man desire any woman? The answer is easy: evolution played on our apelike ancestors the trick of developing "lust" so that they could be brought to search for a partner and release the tension (I am not sure of what is included in the category "partner").

Second question: why do a man and a woman feel attachment to each other? Again the answer is easy: it is another trick of evolution that made our apelike ancestors develop the neural functions necessary to feel "romantic love", so as not to have to go roaming in looking for partners, and be able to dedicate themselves fully to mating with just the one to whom they are now attached.

Third question: what makes this attachment endure? By now you know the answer: it is still a trick of evolution working on our apelike ancestor's brain to make them wanting to raise the children born from their mating.

It seems that this is what teaches a certain biological anthropologists of Rutger's University, a woman who is known as one of the most prominent of her field (I leave her anonymous, "to name the sin but not the sinner").

Some call it just anthropology, without qualifications. It might even be, given the fact that she claims to explain in this way the origin of our moral feelings. Too bad that no such a thing exists outside of the mores, the habits or customs by which a group lives and perpetuates itself by passing them from a generation to the next. Her explanations fall therefore into the classical vicious circle, of presupposing that which they have to explain.

Too bad, in short, that a biological anthropologist feels authorized to ignore completely that other field of research on man called "socio-cultural anthropology".

The trouble, with bio- and psychological anthropology, is to take men as "individuals" of a species, in the same sense that any kind of animals (bulls, horses, pigs, dogs) are individuals of their species: which juman beings are not, because no one has ever seen a "man", who were not an Italian, a French, an American, a Chinese, or whatever.

What worries me, is that I discovered the existence of that woman "anthropologist" by reading an essay by a cardinal (again "the sin but not the sinner"), previously teacher of theological anthropology, who didn't simply dismiss her as I have done for the lack of any sense of what science is, but thought her worthy of being taken seriously, enough to deserve a reply.

HP

From the Archives...sort of...

Does Islam promote peace? As a Catholic, I cannot claim authority to answer the question. My limited knowledge of Islam can, however, serve to set the problem posed by such a query in relief.

First, it is a loaded question.

When English authors employ the word, “peace” they are more or less consciously wording a concept represented by the Christian political and theological authors with the Latin, pax.

Arabic is the language of Islam.

The Arabic word most often translated to English as “peace” is salaam, which is, like pax, a technical, juridical term.

In the Christian tradition, pax (peace) is the presence of “justice”. “Justice”, in its turn, is “the condition of concord in society” achieved through the “rule of law”. “Law” is a “dictate of reason promulgated by competent authority and ordered to the common good”. “Reason” is a peculiarly human faculty, by the proper exercise of which human nature may attain to an understanding of Divine ordinance.

Salaam, on the other hand - and as far as I understand it - refers to the state of absolute submission to the manifest will of the one God. Now, “submission” in this case renders the Arabic word (another juridical term) islam, from which the Muslim religion has its proper name; the Arabic for “one God" is Allah, and the Arabic for “manifest will” is Qur’an, which is also the name of the Muslims’ holy book, often transliterated as Koran.

In any case, the Qur'an is the source and ultimate authority in and for law under Islam - for it is the revelation of the Seal of the Prophets, Mohammad.

Peace, according to the Muslim religion, is the absolute rule of Islam, or absolute submission to the will of Allah, as made manifest through His revelation, which is Law.

It would seem to follow, therefore, that there is no salaam where there is no islam, no “peace” outside the “complete subjection of each and every living person’s will, to the will of Allah as made manifest in the Koran”.

In other words, there can be no “peace” until everyone living has submitted to the dictates of the Muslim religion. Once the Law has been proclaimed, to refrain from an act of submission is, quite literally, to place oneself outside the law, i.e. to be an outlaw.

In the Christian tradition, peace (pax) is the presence of justice, which is the condition of social concord through rule of law, and that law is the perfection of reason (ratio), by which human nature participates in the Divine order.

There seems, therefore, to be little to justify translating both the Christian pax and the Islamic salaam with the English “peace”.

“Law”, after all, is for Christians the participation of human reason in the Divine order, while for Muslims, “Law” is ultimately the manifestation of Divine will, a will that one cannot hope to understand and to which one must only submit.

The question whether Islam is a religion of peace is therefore not even a real question: it only seems to be capable of being raised because of an inappropriate use of a single word in English to translate two different words from two different languages, words that function as technical juridical terms in disparate and conflicting cultural systems.

LD

Rhetoric and prudence

I can't let the Nobel prize for peace to Obama pass without a comment. Because I haven't seen any particular change on the world scene except Obama's own declarations of good will, I'll do it in the form of a general reflection on rhetoric and prudence.

What is rhetoric and what has to do with prudence? you could ask; or vice versa. Well, everything.

Rhetoric, in the old, full sense of the word, is the art of persuasion: i.e. the art of talking and acting effectively, obtaining the assent of one's interlocutor or audience to what he says or to the course of action he wants. Plato, in his negative moods, found it quite appalling, and styled it as the art of seduction, by which a lover makes the beloved grants him or her her or his favors. However, we like it or not, it is of the essence of democracy as a political regime based on consensus. No one could be elected if he weren't well versed in it.

Obama showed last year to be a master at it.

Prudence, on the contrary, never suffered a bad press with ancient philosophers, but it was quite forgotten with modern ones. It is the art of assessing a situation, so to know what to do (and say) and what not to do (and say). To stay with the example of the seducer, he should know when he can give it a try and when not; but in this case it is just an example, carrying no negative connotations. We need prudence in all circumstances of life, so much the more when we have to take a decision on the spot. Therefore prudence was classified among the four cardinal virtues (besides it, fortitude, temperance and justice).

On this regard Obama… well, I'll let the judgment to my readers.

The reason why we need to be well versed in rhetoric is the same for which we need to be prudent men.

The situations we can find ourselves in are made of a myriad of more or less perceptible or imperceptible signs, by which we can be easily led astray. Again the example of seduction: a woman acts graciously towards me, which might mean…; well, it just "might", but if I am mistaken I'll be bitterly disappointed. Prudence means then to be able to recognize according to circumstances which signs are really pertinent for assessing the kind of situation I am in. Hence, situations aren't like natural species that we can classify in a univocal way, so that, given certain signs, we can be sure of what they are. Neither I can't state my case with an interlocutor or an audience in such an univocal way, made of clear cut definitions and classifications. I need to be able to give them something more significant, that makes them able to assess the situation as I do.

Good rhetoric partakes then of the habit of prudence. Not all audiences are the same: what works with some, doesn't work with others.

What works with Americans, with Europeans, or the Swedish Academy, doesn't necessarily works with the sworn enemies of what we are.

Si pacem vis para bellum (if you want peace, prepare yourself to war), recites an old Latin saying. Here again it is question of prudence. In certain cases it might lead to a destructive armaments race. In others might be the thing to do, and to do otherwise would be taken as a sign of weakness.

Again, how things stand with Obama concerning his prudential rhetoric, I'll leave it to the judgement of readers.

HP

Politics and faith

Contrasts in Italian politics among the power of the State that is too long to explain, prompted me these general considerations.

It is funny that there are so many people, much more in Europe than in the States but even here an increasing number, think that religion should be left totally out of the public space, because, they say, it is a matter of faith, and faith is a strictly individual affair.

It's more than funny, it's very funny.

I tell you why: politics rests entirely on faith.

Thus said, it is a little blunt, so I should try to explain myself.

We rarely stop and think of the meaning of the words we use. Too bad, because we could be surprised. So it is for the word faith, which carries a rich set of connotations.

For those who want to exclude it from the public space, it means essentially belief: where to believe something is opposed to knowing it. In other words, belief is equated with opinion, and according to the law everybody should be entitled to his own opinions. Here things become immediately funny, if we just bring to mind how general is the use of an expression like "I believe in...": both for things I can believe or not believe, which makes them opinions, and for things I can't but believe, which makes them science. Troubles starts when it comes to saying which is which: vary shaky business.

One could say, "I believe in the theory of evolution", or, "I believe in the theory of relativity", thinking to be affirming two things equally scientific. Someone else (like yours truly) might think, instead, that this is true for the second but not for the first, and say so. "Why, aren't both of them proved?" could ask the first, politely or with a tone of challenge (of course if he cares to be polite or challenging, and not simply ignore such an ignorant moron, who dares to doubt of evolution). "Depends on what you mean by proving", could answer a little ironic the second, "don't you know that even philosophers of science are not quite in agreement on it? Besides, how could you or I know? We didn't prove it." "You must be kidding, scientists…" "There I wanted you!"

Belief, then, is not just opinion. It simply means to be persuaded of the truth of something, for more or less good reasons. And one good reason can also be trust. Actually, the arguments for or against the theory of evolution might not be so hard to assess. But the theory of relativity… For us average mortals it is like talking about God's existence. We can only trust those who proved it.

Funny business, proving: adverting, testing, knowing…But what has to do with politics? A moment of patience, I am coming to it.

Belief, joined with trust, gives the meaning of faith. Not the full meaning yet, but enough of it to clarify the assertion I made above. I trust somebody, and I believe in what he says; I don't trust him, and I don't believe it. This happens even among scientists, between people and scientists, and, most blatantly, in politics and in religion.

Let's say, for example, the President of the United States tells us that things at the moment are tough, but we are strong and can make it. Well, we confide in him, and do our best.

Congress makes laws. We confide in it, and think that they are conceived for the common good. Courts administer justice. We confide in them, and willingly subject ourselves to their sentences and orders.

Is it clear? All politics rests on faith. Religion cannot be really separated from politics. The Founding Fathers of the United States knew it, but believed that it could be left open to civil discussion, confiding in the reciprocal good faith of people.

What happens, then, if people are divided by utterly different religions (including the religion of non-religion)? And while the government takes one side, the courts take another? A more or less latent or open war of all against all, is Thomas Hobbes' inexorable answer, to be kept in check by a tyrant State.

There is however an other answer I am more prone to: to recognize that our reasoning is prompted by faith, and to look here for proofs of what is said in the public square.

HP

Gaudium et spes and the Work of the Holy Spirit: a reply to the HP

Dear HP,

Well you know of my love for the Catholic tradition, and well you know of my wariness of modernity - indeed, I learned much of it at your foot.

Having said that, I must now wonder whether your treatment of Gaudium et spes might be incomplete.

GS is a document of the Council, and as such we must regard it as inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Only then can we (and I think that, in the case of GS, we really must) go on to criticize it.

Indeed, one of its harshest and most effective critics is the present Pontiff, who struggled to find a Christocentric key in the text.

Eventually he did, following JPII's frequent citation of the line to the effect that Jesus CHrist is not only God's self-revelation to Man, but God's revelation of the truth about human nature nature to Mankind.

That said, the document was written by committee, and as such is an abject failure from a literary point of view.

With regard to the document's discussion of transformation, I would recall the opening lines:

The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.

Now, I may be using too sharp a knife, but it has always strucke me that the lack of a qualifier following the naming of the "followers of Christ" is conspicuous, and telling. The joys and hopes of the present age are the joys and hopes etc. of Christians, sic et simpliciter, which is to say, the joys and hopes etc. of Christians in every age. The opening statement of the document, on this reading, would contain a constant, precisely the constant the Council Fathers go on to ignore for the rest of the document.

Best,

LD

Great Transofrmations

I was reading an article on the G20 – but for what I have to say it could have been about almost anything – when I was hit by a reference to the "great transformations of the Nineties". Mind me, nothing conspicuous about it, it was just that it stirred in me an unfavorable recollection.

To speak about the accelerated transformation of present day society is a common place of our times.

Hard to die. Nobody noticing that we have been saying that since I don't know when, so marking our society with an unchanging character.

I must say, as student of cultural anthropology, that I didn't draw from it a lesson of relativism. I did learn from it to relativise myself as man of my time; but this was rather a stimulus to look for constants in human affairs, and discover how, in spite of all seeming evidence to the contrary, men have not changed in their nature. Save of course for the change brought by divine grace through Jesus Christ: a change, though, that non tollit sed perficit naturam.

The unfavorable stir in my memory provoked by that article, brought back to the surface the "wind of the Sixties", of which I spoke some time ago. We were really convinced that a new era was dawning. Unfortunately we find traces of the cultural mood of that time also in the Second Vatican Council: in what now appears to me its soft spot, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in today's world Gaudium and spes.

There I read: "Humanity lives today a new period of her history, characterized by profound and quick changes that are progressively extended to the whole universe" (GS n° 4).

Did they, the Council fathers, really believe that?

HP

How (not) to Conduct Civilized Debate

Awhile back, an old and dear friend with somewhat different views from my own regarding abortion suggested several things in the course of a conversation, to wit:

• President Obama is not pro-abortion, he is pro-choice.

• My friend and interlocutor's position is "anti anti-abortionist"

• Pope Benedict XVI is leading the Catholic Church toward destruction by clinging to outdated ideas on condoms and birth control

I answered the first thusly:

There is a distinction in the abstract between being pro-choice and being pro-abortion, and there may be a real difference; in all my life, however, I have never met anyone who claimed to be pro-choice but not pro-abortion, who, when pressed, did not eventually say that s/he thinks there are cases in which abortion is a good option, one to which s/he would recur.

I say this makes a person pro-abortion, rather than simply pro-choice.

President Obama made public statements to the effect that he would not see his daughters "punished with a baby," in the event they "made mistakes[.]"

This sounds an awful lot like he's glad to have the option around.

This makes him pro-abortion.

Now, to the second, which was motivated by an argument to the effect that abortion foes would save more lives by spending time and energy on things like adoption, rather than on operations and campaigns directly opposing abortion rights, I essentially replied that perhaps more lives would be saved if people seeking and providing abortions spent their time and money on things like adoption.

I have yet to answer the third bulleted assertion, because there seems to be so much wrong with it that I know not where to start.

It has always struck me as absolutely uncanny that people can be perfectly willing to accept the truth of the Church's central claim, i.e. that God became a carpenter and died the death of a criminal and then got up two days later, but they balk at the idea that encasing one's member in a synthetic sac before engaging in coitus might be unnatural.

I am fairly sure we need to do a whole lot more to shape the conversation, including the language in which it is conducted and the default terms of reference. Most people, including, sorry to say, most Catholics, believe that the Church's opposition to birth control began in '68, and is a matter of Papal discipline, rather than right apprehension of Natural Law and the Church's constant teaching.

I will end on the following note, one I think is likely to become my refrain in the near future: people who disagree with the Church on any number of issues are not, ipso facto, bad. They may have a very inadequate or even seriously mistaken understanding of what the Church's position on a given issue really is - and this is extremely important, for, what appears to us to be wilful opposition to or perhaps flagrant disregard for the Magisterium may be a simple matter of a more-or-less sound conscience acting on bad information. We have all found ourelves in such a situation. In short, to put a positive turn on a famous maxim of Bishop Fulton John Sheen, love bringing people to the truth more than you love being right and winning the argument, and you will find yourself winning more arguments and bringing yourself closer to the truth.

LD