Christmas spirit for the whole year

I had an unfinished little Christmas meditation left in my draft page. Christmas is passed, and just started the new year. So, the best I can do is to wish that something of the Christmas spirit is going to endure in the new year, and to ask, to resume that meditation, what that spirit is.

No much good to say about the past year. The financial crisis keeps on plaguing us, and an incompetent man sits in the White House, incapable of promoting in people that hope on which he based the campaign that led to his election (rarely the promises of the electoral campaign have been more belied by the reality of the person and of his administration: he presented himself as post partisan, and acted in a way that more partisan could hardly be; he presented himself as post racial, and with him racial tensions came back to the fore in America). Not many reasons of hope seem to be looming at the horizon. In this moment of lack of American leadership, exploded the so called “Arab spring”: the revolt against autocrats that appeared as a promise for democracy in Arab countries, but out of which are emerging to power the only organized groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood, which only promise an increase of the tension between the Islamic world and the rest of us. Not to speak of Iran.

I won’t keep on going listing the evils that threaten our world, East and West so called. As far as the Western side of the world I’d number in the first place the failure of confidence: word that includes the root fid of fides, faith and trust together.

At the end of the Christmas and New Year holidays there is for the Catholic tradition the Epiphany: the manifestation of what happened at Christmas, when the Magi hail in a baby the “new born king”, which marks the turning into a new year.

Here you have the Christmas spirit: it’s a spirit of hope, the hope coming from a birth. In Italian it is called Natale, in Spanish, Natividad: a birthday, that we celebrate.

What is it then that we do celebrate when we remember somebody’s birthday, and may be throw a party for him or her? Pretty simple: the joy that he or she brought into our life.

A beautiful Hollywood movie of 1946 by Frank Capra, It’s a wonderful life, best illustrate this sense of the celebration represented by Christmas. Here is the story: on Christmas Eve a man meditates suicide, because of the bankrupt that threatens his life work, which makes him think that better were not to be born; the miraculous intervention of his guardian angel makes him see how things would have been if he really had not been born: that is, because of all the good that he did, much worse; he asks for his life back, and finds all the friends he made, knowing his difficulties, bringing in thanks more than he needed to be saved from bankrupt. The moral is that the good one does is the difference that makes his being born worthy, for others to celebrate.

The more the good done, the larger the circle of the people celebrating the birth. The good one does, however, doesn’t extent itself only in space, but also in time, and gives therefore to celebration its character of recurrence: the good brought of old to life by someone gives reason to celebrate, with his birth, birth itself as the coming to life.

Should someone find what I just said not clear enough as illustration of the meaning of the Christmas epiphany, he might think of what happens today, when the reasons for celebrating are, if not erased, at least hidden. Birth is surrounded by expectations and recollections of renewal of life which make of it a social, public affair. Stripped, instead, of the expectations and recollections of communal life, it doesn’t remain but a biological event. Uselessly we confer to the newborn inherent rights, these are not enough to make of him a public person: one is and remains private – word coming from the same root of “deprived”, lacking of something essential, that makes him appear to others as a promise of good, and, by seeing himself through others’ eyes, makes him feel his being born a worthy thing.

When the good reaches the whole community, we have the kind of person traditionally called king. But they are telling us that in our democratic society there are no longer kings, only experts, qualified as such by the mainstream culture passed over by universities and media, not to inspire us to the good, but to direct our lives in a way politically correct.

Hence despair and partisanship. Over against which it stands the Christmas spirit of celebration of birth.

HD

The Berlin Manifesto

Through the course of the coming days and weeks, the authors of these Chronicles from the Front will be commenting on and discussing the speech of Pope Benedict XVI to the Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany. We believe that this discourse will come to be understood as a foundational text for the renewal of Western civilization, for the cause of truth, of justice, of beauty: in a word, for the cause of Christ's Holy Gospel and of all that is good in the culture to which that same gave most definitive shape - for men of good will everywhere at the dawn of this third millennium of Christianity.

Please find the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's remarks to the German Federal Parliament, as published by Vatican Radio, below:

Mr President of the Federal Republic,
Mr President of the Bundestag,
Madam Chancellor,
Mr President of the Bundesrat,
Ladies and Gentlemen Members of the House,

It is an honour and a joy for me to speak before this distinguished house, before the Parliament of my native Germany, that meets here as a democratically elected representation of the people, in order to work for the good of the Federal Republic of Germany. I should like to thank the President of the Bundestag both for his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind words of greeting and appreciation with which he has welcomed me. At this moment I turn to you, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, not least as your fellow-countryman who for all his life has been conscious of close links to his origins, and has followed the affairs of his native Germany with keen interest. But the invitation to give this address was extended to me as Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, who bears the highest responsibility for Catholic Christianity. In issuing this invitation you are acknowledging the role that the Holy See plays as a partner within the community of peoples and states. Setting out from this international responsibility that I hold, I should like to propose to you some thoughts on the foundations of a free state of law.
Allow me to begin my reflections on the foundations of law [Recht] with a brief story from sacred Scripture. In the First Book of the Kings, it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success – wealth – long life – destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead, he asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and evil (cf. 1 Kg 3:9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, as this is what opens up for him the possibility of effective political action. Yet success is subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of justice. “Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?”, as Saint Augustine once said . We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss. To serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may appear right? Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today.
For most of the matters that need to be regulated by law, the support of the majority can serve as a sufficient criterion. Yet it is evident that for the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of man and of humanity is at stake, the majority principle is not enough: everyone in a position of responsibility must personally seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws. In the third century, the great theologian Origen provided the following explanation for the resistance of Christians to certain legal systems: “Suppose that a man were living among the Scythians, whose laws are contrary to the divine law, and was compelled to live among them ... such a man for the sake of the true law, though illegal among the Scythians, would rightly form associations with like-minded people contrary to the laws of the Scythians.”
This conviction was what motivated resistance movements to act against the Nazi regime and other totalitarian regimes, thereby doing a great service to justice and to humanity as a whole. For these people, it was indisputably evident that the law in force was actually unlawful. Yet when it comes to the decisions of a democratic politician, the question of what now corresponds to the law of truth, what is actually right and may be enacted as law, is less obvious. In terms of the underlying anthropological issues, what is right and may be given the force of law is in no way simply self-evident today. The question of how to recognize what is truly right and thus to serve justice when framing laws has never been simple, and today in view of the vast extent of our knowledge and our capacity, it has become still harder.
How do we recognize what is right? In history, systems of law have almost always been based on religion: decisions regarding what was to be lawful among men were taken with reference to the divinity. Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed body of law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned themselves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century B.C. In the first half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with leading teachers of Roman Law. Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was and is of key significance for the juridical culture of mankind. This pre-Christian marriage between law and philosophy opened up the path that led via the Christian Middle Ages and the juridical developments of the Age of Enlightenment all the way to the Declaration of Human Rights and to our German Basic Law of 1949, with which our nation committed itself to “inviolable and inalienable human rights as the foundation of every human community, and of peace and justice in the world”.
For the development of law and for the development of humanity, it was highly significant that Christian theologians aligned themselves against the religious law associated with polytheism and on the side of philosophy, and that they acknowledged reason and nature in their interrelation as the universally valid source of law. This step had already been taken by Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans, when he said: “When Gentiles who have not the Law [the Torah of Israel] do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves ... they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness ...” (Rom 2:14f.). Here we see the two fundamental concepts of nature and conscience, where conscience is nothing other than Solomon’s listening heart, reason that is open to the language of being. If this seemed to offer a clear explanation of the foundations of legislation up to the time of the Enlightenment, up to the time of the Declaration on Human Rights after the Second World War and the framing of our Basic Law, there has been a dramatic shift in the situation in the last half-century. The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term. Let me outline briefly how this situation arose. Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between “is” and “ought”. An “ought” can never follow from an “is”, because the two are situated on completely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the positivist understanding of nature and reason has come to be almost universally accepted. If nature – in the words of Hans Kelsen – is viewed as “an aggregate of objective data linked together in terms of cause and effect”, then indeed no ethical indication of any kind can be derived from it. A positivist conception of nature as purely functional, in the way that the natural sciences explain it, is incapable of producing any bridge to ethics and law, but once again yields only functional answers. The same also applies to reason, according to the positivist understanding that is widely held to be the only genuinely scientific one. Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word. Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one.
The positivist approach to nature and reason, the positivist world view in general, is a most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no way dispense with. But in and of itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding to the full breadth of the human condition. Where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture and banishes all other cultural realities to the status of subcultures, it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity. I say this with Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted efforts to recognize only positivism as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, so that all the other insights and values of our culture are reduced to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-à-vis other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness and at the same time extremist and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum. In its self-proclaimed exclusivity, the positivist reason which recognizes nothing beyond mere functionality resembles a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves provide lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world. And yet we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that even in this artificial world, we are still covertly drawing upon God’s raw materials, which we refashion into our own products. The windows must be flung open again, we must see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more and learn to make proper use of all this.
But how are we to do this? How do we find our way out into the wide world, into the big picture? How can reason rediscover its true greatness, without being sidetracked into irrationality? How can nature reassert itself in its true depth, with all its demands, with all its directives? I would like to recall one of the developments in recent political history, hoping that I will neither be misunderstood, nor provoke too many one-sided polemics. I would say that the emergence of the ecological movement in German politics since the 1970s, while it has not exactly flung open the windows, nevertheless was and continues to be a cry for fresh air which must not be ignored or pushed aside, just because too much of it is seen to be irrational. Young people had come to realize that something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives. In saying this, I am clearly not promoting any particular political party – nothing could be further from my mind. If something is wrong in our relationship with reality, then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation and we are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture. Allow me to dwell a little longer on this point. The importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a further point that is still largely disregarded, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he listens to his nature, respects it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.
Let us come back to the fundamental concepts of nature and reason, from which we set out. The great proponent of legal positivism, Kelsen, at the age of 84 – in 1965 – abandoned the dualism of “is” and “ought”. He had said that norms can only come from the will. Nature therefore could only contain norms if a will had put them there. But this would presuppose a Creator God, whose will had entered into nature. “Any attempt to discuss the truth of this belief is utterly futile”, he observed. Is it really? – I find myself asking. Is it really pointless to wonder whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose a creative reason, a Creator Spiritus?
At this point Europe’s cultural heritage ought to come to our assistance. The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history.
As he assumed the mantle of office, the young King Solomon was invited to make a request. How would it be if we, the law-makers of today, were invited to make a request? What would we ask for? I think that, even today, there is ultimately nothing else we could wish for but a listening heart – the capacity to discern between good and evil, and thus to establish true law, to serve justice and peace. Thank you for your attention!"

My picks for Catholic Media Promotion Day

Explanations will follow - for now, my picks, many of which will explain themselves, I think!

CATHOLIC BLOGS:

The Weight of Glory

Fallible Blogma

The Crescat

CATHOLIC PODCASTS:

Catholic Under the Hood

CATHOLIC MEDIA INITIATIVES:

Vatican Radio

Catholic Answers

EWTN

A little Advent thought

When I want to talk about politics, I am pulled to talk about science. When I talk about science, I am pulled to talk about politics.

And, one way or another I always end by talking about theology.

Let's see why.

I was rather elated by the results of November 2 elections.

Of course, I could be said, you are a damn hothead conservative, with no understanding of the progressive agenda. In one word, you are democratophobic.

Well, I confess that I don't particularly like to days democrats. As so many other people. But do democrats ever stop asking why? See these interesting lines by a well known "conservative" author and commentator:

"I grew up in a Democratic household. The talk at the family dinner table in the early sixties, to the degree it touched on politics, concerned the minimum wage, 40-hour work week, overtime pay, civil rights, disability insurance, or bond money for school construction and teacher training. In other words, it was a sort of "level the playing field" to ensure equality of opportunity.

I don't recall discussions about the evils of American foreign policy, racial quotas, drug legalization, open borders and amnesty, the need for gay marriage, or abortion on demand. I do remember the national spokesmen whom we were supposed to admire — Pat Brown, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey — did not look or act like John Edwards or John Kerry.

Now one can argue that the seeds of the present Democratic desire for an imposed equality of result, embraced by a Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi [not to speak, I add, of present POTUS], is but the logical evolution from the old Democratic square deal."

I say, definitely, no: there is no following from those old democrats to the new ones.

Why?

Because in the early sixties there was still a shared understanding of man's nature.

If this meaning of the word were known to my reader, I'd say that they all shared a "liberal" view of man, in the continental sense of the word, that, in stressing the primacy of the individual person, is of Christian origin.

Afterwards the current Anglo-American understanding of "liberalism", already strongly denounced by the blessed John Henry Newman during the Nineteenth Century, won the way: people are not for it individual persons, but just individuals of the homo sapiens sapiens species. It follows that whatever they otherwise think of themselves – we call it culture and religion – is nothing more than opinion, so that only the state can keep in check their individual or group egoisms.

Here we are at: opinion is opposed to science.

Assumed that we know what science is.

I was involved during the month of October, in a long spawn dialogue with another blogger, ended because at a certain point I dropped my arms in despair.

He claimed to be speaking for pure science, by making a primary appeal to biology and scientific method. I made the same claim, and my primary appeal went to mathematics and Einsteinian physics. By his way science leads to stark atheism, by my way it leads to see the world as an epiphany of God's glory.

So, who is right? Let's recognize it: what is science is a matter of opinion, not distinguishable therefore from culture and religion.

I know that people working in disciplines like biology as well as their sympathizers, holding a very definite opinion about what science is, will never grant it.

Neither do I think that opinion and science are the same thing, but, by qualifying as opinion the meaning of the word science, I ask to recognize that it is open to discussion.

Which leads me back to politics: i.e., to raise the question of what motivates people to hold the opinions they hold.

To clear things out, I have my good doubts that it could be our genes. In this case, given the difference of opinions concerning science, it should be proved the existence of a gene whose presence or absence would make us bend one way or another. But, should it be provable and proved the existence of such a genetic difference, it wouldn't prove anything, because it would remain to be argued why it is one bent or the other that deserves to be qualified as scientific. Neither it would work an appeal to evolution, to explain how we have become what we are by selecting certain ideas and rejecting others, because it doesn't overcome the fact that in this dispute nobody will accept to view himself, with the ideas he holds, as having been selected out rather than selected in. So we would be back to the starting point.

I look for it then in the cultural bias people show in connection with their sense of societal belonging. This means that I prefer to look at what people do, recurring in the evidence of all times and places, rather than letting some self declared scientist, with his naïve ideas about the ordinary life of men, instruct me about them.

We need a science of science, or, if you prefer, a political science. Conservatives might be naïve in the view they hold, but so are liberals, with all their apparent sophistication. I side with the first because their naïvité is richer than that of the others, whose sophistication consists in not allowing them to look at what people really do: their being always engaged in communication, for all kind of purposes, not last that of stating how things really are, so to instruct each other what to do about it

Science is the name for a claim, made for what one thinks to know. To grant this should enable us to dispute on the concept of science: otherwise there is no science but only the opposing claims, with each party convinced to be in the right while pitying the insipience of the other.

Old Aristotle indicated in the fourth century BC how to find the way out of such sterile opposition: like that, today, between conservatives, whose claim is in knowing the truth, and liberals, who thing there is no truth to be known.

To the skeptic – said Aristotle – I can't reply anything, as long as he remains in silence. But, if he just speaks, I can pin him down, finding him in contradiction with himself. Not so much because he says things that can't be true at once, but because what he says runs against what he does by saying it. Like in this classical example:

"The Cretan Epimenides said: all Cretans are liars." Question: true or false? If you say true, then it is false, if you say false, then it is true.

This means that the criterion for discussing claims is the logical consistency between what one says and what he does in the very act of saying it.

Of course, the skeptic has to speak. Unfortunately there are many ways of not speaking: not only by remaining silent, but also by the use made of language. The one made by today intellos strangely resembles such a contradictory speaking: more a sort of subtle violence on the listener than saying anything.

Funny business is logic, when it is applied to human affairs, like people talking to each other. But then it points to the way out of the dilemma: the truth to which I claim must be such, as in mathematics, to transcend you and me.

It must be theological.

Take all this as a little Advent thought.

HP

Mental and political sanity

Well, I am bound to say that the result of elections makes me, as patriot of a certain Europe present in America, happy.

As a friend of mine from Scituate Mass. wrote me: "it was a good night for America – but here in Massachusetts the results were dismal – we remain a backwater of extreme liberalism – fortunately the rest of the country (excluding California) seem to be heading on the right track toward political sanity."

The only reservation which, in the face of any victory of the party I favor, leaves me with a somewhat sour mouth is: it was a party victory.

I ask myself: shall we ever be able to move toward an overcoming of the creeping civil war that plagues Europe and America? My friend speaks of "political sanity", and I agree with him. But what way do we have to define what "sanity " is?

In these days I have been reading and writing about the Grammar of Assent of the blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman. He indicates there a way toward an answer. Which can confirm us in our positions, with just the wish that the opposing party would take time to read him and to answer to what he says.

He distinguishes two kinds of assents we can give to statements: a notional one and a real one. Ha calls notional all kinds of assents which stay in the realm of generality, from simple acceptance of current opinions to scientific theories based on probability. Only real is the assent we give to the concrete, the individual instance that touches us intimately.

I remember, to illustrate what he means, an observation for an uncle of mine, great university professor of hydraulics. Speaking of another nephew of his, also professor in the same field, he said of him as of his generation of scientists: "They want to be scientific, and to study rivers build mathematical models based on statistics (i.e., on probability), expecting them to behave accordingly, feeling almost outraged if rivers dare not to conform to what they say. No, if you want to know about rivers, you must have spent many an hour with your feet in them."

Here you have it: mental sanity is not to take one's models for reality. The way to reach a firm, certain understanding of reality, is to avoid confusing them: to recognize that ordinary knowledge, more or less tamed in science, works as a law action, according to the logic of circumstantial evidence. Each item of evidence, however probable, is incapable of engendering certainty by itself. But if all evidence points consistently in the same direction, one can finally come to a sentence of how things are in the concrete case to be judged, being sure of it.

Taking one's models for reality means at the same time to misrepresent to oneself what one is really assenting to: i.e., the political motivations behind the preference for those models. Recognizing them is the first step toward political sanity.

Which is my great wish for the future. My daily prayer.

HP

Dhimmitude

Hat tip: Rorate

The folks at Rorate Caeli called my attention to a piece by Sandro Magister, in which the words of a Lebanese bishop and Middle East Synod Father, spoken in criticism of Islam, were not included in the published version of his remarks.

A snippet of some of the redacted remarks:

The Koran gives the Muslim the right to judge Christians and to kill them for the Jihad (the holy war). It commands the imposition of religion through force, with the sword. The history of invasions bears witness to this.

For the full story, click here.

LD

Cardinal and theological virtues for America

Dear LD,

My answer to your question about the transferability of an institutional model from one country to another is yes and no.

No, if we simply try to transfer the institutional mechanics, so to speak, e.g., regarding our Western democracies, the electoral mechanism. Yes, if we look at the underlying ideas of a political experience.

The tragedy, as you pointed out yourself, is that we too might tend to forget the latter, laying all the stress on the first. Hence the creeping civil war.

One of the few authors who had something serious – should I say scientific? – to say in political matters, the Notre Dame Scottish professor Alasdair MacIntyre, laid a strong stress on the need of recovering an ethic, which is also a psychology, of the virtues.

For whomever is reading who is not inside such matters, I am speaking of the four cardinal virtues, already identified by Plato and Aristotle: prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice; and the three theological virtues, identified by Christian theology, but I think of equal universal import as the other: faith, hope and charity.

However, MacIntyre remarks that the doctrine of the cardinal virtues was classically tied with a certain model of man fit for a certain society: that of the Greek city state, the polis. So he asks himself how could they be transferred to men of a different kind of society, thus being made universal as for example in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa.

Now I go by memory, and I haven't verified MacIntyre's answer. It seems to me to be something of the kind: because St. Thomas makes them proper for any human intercourse, so much more if it involves people coming from different human groups. The way I understand it, this necessarily requires complementing the cardinal virtues with the theological ones.

Calling faith, hope and charity "theological" doesn't mean that they depend on a religious doctrine, which only confers them their ethical validity. It is quite the reverse: they are rooted in any human intercourse, and therefore it's them that measure the religious and political validity of a doctrine, its "catholicity".

Now, back to America. Two things.

First: one of my teachers, Will Herberg, strongly stressed America being a land of immigrants: i.e., coming close to realize the situation envisioned by St. Thomas, where naked human intercourse demands the full set of the four and three virtues.

Second: it wasn't, though, made by the convergence of peoples of any kind whatsoever (as POTUS suggested in a speech of his) but of peoples who, for all their ethnic differences, somehow knew of the virtues required by the American experience.

That's why some peoples seem fit for America, like, more recently, Koreans or Vietnamese; while others seem unfit, like, alas, Islamics (with all the due qualifications of the case).

Your work on America, dear LD, is important, and needs to be carried on, precisely because both liberals and conservatives tend to think in abstract terms, detached from the core of the American experience. This needs to be unearthed in its most characteristic manifestations, to bring it consciously to philosophy.

HP

De amicitia III

Clayton has published the full outline of his Friendship series, along with a letter explanatory.

If you would be edified and delighted, then follow this link.

LD

Typhus

Indeed the Hyundai ad was blasphemous; but the real blasphemy is what we have allowed soccer to become.

Over here in Italy we call support for a soccer team tifo, i.e. "typhus", a contagious sickness that gives very high fever.

I don't know whether the same fanaticism, often violent, that is unleashed in connection with soccer matches in Italy or in England and elsewhere, is aroused by any of the preferred American national sports (football, baseball, basket ball …) .

I would have liked to expand on this, and perhaps I'll do it in another post. For now just one comment:

When we abandon the true God, inevitably we fall prey of idols.

HP

A gift of life

It might be proper to put down something on Easter.

As if it were an easy thing to do!

First of all we should recollect what we are celebrating; or better, where our celebration stems from.

Why, you could say, it is clear: the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Yes, but wherefrom do we know about it? The answer is less obvious than it should be: the Church – i.e., the first witnesses, whose testimony was on one side written down in the New Testament, while on the other was kept alive in the community of their successors.

Let's recover the marvel of it: in the old times of Tiberius, second Roman emperor, a little bunch of Jews started going around preaching, by telling a strange story.

Everybody can read it in St. Peter's words at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. On my side I like to put it in this way:

Our teacher, who had done and said great things, and from whom we expected still greater ones, was taken prisoner and put to death. We were dumbfounded, utterly discouraged, thinking that was the end of all our hopes. And yet… three days later we saw him alive again, he stayed with us and ate with us.

Quite marvelous, isn't it? To see a man who had been dead, alive again.

Mind me well: they didn't say "we saw his ghost", but "we saw him in the flesh".

Today we might be prone to attribute it to their credulity. But no, for them it was as incredible as for us, men of a disenchanted world. Otherwise, if he had been just a ghost, there wouldn't have been much to marvel about, nothing to preach about.

Besides the marvel, what did that mean for them? That a priestly king had offered himself in sacrifice, once and for all.

Do you know what is a sacrifice, and how it pertains to a king? If you don't, try to think of the gift of life that men make for those whom they love; and, in Jesus' case, multiply by infinite.

HP

Pray for Haiti

Pray, and give.

Catholic organizations were on the ground already and may be better placed most quickly to reach the most needy. The destruction, however, is so vast and so absolute that it is difficult to know where to start - and many of the people who were there to help are now themselves in need of succor.

America is the most successful society in history, by whatever measure: the help we owe our distressed neighbors is not principally a matter of charity - it is one of duty.

Best,

LD

They Shot Him at Church on Sunday

yes, everyone: I heard about Dr. Tiller's murder.

That is what it was, by the way. Dr. Tiller was killed in church on Sunday.

Dr. Tiller was killed to make a point.

I understand that there is a suspect in custody.

Good.

He needs to be punished for his crime.

That is all.

LD

Archbishop Burke and the Voter's Conscience: a clarification

I have seen the interview that Abp. Burke gave to Kathryn Lopez over at NRO. He makes the following statement:

"If a Catholic knowingly and deliberately votes for a person who is in favor of the most grievous violations of the natural moral law, then he has formally cooperated in a grave evil and must confess his serious sin. Since President Obama clearly announced, during the election campaign, his anti-life and anti-family agenda, a Catholic who knew his agenda regarding, for example, procured abortion, embryonic-stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage, could not have voted for him with a clear conscience."

Abp. Burke is a great legal mind and a truly great Churchman. As he has formulated the matter above, though, there seems to be an element that, while not wrong, is imprecise as a matter of moral theology; I mean Archbishop Burke's articulation of the conditions for formal cooperation in an act. Formal cooperation requires that there be assent to the end, the purpose of the act with which one cooperates.

Perhaps this is what the Archbishop means by "deliberately", but deliberation is not, in the language of moral science, the same as willing(ness).

I might knowingly and deliberately tie up a fellow hostage while the house robber holds us both at gunpoint, without assenting implicitly or otherwise to the act of robbery. I would yet be but a material cooperator. Similarly, a Catholic might have voted for Obama despite the candidate's views on abortion, etc., and still have only cooperated materially in any eventual evil that came about as the result of the implementation of the President's policies. In sum, only someone who voted for Obama because of his abortion policies would be guilty of formal cooperation.

Catholics who voted for Obama despite their opposition to his life policies were appallingly naive and ill-advised. They acted stupidly, but they did not necessarily commit a mortal sin.

In any case, I certainly do not think Archbishop Burke intended his observations to be an armchair condemnation of millions of people - though Tom Peters is using the Archbishop's remarks to Monday morning quarterback the consciences of his fellow citizens and co-religionists.

This is unhelpful, at best.

The Catholic Democrats' Statement on Ambassador Glendon's Refusal of the Laetare Medal: an LD gloss

Fr. Zuhlsdorf has already glossed the statement, and his gloss ought to be read (though I really wish he would stop calling ND "NS" for Notre Shame. Fr. Zuhlsdorf is one of the best-informed and most thoughtful voices in the blogosphere. Such gimmicks are out of character with, and indeed tend to make it difficult for interlocutors to see and appreciate, the thoughtful tenor and substance of his commentary, generally.). In my gloss, I have tried to keep the duplication of substantive points to a bear minimum.

As usual, emphases in Gold, comments in [LD BLUE]

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Catholic Democrats Deplores
Ambassador Glendon's Undiplomatic Withdrawal from Notre Dame Commencement

Decision Not in Step with Majority of Catholics
Who Support the President's Social Justice Policies

Boston, MA - Catholic Democrats is expressing its disappointment in the decision by Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon to withdraw her acceptance of the prestigious Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame. Ambassador Glendon sent a letter to Fr. John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, saying that she had reconsidered her acceptance because of the university's decision to honor the President of the United States. Not true. What the ambassador said was: Last month, when you called to tell me that the commencement speech was to be given by President Obama, I mentioned to you that I would have to rewrite my speech. Over the ensuing weeks, the task that once seemed so delightful has been complicated by a number of factors. [a Commencement exercise] is not the right place, nor is a brief acceptance speech the right vehicle, for engagement with the very serious problems raised by Notre Dame’s decision.]

Ambassador Glendon, a professor at Harvard Law School and a listed advisor to the Right wing Catholic League, said that she could not accept the award because she did not want to engage with the university on the "very serious problems raised by Notre Dame's decision ... to honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church's position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice." [V.s. The ambassador did not say she does not want to engage with the university. She said graduation day is not the right moment for engagement, whether with the POTUS, the ND authorities or the issues raised by the whole sad affair.]

"It is unfortunate that Professor Glendon would repeat the Republican talking points to justify her decision," said Dr. Patrick Whelan, president of Catholic Democrats. [This is positiviely serpentine: notice that Whelan does not quite, does not exaclty say, "Prof. Glendon repeats the Republican talking points, etc." That would have been a lie. It would have been a lie because Ambassador Glendon did not, in fact, repeat the Republican talking points. I would almost, almost prefer a bald lie to this creeping, crawling cravenness.] "Like many conservative critics, she conveniently sidesteps any acknowledgement of President Obama's pledge to reduce the number of abortions. Ambassador Glendon's statement knowingly ignores the President's leadership in moving the nation past the deep wounds of racial prejudice and advancing a spectrum of social and economic justice issues at the heart of our faith - including a new focus on strategies to reduce abortion." [Unlike ND, Ambassador Glendon did not need to justify her decision to decline the award. The Ambassador needed only to explain her decision. Since her reasons for declining had nothing to do with the above, there was simply no reason for her to touch on them, i.e. the President's protestations of support for reducing the number of abortions (and here let me say that such proestations are technically meaningless - it might be meaningful to support specific programs, on the grounds that they will lead to a reduction in the number of abortions; it might be meaningful to pledge support for any measure that promises to reduce the number of abortions - the emptiest nonsense), his supposed leadership in leading the nation past the deep wounds of racial prejudice (here it is worthwhile to mention that the President's election has done much for the country in this regard - though that he was elected is rather more a measure of the progress we have made as a nation, than a vehicle for it), and his advancement of a spectrum of social and economic issues at the heart of our faith (let me do two things: first, let me deny the first premise; then, let me deny the second. The president has not advanced anything. He inherited a series of crises. More importantly, those issues are not at the heart of our faith.).]

President Obama is the first president to run for office on a platform that promotes strategies to reduce the number of abortions in our country. [That is a lie. Suppose it were true: would we be able to trust the practical judgment of a man who would reduce the number of abortions by making every imaginable abortion procedure available at little or no cost to as many women as possible at home and abroad?] Last week, Cardinal Rigali, chair of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) praised the re-introduction of the "Pregnant Women's Support Act" saying that it "offers an authentic common ground, an approach that people can embrace regardless of their position on other issues."

Catholic Democrats has launched an online statement of support for the University of Notre Dame and its president, as well as in defense of Catholic education. The statement has been signed by thousands of Catholics from across the country. Catholic Democrats believes that the national debate on this controversy epitomizes the divisiveness in our Church and in the public square and is calling on all Catholics to engage in respectful dialogue on all the moral issues of our time.

"While we are disappointed in Ambassador Glendon's decision, we know that the majority of Catholics in the United States support the President because they feel he represents Catholic values across the spectrum of moral issues," said Steve Krueger, national director of Catholic Democrats. "The Catholic Right is caught in a web of the political Right and is out of step with Church teaching on matters of political culture. Even the Pope has honored political figures who are not in agreement with Church teaching such as President Sarkozy of France. [This is absolutely disgusting: I was one of those, who brought the Sarkozy example to the fore in trying to mount an early defense of ND's decision. The "Sarkozy Defense" if I may, depends entirely on recognizing that, just as the Pope was not honoring Sarkozy qua Sarkozy, that he was rather honoring Sarkozy qua French Chief of State, i.e. honoring the office in the officeholder, so ND was not honoring the man, Barack Obama, but only the President of the United States. Notre Dame's own statements have made it abundantly clear that their intention was to honor Barack Obama's person, rather than merely to honor the current holder of the office of President of the United States. N.B., I think many people have missed this distinction, which may be rather more subtle than I perceive it to be. The disgusting thing is that the authors of this statement deliberately turn the matter on its head: Ambassador Glendon declines in response to ND's decision to honor the POTUS, while the Pope honors Sarkozy.] Their actions and rhetoric are exacting an undisclosed cost on the Church and society that does not serve the best interest of either."

//End

Catholic Democrats Deplore Mary Ann Glendon

They are, at the very least, extremely disingenuous about it.

Their Press Release here:

Below is a reproduction of what I wrote in the combox at Fr. Zuhlsdorf's place, to whom I tip my hat.

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The Catholic Democrats are being extremely disingenuous here.

When this whole scandal erupted, I was in the minority of voices, saying, “hold your horses,” while a great deal of vitriol was being spouted from many quarters. I was willing to give ND the benefit of the doubt, and say, “Is it really as bad as all that?”

Well, ND’s handling of the fallout has shown beyond a shadow of doubt that, however innocent their decision to invite the POTUS, their intention in granting the honorary degree was to honor the man, Barack Obama. Since Barack Obama is the most radically pro-abortion person ever to stand in, let alone be elected to the Oval Office, it is quite clear that honoring his person were in direct and complete disregard for and even contempt of the USCCB’s statement on Catholics in Political Life.

ND’s supposed consultation of canon lawyers, or rather ND’s decision to follow their lawyers’ supposed counsel, only aggravates ND’s failure to think with the Church in this matter.

I still maintain that, had ND said right from the get-go that theirs is a standing invitation to newly-elected presidents and their award the traditional honor the university bestows on the officeholder as such in recognition of the dignity the presence of the office brings to the occasion, then they might have avoided this whole sad episode.

Instead, they dug their own grave.

More later.