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December 16, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

The World Turned Upside Down, or, Cicero at the Gym

Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year:

Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.

Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d.

Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.

-From “The World Turned Upside-Down” Thomason Tracts (669. f. 10 (47)), dated 8 April 1646.

“The World Turned Upside-Down” is a ballad written during the English Civil War in the 1640s as a protest against laws passed by England’s Puritan-dominated Parliament banning traditional celebrations of Christmas . The Puritans (as was their way) believed the Nativity of the Lord should be a solemn, serious occasion. Making merry, decking the halls, hoisting steaming bowls of wassail, and so forth, simply smacked too much of paganism for the austere Roundheads.

*“The Puritan Governor interrupting the Christmas Sports,” by Howard Pyle c. 1883*

“The War on Christmas,” it seems, is nothing new. The writer of “The World Turned Upside-Down,” however, might be surprised at just how upside-down the order of battle has become in the modern version of the conflict. The Puritans wanted to take all the joyful and celebratory elements out of the observance of Christmas on the grounds that they obscured the holiday’s religious significance. 21st century censors, on the other hand, want to take all the religion out of our celebrations of the Nativity (as is their way), leaving only things frivolous and indulgent. They are seeking, in short, to transform one of the holiest days of the Christian liturgical year into a sort of purposeless seasonal bacchanal. Talk about the world turned upside-down!

O Tempora, O Mores!

Of course, the current War on Christmas is itself simply one example among many, just one illustration of the sorry reality that we are now living in a Neo-pagan culture. Our society has largely abandoned God and Christianity, and given itself over to the indulgence of primal urges. And if we are in fact Neo-pagans, then are in much sorrier shape than the Old Pagans ever were: they came by their heathenism honestly, since they had no access to the Revelation of Jesus Christ. We, on the other hand, are consciously rejecting the Good News of God-Become-Man. Accordingly, our Neo-paganism, despite its veneer of scientism, is even more upside-down than the old variety: along with Supernatural Truth, we are also increasingly abandoning even natural truths in a way that would have horrified the heathens of old. Consider, for instance, what the greatest orator of the pre–Christian world, the Roman politician, philosopher, and writer Marcus Tullius Cicero has to say about what we would call Natural Law:

There is a true law, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the Good respect its injunctions, and the Wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and it is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing today and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this eternal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer. He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. For his crime he must endure the severest penalties hereafter, even if he avoid the usual misfortunes of the present life.

*“Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, latrinis femineis nostris?”* **Cicero Denouncing Catilina Before the Senate***, by Hans Werner Schmidt, 1912*

We live in a culture that no longer believes in what Cicero is describing: today’s conventional wisdom is that we can make reality whatever we want it to be. We scoff at the pagan philosopher’s assertion that the natural law “cannot be contradicted by any other law”, and we are increasingly using the power of the state (the senate and the people, as Cicero would put it) to this impose this Brave New World on those who won’t accept it willingly. If a latter-day Cicero were to give utterance to what he says above, he would most likely find himself “cancelled” and needing to employ his prodigious rhetorical skills to defend himself from charges of “hate speech.”

Intolerance Won’t Be Tolerated

The cutting edge of the new paganism (at least at the moment) is the question of what today is called “gender.” This is no longer a function of one’s biological sex, but is an “identity” chosen by individuals that need not correspond to any external reality (which frees us from the tyranny of being either male or female, there now being dozens of genders from which we can choose). Cicero never guessed how truly a man might fly from himself, and do “violence to the very nature of man.”

It should be clear that those individuals who truly believe that they are somehow in the wrong body deserve our prayers and understanding. And if this were simply a matter of people calling themselves what they want, it would be sad and unfortunate. The real revolutionaries, however, are those whose goal is in fact to turn the whole world upside down in order to make the human will (which is to say, their own will) the undisputed master. They exploit the gender-confused as a battering ram against the foundations of reality-based society. Those who create their own reality cannot tolerate any opposition from the genuine article, not even the unspoken opposition of those who simply live in accord with a more traditional understanding of the nature of things. After all, give people the choice between a fake and the real thing, what are they more likely to choose?

As Maine Goes . . .

We have seen the intolerance of the new Masters of Reality with increasing frequency over the past decade. There used to be a saying in U.S. presidential elections, “as Maine goes, so goes the nation.” That may no longer be true of elections for the nation’s chief executive, but it seems to have some validity for the question at hand. Eight years ago the highest court in the state of Maine ruled that “School officials violated state anti-discrimination law when they would not allow a transgender fifth-grader to use the girls’ bathroom.” The law has no interest, apparently, in the vast majority of girls who feel threatened by a biological boy in their bathroom. Nor does it seem concerned about the opening the new freewheeling bathroom regime gives to good old-fashioned sexual predators, regardless of gender indentity, who see an opportunity too good to pass up.

*Maine State Supreme Court (www.courts.maine.gov)*

Despite the assurances of social revolutionaries, there have been plenty of intrusions by men with less than innocent motives into what had formerly been safe spaces for women. At about the same time as the Maine Supreme Court ruling, and just a day’s drive to the north, the Ontario’s human rights commission defended “the right of ‘transgendered’ men to use women’s changing rooms in response to a woman’s complaint that she was ogled” by a man who was not, shall we say, adhering to traditional norms of modesty in his attire or his behavior (link, for mature audiences only). Note that the bad guy here (the bad gal, actually) was the woman who objected to the suggestive behavior of a naked man in a space ostensibly set aside for women.

A Non-Intimidating, Welcoming Environment . . . For Some

Not long after that a woman was banned from her local Planet Fitness gym because she complained about a man in her locker room who “identified as” a woman, but who was very evidently a biological male. The woman thought that she was warning and protecting other women by complaining about the intruder. The gym, on the other hand, declared her behavior “inappropriate and disruptive to other members,” and so she was asked to leave, since “Planet Fitness is committed to creating a non-intimidating, welcoming environment for our members.” Except for female members who object to undressing in the presence of naked men. Apparently, there is nothing inappropriate or disruptive about a man (whatever he thinks of himself) invading an area where women are accustomed to changing and showering.

Notice that in all these cases, it is not enough to be tolerant of those who wish to turn their own world upside-down: all of us are required to assent to the triumph of human will over objective reality, even to the point of sacrificing our own safety. The New Reality must be protected at all costs.

Things go South

As we have seen recently, those who stand up and declare publicly that the new emperor has no clothes can face consequences more severe than simply losing a gym membership. At a school board meeting in Loudon County, Virginia, this past June [article here], the school superintendent confidently asserted that “the predator transgender student or person does not exist,” and furthermore that “we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” The problem was that just such a sexual assault on a 9th grade girl by “a boy wearing a skirt” had been reported less than a month earlier. The victim’s father was present at the meeting, and was quite understandably upset at the official effort to cover up the crime against his daughter. The father was arrested for his trouble, literally dragged out of the meeting, and sentenced to 10 days in jail (suspended provided he behaved more compliantly for the next twelve months). He was banned from subsequent school board meetings. The New Reality doesn’t take kindly to impertinent intrusions on the part of the Old.

*Protesting parents at Loudon County School Board meeting (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)*

In case you’re wondering how the story ended, the school board was sufficiently aware of the predatory male to transfer him, quietly, to another school. There he promptly found himself accused of a similar bathroom assault on a second girl. Last month a juvenile court judge found him guilty of the initial assault, with a hearing on the second incident scheduled for this month. The affair had at least enough of a bad odor about it to bring the Loudon County School Board into disrepute, and to contribute substantially to the upset victory of Republican Glen Youngkin in the recent Virginia gubernatorial election. Whether it has any impact on long term trends, however, remains to be seen.

True North

Let me repeat that transgenderism itself is merely a useful tool for those who seek to mold the world according to their own design. Once its usefulness is depleted it will be dropped, and those unfortunate individuals who have sacrificed their bodies and their happiness to its promises will be forgotten without a second thought. Nor is this the first time we’ve been tempted by the promise of god-like powers: “But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4-5) It was a lie, of course, as such promises always are. All the serpent could offer was death, estrangement, and a world turned upside-down.

Speaking of which, the title of the ballad with which we began this discussion appears to have drawn its inspiration from the Acts of the Apostles. It’s an instructive passage. St. Paul has been preaching in Thessalonica, where the preaching of the Gospel seems to have ruffled some feathers. Then as now, the Truth is offensive to those who wish to pursue their own “truth”, and such people will often resort to force to silence the competing voice. In Thessalonica Paul has been staying with a man named Jason, who receives a visit from a crowd of mostly peaceful protesters:

. . . and taking some wicked fellows of the rabble, they gathered a crowd, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the people. And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brethren before the city authorities, crying, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them; and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” (Acts 17:5-7)

We Christians continue to proclaim the Kingship of Jesus Christ: we celebrated the Feast of Christ the King just last month. And just as was the case in St. Paul’s day, Caesars large and small can’t tolerate the competition, and so they try to shut it down. Is it any wonder that churches were shut down during the first wave of the COVID panic when bars and casinos were considered “essential services?”

“Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star” (Matthew 2:1-2)

The Gifts of the Magi, Artist: Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Engraver: Z. Scheckel, 1860. Courtesy of Hathi Digital Trust Library and the Getty Library

In a world turned upside-down, who knows what way is up? If there’s no true point of reference, who’s to say what direction is north, and which is south? Of couse, we know that wise men don’t follow their own inclinations, they look for follow something reliable, something fixed. Consider these Wise Men:

Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, saying, “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews? For we have seen his star . . .” (Matthew 2:1-2)

We also have a star to follow, our own North Star to guide us: our King, Jesus Christ.

November 19, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics, The Liturgical Year

Christ is King of the Universe . . . and of Our Hearts

The End of History?

Christ is King! How easily we forget . . .

What a fool I was when the Berlin Wall fell forty years ago.

I naively thought that the apotheosis of the state into totalitarian forms of government was fully and finally exposed. Everyone knew it was an inhuman, deadly fraud. In my innocence, I was sure that all such attempts to put the minutiae of every individual’s life into the all-powerful hands of bureaucrat-gods had sputtered and died from their own absurdity, never to return. After all, the totalitarian states of the twentieth century had almost all gone through the entire cycle of rise, decline, and fall. Now they were residing in what one of their authors so eloquently termed “the dustbin of history.” Of the few remaining, Cuba and North Korea were so transparently disasters that nobody (it seemed) could see them as models. Even China appeared to be following Russia and the communist states of Eastern Europe on the path of democratic reform.

Christ is King, Berlin Wall — *West Germans celebrate the unification of Berlin atop the wall on Nov. 12, 1989. Stephen Jaffe/Getty Images*

Yes I and many others had deceived ourselves. Who would have guessed that despite the millions murdered and starved in the 20th century, and the manifest failure of every single attempt to invest god-like power into human governance, the totalitarian impulse would still hold such appeal, even growing appeal, in the third decade of the 21st century? Who would have predicted that even here in the United States, Cradle of Liberty, powerful financial interests and leading media entities would join with ambitious political forces to form a totalitarian syndicate that would make Mussolini proud?

The Totalitarian Impulse

Christ is King, not this guy — *Benito Mussolini (Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty Images)*

Speaking of Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator was certainly on the mind of Pope Pius XI in 1925. That’s when the Roman Pontiff introduced The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. Pope Pius added the feast in order to counter growing totalitarian movements in Europe and elsewhere. He sought to remind Catholics that their Lord and Savior is Jesus Christ. He is not the Volk, and certainly not whatever Duce happens to grab the reins of power at a given time. The Solemnity of Christ the King says to the self-anointed powers of this world what Jesus says to Pontius Pilate. To wit: “You would have no power over me unless it had been given to you from above” (John 19:11)

Sadly, despite the eclipse of most of the prominent fascistic and communist governments by the end of the past century, the totalitarian impulse and the idolatry of the state continues, albeit in a rather less homicidal form (for the time being). For that reason this feast day is as relevant now as it was a century ago.

He Must Reign

The celebration of Christ the King is also relevant on another level. It applies to each and every man and woman who has inhabited this Earth (with two exceptions) since Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden. In Quas Primas, the encyclical with which he established the Solemnity of Christ the King, Pope Pius XI says:

. . . If to Christ our Lord is given all power in heaven and on earth; if all men, purchased by his precious blood, are by a new right subjected to his dominion; if this power embraces all men, it must be clear that not one of our faculties is exempt from his empire. He must reign in our minds, which should assent with perfect submission and firm belief to revealed truths and to the doctrines of Christ. He must reign in our wills, which should obey the laws and precepts of God. He must reign in our hearts, which should spurn natural desires and love God above all things, and cleave to him alone. He must reign in our bodies and in our members, which should serve as instruments for the interior sanctification of our souls . . .

“You would have no power over me unless it had been given to you from above” (John 19:11)

Jesus Before Pilate, Second Interview (Jésus devant Pilate. Deuxième entretien), James Tissot,1886-1894

Christ is King

Pope Pius reminds us that there is Someone who really does have a claim on us. Someone who rules every aspect of our lives and even ourselves. It’s not the state. Yes, Christ does not only reign over the world, he reigns in our hearts . . . if we let him. All of us, even those who have consciously sworn off looking for messiahs in politics or government, fall into idolatry from time to time. How often have I pinned my dearest hopes on some passing thing? A new job, the next tax refund, or even some ridiculous new gadget to add to my collection of equally ridiculous gadgets? If I’m not careful (and, honestly, sometimes I’m not), I can find these seemingly innocuous little idols setting themselves up on the Throne reserved for Jesus alone.

On this Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe, we do well to remember that only Christ is the Lord of men, only Christ can be the Master of our hearts: Inquietum est cor meum, Domine, donec in te requiescat, “my heart is restless, Lord, until it rests in you”.

Featured image, top of page: Christ Surrounded by Musician Angels, Hans Memling, 1480s

October 8, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

Put Not Your Trust in Princes, or, The Autumn of Our Discontent

It’s a beautiful autumn day in New England, a clear, bright, warm (but not too warm) day such as this region has produced every October since before the first humans wandered across the Bering Land Bridge and meandered south. It was snowing when I started this blog nine months (and 111 posts) ago. I had mostly let my old Blogger blogs lapse because of changes in my life that made the pursuit of bloggery difficult, but in January I felt driven to pick up the, um, not pen . . . hmm, what does one pick up when starting a blog? Anyway, I felt driven to resume the practice of bloggery. Nine months, of course, is the length of time (more or less) that most of us spend in the womb, so this seems like a good enough time to look back and evaluate how things have developed.

Back in January there was much lamentation in the land to the effect that 2020 was The Worst Year Ever. I wasn’t quite sure it was the “worst year ever”, or even one of the worst, at least if we considered actual events: nothing came even close to the horrors or the war years 1914-1918 and 1939-1945; the coronavirus “pandemic” couldn’t hold a candle to the death and suffering caused by the Spanish Flu in 1918-1921, and all that was just considering the preceding century: every preceding century can boast years far worse than 2020.

No, the events of 2020 were not evil on an epochal scale . . . in and of themselves. At the same time, history had seemed to take an unsettling and ominous turn in the previous twelve months: the year was dreadful not so much for what actually happened as for revealing the rot that had been steadily growing beneath the surface, and for raising the specter of much worse to come. The rush to surrender freedoms both political and (even worse) religious at the onset of the nasty-but-not-chart-topping COVID 19 virus; the mayhem in our cities throughout the summer with the tacit, and sometimes not so tacit, indulgence of government officials and influential social entities; the sheer juvenile hysteria of much of the political class, and the shambles of a national election that at least appeared to be fraught with all manner of fraud and dishonesty: all these served to undermine whatever faith we might have had in the institutions that protect our lives, property, and freedoms.

Most frightening of all, perhaps, was the unmasking of the immense power wielded by large electronic communications behemoths, no longer restrained by any appearance of restraint or sense of fairness. How could we hope to reason freely with one another, as Americans have been wont to do, when giants like as Amazon, Twitter, and Google could shut out a major news organization such as the New York Post, shut down a rival social network as they did to Parler, and shut up even Donald J. Trump when he was still President of the United States? The dystopian nightmares in Brave New World and 1984 suddenly look less distant.

I determined that I needed to do something, however small, to counter the societal shamble toward Dystopia. In part, I would stop Feeding The Beast: I immediately dropped Twitter and Facebook, and committed myself to using Google as little as possible. I decided that, rather than reviving one of my old Google-owned Blogger blogs, I would use a different free platform that was not affiliated with any of the largest social media monsters (I eventually settled on WordPress.com). I had always seen my blogs as a way of preserving and sharing the treasures created by Christian culture over the millennia, so I would include, if possible, a sacred music post every Monday. I would not post any music from Google-owned YouTube, however. I have managed to find most of the musical clips I wanted on Vimeo, and in the case of those selections that weren’t already there, I’ve made my own videos and posted them to a free Vimeo account. I have also made a point of including as much sacred art as possible, always including the name of the work and the artist.

Woodrow Wilson, U.S. President 1913-1921

So far I’ve managed to keep it going, although in the last month or so my schedule has prevented me from maintaining my original goal of at least three posts a week (one music, one re-run from my old blogs, one all-new piece). Over that time, things out in The World have continued to become ever more interesting. The new U.S. administration has shown a taste for totalitarianism not seen at least since the Woodrow Wilson administration (if even then). Just one example: we now have dozens of ordinary citizens imprisoned indefinitely for the crime of trespassing on federal property in support of the wrong candidate. It is also now clear that leftist totalitarians here and around the world have been exploiting COVID as a handy excuse to seize and exercise ever greater power. The large media entities have enthusiastically joined in that effort, vigorously shutting down anyone who disagrees with the “official” narrative or who offers factual information about proven safe and effective COVID treatments other than the experimental gene therapy that the Powers That Be have decided to impose on everyone, including upon those who have already acquired natural immunity. The resulting Medico-Fascist regime differs little, at least in effect, from Mussolini’s ideal of “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”, except for the lack of a Duce at its head (the sad, confused old man in the White House hardly fits the bill).

The fashion for reactionary progressive totalitarianism has affected the Church as well, as we saw in last summer’s crackdown on the Traditional Latin Mass. In some places (particularly Latin America) some bishops have gone even further than the dictates of Traditionis Custodes to attack religious orders which use more traditional liturgy and any practices among the faithful (such as kneeling for Holy Communion) that so much as suggest that the Church existed before 1970.

Good Old Days or Bad Old Days? The Traditional Latin Mass

“The Mass of St. John Matha”
by Juan Carreño de Miranda, 1666

That all sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Ah, but there’s good news, and the good news for Catholic Christians is, well, the Good News (εὐαγγέλιον in Greek, god spell in Old English, from which we get our word Gospel). Scripture advises us:

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help.

When his breath departs he returns to his earth; on that very day his plans perish.

Happy is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God

(psalm 146: 3-5)

No human being, and no human institution, will last: all will return to earth. “The Lord,” on the other hand, “will reign forever” (psalm 146: 10). We’re kidding ourselves, of course, if we think that means comfort and safety here and now. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus says to Pontius Pilate (John 18:36). Our journey to that kingdom lies along a via dolorosa in this one: we can depend upon the powers of this world to save us no more than Jesus could rely on Pilate to save him from Calvary.

Now, while our Kingdom is in the next world, that doesn’t mean we can just let the powers of this world roll over us: we need to fight to preserve the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. At the same time, we should bear in mind that victory on the eternal plane often looks like defeat here and now: how do you think things looked to The World on that first Good Friday? Who really won?

So let’s keep fighting the Good Fight: that has been a theme of this blog since its inception. Our Hope, however, should be in the One who rose on Easter Sunday: Spes in Domino est.

Featured image top of page: “The Judgment of King Solomon” by Nicholas Poussin, 1649

July 3, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

Appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World

This July 4th is the 245th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which grounds the founding of the Unites States in a theological argument:

. . . that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

This post looks at a related argument: the founders believed that only those who subject themselves to the rule of God are capable of successfully directing the government of a republic.

“The Declaration of Independence” by John Trumbull, 1818.

The Great Experiment

“It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” –Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #1

The Publication of the American Declaration of Independence on July 4^th, 1776, marks the formal beginning of a great experiment. As Alexander Hamilton put it a decade later during the debate over adopting the new constitution, the question was whether free men, exercising “reflection and choice,” were up to the job. The founders of the new republic, as Hamilton’s quote above suggests, also saw the new republic that they inaugurating as not simply a matter of local interest, but as an example to the rest of the world that such an arrangement could succeed. The conventional wisdom at the time was that republics and democracies were doomed to fail, devoured by the unchecked passions and appetites of the populace. That, it was said, was the verdict of history.

Dispositions Which Lead to Political Prosperity

We might reasonably ask what it was that led Hamilton and the other founders to believe that this republic would not similarly fall victim to the baser motives of its citizens. It wasn’t education, as important as that might be, because the founders understood the difference between knowledge and wisdom, as so many of us today do not. George Washington put it very directly in his Farewell Address [bold mine]:

…Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens . . . Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

“. . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” -George Washington

Washington was most emphatically not referring to a national religion or state church, something that was explicitly ruled out in the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Despite the current conventional wisdom that the founders were “all deists”, in fact he and most of the others were Protestants of various stripes; some, such as Jefferson, did hold to rather idiosyncratic mixtures of Christianity and deism. A very few were Catholic, including only one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll, who was nevertheless one of the most prominent Catholics in the colonies.

Despite their differences their way of looking at the world was shaped by Christianity, even those who were deists, and they all shared a firm conviction that human dignity demanded that men should be accorded the freedom under God to conduct their own lives. Religious toleration was therefore an essential part of the polity they devised, an arrangement amenable to the flourishing not only of Protestant Christians, but also favorable to a growing Catholic population as well (often in spite of very real prejudice on the part of their non-Catholic fellow citizens). The result was an inversion of the usual political order, in which ordinary citizens occupied the lowest position, with a governing elite above, and God over all; the American model still had God at the apex, but directly below him not the rulers but the citizens themselves, and they, each one shaped and informed by his faith, were empowered to help direct the government.

A New and Different Experiment

Pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong, 2019 (Ng Han Guan/Associated Press)

For its first two centuries the American experiment seemed to be proving the doubters wrong, although not without a few significant rough spots along the way (the stretch from 1861-1865, for instance, and the long struggle of which it was a part to free the slaves and extend the full benefits of citizenship to them and their descendants). The United States has grown and prospered, and has often been the example its founders hoped it would be (witness the prominence of American flags in pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong not too long ago).

Material success, however, often leads both individuals and nations to lose sight of their radical dependence on the Grace of God. That would seem to be the case in the United States today. It appears that a new and very different experiment is under way, in which religion and morality are no longer guiding principles; the indulgence of appetites and passions is held to be a virtue, such that those who object must be harassed and silenced; oaths of the Courts of Justice, as Washington called them, are no more than empty words, if recent judicial decisions are any indication. History and reason suggest that experiments of this sort do not end well. I am reminded of the words of Thomas Jefferson who, deist though he might have been, had the wisdom to say: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

God is indeed just, but he is also merciful, and this country has seen several “Great Awakenings” of religious faith in the past. I believe with Alexander Hamilton that the “conduct and example” of the American people are being watched with interest around the world; the failure of the experiment in Liberty under God would be a loss not just for Americans but for people everywhere. Please join me in praying that we rediscover the reliance on our Creator that animated the signers of the Declaration of Independence whose proclamation we celebrate today; please join me in echoing one of our great presidents, Abraham Lincoln, who at perhaps the darkest juncture of our national history prayed “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

N.B. Lincoln’s quote comes from his “Gettysburg Address”, which he delivered at the dedication of a cemetery to inter the dead from the Battle of Gettysburg, the largest and most destructive battle in the history of North America. It was fought on July 1-3 1863, 158 years ago this week.

June 22, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics, Pro-Life

The Bishops, the Politicians, and Abortion: What Would St. John Fisher Do?

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

The quote above is often attributed to communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. There is no record of his actually having said it, but it’s widely repeated because it pithily sums up a terrifying truth about the relentlessness of war. In an age when a large and influential segment of the population wages political warfare on all who seem to stand in the way of their urgent drive to replace reality as it is with a vaguely envisioned utopia, we can amend that to “You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.”

For a long time now the Catholic bishops in the United States have dabbled in politics, mostly in a manner that we would call “virtue signaling” today: a statement about nuclear war in the 1980s, expressions of concern about capital punishment in the 1990s, some hand-wringing about immigration in more recent years. All issues with legitimate moral dimensions, it’s true, but all likewise issues on which serious Catholics can have legitimate differences of opinion. In none of them were the bishops confronting Catholics or others who were clearly advocating anything directly contrary to the moral law, or promoting an intrinsic evil. And for what it’s worth, none of them are areas in which Catholic bishops have particular competence.

Over the same stretch of time there has been another issue looming, one which is indeed a matter of intrinsic evil, about which there is no room for prudential judgment, and which is very much within the competence of the episcopacy: abortion. Abortion has been unambiguously condemned as a moral evil from the very first days of the Church: “thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide” (Didache, II.2). Now, to be fair, the bishops have been virtually unanimous that abortion is wrong. At the same time, they have been unable or unwilling to fully deploy their authority to teach, govern, and sanctify in the case of prominent prominent public figures who claim to be Catholic and. at the same time, promote abortion and other evils.

It has become increasingly difficult for them to dodge the issue. Now a man who claims to be “a devout Catholic” has become President of the United States, having promised to use the power of the U.S. government to make abortion more accessible at home and around the world, and furthermore at the expense of American taxpayers regardless of their religious or moral convictions. He is doing the same with regard to other moral evils such as same sex marriage. He has even pledged to drag the Little Sisters of the Poor throught the federal courts yet again to force them to pay for contraceptives for employees.

As it happens, we are honoring two great saints today who know what is to stand for the Truth in the face of an invasive government, St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More. St. Thomas More is more familiar to us than his contemporary St. John Fisher, partly because his magnetic personality still resonates almost five centuries later, but also in large part because of Robert Bolt’s play and film A Man For All Seasons. St. John Fisher’s story is no less compelling, however, and is in fact given greater prominence by the Church (both Saints are commemorated on the anniversary of his death, although they were not martyred on the same day). As a bishop who faced some particularly difficult choices, he is particularly relevant today.

Who was St. John Fisher? At the time of his death he was bishop of the English See of Rochester, and he died defending the authority of the Church, its vicar the Pope, and the sanctity of marriage, against a monarch who was willing to destroy all of those things in order to get his way: King Henry VIII. In my previous post (here) on Blessed Margaret Pole, who gave her life in the same cause, I wrote of Henry VIII that he:

could serve as a sort of patron “anti-saint” for our times. He was a man possessed of great gifts . . . Henry never mastered himself, however, and so his prodigious talents were put at the service, not of his people, but of his equally prodigious cravings for women, wealth, and power. In the end he tried to swallow even the Church. In his later years his grossly obese body became a living image of his insatiable appetites.

John Fisher was no stranger to Henry’s household. Before his episcopal ordination, Fisher had been the confessor of Margaret Beaufort, Henry’s grandmother, and reportedly tutored the future Monarch himself. The bishop’s long familiarity with the king and his family did him no more good than layman Thomas More’s personal friendship with Henry did him. Fisher had championed the marriage of Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife, and had resisted the king’s encroachments on the Church. At last, when he refused to take an oath recognizing the offspring of Henry’s new wife Ann Boleyn as the legitimate successors to the throne, he was put to death. He alone of the English bishops resisted to the bitter end King Henry’s usurpation of the authority of the Church and mockery of the sanctity of marriage.

Henry VIII’s bloated specter casts a longer shadow over the world today than at any time since his death almost five hundred years ago, now when a voracious state is devouring more and more of our freedoms, and casting an especially greedy eye on the free exercise of religion. It’s in this context that the American bishops, who just their annual meeting, voted last Friday to issue a document on “Eucharistic Coherence”, by which they mean the constant practice of the Church (going back to the days of the Apostles themselves) that individuals who engage in persistent and unrepentant public evil should not receive the Body and Blood of Christ in communion.

What this document will actually say is not yet clear; a committee will work on a draft over the next few months for the bishops to vote on at their November meeting. Given the past timidity of the bishops in this regard, it’s hard to envision them getting enough of the espicopate to sign off on a really clear and decisive statement. The brief statement on the USCCB website looks a lot like the all-too-familiar fence straddling:

American Bishops (Photo by Leigh Vogel/MaxPPP)

Since the conclusion of the Spring Plenary Assembly of the U.S. bishops last week, there has been much attention on the vote taken to draft a document on the Eucharist. The question of whether or not to deny any individual or groups Holy Communion was not on the ballot. The vote by the bishops last week tasked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine to begin the drafting of a teaching document on the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life. The importance of nurturing an ever deeper understanding of the beauty and mystery of the Eucharist in our lives is not a new topic for the bishops. The document being drafted is not meant to be disciplinary in nature, nor is it targeted at any one individual or class of persons. It will include a section on the Church’s teaching on the responsibility of every Catholic, including bishops, to live in accordance with the truth, goodness and beauty of the Eucharist we celebrate.

Clearly, we should not get our hopes up. All the same, we should keep engouraging our bishops to do the right thing, and keep praying for them: The Holy Spirit may yet give them the strength. The possibility that the bishops may at last take a stand has impelled a large number of pro-abortion self-identified Catholics in the U.S. Congress to issue a preemptive strike in the form of a so-called “statement of principles“. There really aren’t much in the way of actual principles in the letter. The pro-abortion legislators mostly point out all the areas where they agree with the prudential policy preferences of a large number of bishops, with the implication that all of those political stances somehow outweigh the moral depravity of abortion. The statement concludes with, well, with the the usual tired, unconvincing cliches:

We believe the separation of church and state allows for our faith to inform our public duties and best serve our constituents. The Sacrament of Holy Communion is central to the life of practicing Catholics, and the weaponization of the Eucharist to Democratic lawmakers for their support of a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion is contradictory.

I examine the incoherence of the “weaponization” argument in my post “Who’s Really ‘politicizing’ the Body of Christ?”; I’ll simply point out here that this description implies that the real significance of the Eucharist is to influence political behavior, and that abortion itself is just another political issue. There is no recognition that the value the Church places on the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with politics, and the dismissive reduction of the horror of abortion to the trite evasion of “a woman’s safe and legal access to abortion” is simply insulting. This letter and the public comments of some of the individual signers are saturated with the same self-idolatry that we find at the center of the gender wars: I am not bound by any truth or reality outside of my desires – if I decide that I’m a Catholic, nobody can tell me differently.

And if reality is really reducible to our individual desires, then here’s no need for bishops . . . or a Church . . . or even a Savior. This is an important moment for the American bishops. They stand to lose whatever moral authority they have left if they allow themselves to be bullied by this crowd of political grifters. The spirit of Henry VIII might be alive, but his modern day emulators at least don’t have his power to remove the heads of their adversaries. May our bishops look to the example of St. John Fisher, pray for his intercession, and trust in the Lord to sustain them as they leave aside the temptations of mere politics and take up once again the true authority handed on to them from Christ through his Apostles.

St. John Fisher, pray for all Catholic bishops and priests, and be an inspiration to them, that they may follow your lead in bravely defending Christ’s Church and his Holy Sacraments. Amen.

Featured image top of page:
“Execution of Bishop John Fisher (A) and lord chancellor Thomas More (B) “.
Unsigned engraving from: Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum, Antwerp 1592.

June 6, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics, Pro-Life, The Church

Discerning the Body: The Bishops, The Politicians, and The Eucharist

Qui bene distinguit bene docet

It is now abundantly clear to all of us, I hope, that St. Paul’s warning about the eternal battle “against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12) is not just a rhetorical trope. It’s raging all around us with a palpable intensity. One of the clearest signs is that more and more of our institutions are taking up and loudly proclaiming the ancient lie first whispered by the Father of Lies to our first parents: “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5) The New Orthodoxy, in fact, goes beyond determining good and evil for ourselves: even external realities like male and female must bow before the the power of the “awakened” human will. Anyone with the temerity to question the new teachings will be told, as Lot was by the men of Sodom: “This fellow came to sojourn, and he would play the judge! Now we will deal worse with you than with them.” (Genesis 19:9)

When you consider the nature of the current struggle, it seems clear that language is one of the main fronts in the war right now. Above I referred to Satan as the “father of lies”. That title is bestowed on him by Jesus himself: “When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.” (John 8:44-45) To the extent that we’re wading through a sea of lies, we’re fighting on the Enemy’s chosen ground. We need to find a way to move the battle back to dry land, to the truth.

That’s where the Latin adage above comes in: Qui bene distinguit bene docet, “He who distinguishes well, teaches well”. A sure way to deceive people either by misdirection or by appealing to their desires, is to obscure the distinction between the truth and a falsehood that bears a passing resemblance to the truth. Promoters of killing embryonic human beings for their stem cells, for instance, will leave out the important qualifier “embryonic” and say that those who oppose the practice are “against stem cells”. In this way they suggest that opponents of embryonic stem cell mining are also against the morally benign and medically beneficial use of adult stem cells, and that they are therefore “anti-science,” and “against medical treatments”, etc. etc. That’s a lie, because most opponents of embryonic stem cell research support the use of adult stem cells.

I should make a caveat at this point: yes, whenever we lie, and whenever we distort or corrupt the language in order to deceive, we are by definition doing the Devil’s work. That doesn’t mean that everyone who gets on board with a false narrative is in League With Satan. I’m sure most such people believe that they are on the side of the (unfallen) angels. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that they (or we, when we do it) aren’t at fault. We are responsible for properly forming our consciences, and when we ought to know better, well, we ought to know better.

Bene Docet

This brings us to the second half of our legal maxim, bene docet, “teaches well”. If we don’t know the truth because we failed to distinguish well, we will not be able to teach well. How well could I teach Latin, for example, if I couldn’t (or didn’t) distinguish nouns from verbs? As it happens, there are more important truths to be taught than proper Latin grammar (if you can believe it). There are truths, or maybe better there is Truth, that is essential for our eternal salvation . . . and there are men who are specially commissioned to teach it.

I’m talking about the bishops of the Catholic Church, of course. The three most essential tasks given to a bishop are these: to teach, to govern, and to sanctify. One of the most important things they are responsible for teaching is, in fact, just what we are celebrating this weekend: Christ’s real Presence, Body and Blood, in the Eucharist. How well are they teaching it? According to a study published by the Pew Research Center two years ago, not very. You’ve probably heard the bottom-line finding: 70% of Catholics don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in Eucharist.

That figure alone doesn’t tell us anything about why they don’t believe, but a deeper dig into the report turns up some interesting details:

Most Catholics who believe that the bread and wine are symbolic do not know that the church holds that transubstantiation occurs. Overall, 43% of Catholics believe that the bread and wine are symbolic and also that this reflects the position of the church. Still, one-in-five Catholics (22%) reject the idea of transubstantiation, even though they know about the church’s teaching.

The vast majority of those who believe that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ – 28% of all Catholics – do know that this is what the church teaches.

What’s striking here is that the largest segment of Catholics, more than four out of every ten, don’t believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but not because they’ve rejected the doctrine: they don’t even know that it is the doctrine. That is a huge failure on the part of those responsible for teaching in the Church, but a great opportunity as well. Who knows what might happen if somebody tells them what the Catholic Church really believes?

Exempla Docent

A smaller group, but still much too large, are those who say they know the teaching, but reject it. This is a tougher nut to crack. The Pew survey doesn’t go into why they don’t believe or why, despite rejecting a foundational Church doctrine, they still consider themselves Catholic. No doubt they don’t think it’s terribly important. Isn’t that the message they get from the institutional Church? It’s unlikely they’ve heard much of an explanation or defense of the doctrine of transubstantiation, unless they’ve actively sought it out.

Speaking of teaching, here’s another Latin maxim: exempla docent: examples teach. The reception of Communion seems a pretty casual affair in many places without the patens, communion rails, and reception on the tongue that served as concrete reminders to earlier generations of just what, or better yet Whom, they are receiving. And not only that: everyone receives. Everyone and anyone, it seems, is worthy to receive the Body and Blood of Our Lord, even promoters and purveyors of a practice as abominable as abortion.

Let’s go back for a moment to bene distinguit. We need to distinguish between doctrinal teaching and mere opinion. We need to make the distinction between a state of grace and a state of sin. We need to distinguish the Body and Blood of Christ from ordinary bread and wine. The Church tells us that the Eucharist is the Summit and Source of the Christian Life, but millions of Catholics are at risk of losing their Life in Christ, and they don’t even know it.

Qui Non Bene Distinguit, Non Bene Docet

That is the issue that many of our Teachers in the Church fail to discern in the current controversy over Eucharistic Coherence, which, as we saw recently, simply refers to the question of whether to admit public, unrepentent advocates of legal abortion and other evil practices to Holy Communion. Those who say that to exclude such people is to “politicize” or “weaponize” the Eucharist are failing to distinguish between the practice of faith and mere politics. In doing so, they endorse the view that the deliberate destruction of innocent human life is not an issue of Good and Evil, but simply a policy disagreement. Qui non bene distinquit, non bene docet.

The issue isn’t political advantage for one party or another, the issue is life itself . . . eternal life. Let’s add a little Greek lesson to the Latin. In secular parlance, a “scandal” is when a prominent person is publicly embarassed. That’s not the original meaning , or the Catholic meaning of the word, however. In Greek σκάνδαλον originally meant the trigger of a trap, the stick that, knocked out of place, causes the snare to catch the victim. From there we get the Christian meaning of scandal, a practice or behavior that blurs the distinction between right and wrong, and in so doing ensnares people in Sin.

Bene Distinguant Episcopi Nostri

The issue here is not that the politicians in question are politicians per se, it is that that as prominent people who represent themselves as Catholic they are publicly using their influence to promote things that are gravely sinful. When those responsible for teaching, governing, and sanctifying fail to distinguish the true dimensions of the problem, and fail to govern by allowing those who persist in openly promoting sin to receive communion, the appointed teachers are teaching by their actions that the Body and Blood of Our Lord is simply not that important. As St. Paul reminds us, unworthy reception of communion is not sanctifying, but condemning:

Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. (1 Corinthians 27-30)

The real issue is not politics, but the saving of souls, the souls of the politicians in question and the souls of those whom they ensnare by their example. Bene distinguant Episcopi nostri – May our bishops distinguish well.

Feature image: “The Anti-Christ” from the Cathedral of Orvieto, painted by Luca Signorelli 1499-1500.

June 3, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics, Pro-Life

Who’s really “politicizing” the Body of Christ?

An unusual and unfamiliar expression, “Eucharistic Coherence”, has been showing up on a lot of Catholic websites lately. I’ve written about the abuse of language on more than one occasion in the recent past (here and here, for instance), but this term is not itself abusive, rather it’s intended to expose and correct abuse. It refers to the coherence that ought to exist between the way Catholics profess and live out their faith in public on the one hand, and their worthiness to receive the Body and Blood of Our Lord in Communion on the other. To put it more plainly, it’s a fancy way of saying that public figures who actively promote abortion and other egregious violations of the moral law are not “devout Catholics”, despite their self-professed devotion to Mother Church, and ought not receive communion.

Seems pretty simple, doesn’t it? And yet it’s not. Here’s the short version of the story: given the exuberance with which certain nominally Catholic politicians in the United States promote the killing of the unborn, the dismantling of the family as an institution, and other unlovely manifestations of the Culture of Death, the U.S. Catholic Bishops are preparing to discuss Eucharistic Coherence (i.e., what to do about the scandal caused by said politicians) at their annual meeting later this month. You will no doubt be surprised to hear that a group of 68 American bishops (I could name names, but you probably know them already) have written to Archbishop Gomez, head of the Bishops Conference, asking him to halt the discussion. It seems these bishops are gravely concerned that applying the standard that St. Paul first sets in his First Letter to the Corinthians, that one must be in communion to receive communion (see 1 Corinthians 11:27), would be to “weaponize” or “politicize” the Eucharist.

As they say, never a dull moment, eh? Some interesting commentary on the situation has been published in just the last few days (you can find a sampling here, here, and here). Of course, this issue did not just arise within the last year, it’s been going on for decades. Given it’s current prominence, however, it seemed a good time to republish a piece I first wrote six years ago, originally called “Is The Catholic Church A Political Animal”, in which I raise the question: who is really “politicizing” the Eucharist?

You’re going to find politics wherever people gather, or so someone once told me when I had objected to using the secular political terms “liberal” and “conservative” to describe different factions within the Catholic Church. And he was right, if by “politics” we mean the small-p wrangling that unavoidably accompanies any human enterprise requiring two or more people. But that is a very different thing from Politics, of the partisan variety. The Church is not a political party, and does not work like a political party. Nor should it.

That may seem an obvious point to you and to me, but it’s not at all obvious to everybody. It’s a distinction lost on a large number of people outside of the Church for instance, for many of whom politics has taken the place of religion, and so has become the lens through which they interpret everything. Many such people have come to dominate the secular media in the developed world, with the result that the mass media projects the secular political model onto the Church, with bad guys called conservatives working to thwart the good guys, the liberals (sometimes referred to as progressives), who are fighting to bring about a kinder, better Catholic Church More In Step With The Times. This is the only model of the inner-workings of the Church most people (including most Catholics) see in print, on television, or online, unless they intentionally seek out those Catholic outlets which reject this distorted interpretation. Sadly, many self-described “Catholic” entities embrace the false political model of the hierarchical Church.

U.S. Catholic Bishops (NCR Online photo)

That is not to say that there isn’t a wide range of legitimate differences of opinion within the Church; there is and always has been. Unlike a political party, however, where major policy planks can change overnight with a vote of the membership (and why not? They’re only opinions), there are many things in the Church which are grounded in Divine Revelation, and are therefore not up for negotiation. This vital distinction was expressed very clearly by then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) in 2004. Senator John Kerry, the nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the United States, was widely criticized for receiving communion and touting his Catholic bona fides despite his open advocacy for legal abortion and other positions contrary to Catholic moral teaching. Accordingly, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote a letter (later published by the Holy See under the title “Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles”) to Kerry’s ordinary, then Archbishop of Washington, D.C. Theodore McCarrick, which shows very clearly how the Church is different from a political party. Cardinal Ratzinger writes:

Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

This crucial difference between particular moral issues can be obscured by applying secular political terms to church “politics”. Political parties often change even basic positions, and this is sometimes a good thing: consider that, when I was a child, many prominent leaders in the Democratic Party in the United States were unapologetic White Supremacists and segregationists. Such a position would be unthinkable today, and yet nobody doubts that the Democratic Party is still the Democratic Party.

“There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.”

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus XVI)

The political analogy can create the impression that proposed changes in the Church are benign or even desirable changes of the same sort, but nothing is further from the truth. The difference between abortion and euthanasia on the one hand and war and capital punishment on the other is that the Church has always taught that the first two are intrinsically evil, i.e., never permissible; this teaching is part of the deposit of faith and cannot change, and to publicly oppose it is to separate oneself from the Church (hence the unworthiness to receive communion). In the case of war and capital punishment, the Church has taught that they may be morally licit under some circumstances, a teaching that likewise cannot change. While there are certain moral principles that bind a Catholic here (e.g., the Just War Doctrine), the actual application of these principles belongs to the prudential judgment of individual Catholic decision makers. It is in the application of prudential judgment that legitimate differences of opinion may arise.

Many so-called “progressives” in the Church today, however, are not advocating simply the more progessive application of unchanging principles in prudential situations, but are pushing for changing more foundational things like the teaching on marriage, the meaning of priesthood, sexual morality, etc. The Catholic Church, however, unlike a poltical party, can’t change its teachings and still remain the Catholic Church. One can usually make a case for being either a conservative or a liberal in political matters, but when it comes to Church Doctrine, we can only be Catholic . . . or Not.

Featured image top of page: “The Last Supper” by Juan de Juanes, 1562

May 8, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part II)

In my prior post, “What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part I)” we saw that the true Church is not reducible to the people who occupy its offices at any particular point in time, not even to those in the highest positions of authority. The true Church is the Mystical Body of Christ extending through time. We depend upon that Church for our salvation, and we can’t abandon it because of the malfeasance of its temporary caretakers, whether they are priests, bishops, or even (if you can believe it) popes.

Bad popes: “Pope Formosus and Stephen VII”
by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870

At the same time, while the immorality and infidelity of bad clerics can’t unmake the Church itself, it can do a lot of damage to members of the Church, and Church institutions, in particular times and places. It can cause souls to be lost. That was in fact the concern of the original comment that led to these posts. A father was afraid that the bad example and erroneous teaching of certain prominent churchmen (including some at a decidedly higher pay grade than his parish priest) would damage the faith of his children, and that he might need to leave the Church for their protection.

His concern is real. Our culture has become toxic, and it is actively hostile to Christian belief and practice. Not only that, the toxicity has infected a large part of the institutional Church. What can we do if leaving the Catholic Church itself is not an option?

I had mentioned to the original commenter that God tends to raise up his greatest saints at times when the institutional Church is at its worst . . . but that’s not really practical advice, is it? After all, it took decades, or even centuries, for the work begun by St. Benedict or St. Francis to bear fruit beyond the circle of their closest followers. Of course, they and the rest of our holy predecessors can intercede for us, and we ought to be asking them to do so. But there’s also something else the saints, the obscure as well as the great, have to offer: their example. Léon Bloy said, “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.” And in fact our Lord himself tells us: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

“St. Benedict Preaching to the Peasants” by Sodoma (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi), 1505

I don’t mean to get hung up on the word in this passage usually translated into English as “perfect”: Jesus surely isn’t demanding of us the sort of absolute perfection that belongs to God alone. The Greek word is τέλειοι, the basic meaning of which is “complete, finished, entire”; from there it came to mean “pure, unblemished”, particularly in reference to a sacrificial animal that fulfills all the highest standards of its kind.* In Matthew’s Gospel we find Jesus speaking these words in the Sermon on the Mount, after a series of examples showing how his disciples are to go beyond or even against the current moral understanding, culminating in:

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven . . .” (Matthew 5:43-45)

Jesus is telling his disciples not to settle for what passes for wisdom in their world, but to carry the Gospel to completeness, to fulfillment, in their lives. They themselves need to be τέλειοι, complete, as in completely committed . . . even if it gets them in trouble with society at large. As to this last point, he had told them moments before “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Matthew 5:11) Now he applies to them the same word commonly used to describe a worthy sacrificial victim. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

This is the essence of sanctity, and this complete devotion to Christ, as opposed to submission to the World, is what we most honor in the saints. It is also what we most need to emulate, however unworthy we might think we are (and I speak as someone who is definitely not ready to claim a day on the Liturgical Calendar). Again, it’s not a coincidence that working to build our lives on the rock foundation of Christ and not on the shifting sand of the World is also the best thing we can do, in very practical terms, for our children. I’d like to share a few ideas below on how we can do that, drawing in part on my own family’s experience.

First, the aforementioned problem of having Fr. Karl Marx for a pastor. The Church allows us great flexibility in choosing our parish. It’s worth taking the time to travel, if necessary, to find an orthodox, reverent Mass. We know a family (with more than a few small children) that makes a four hour round trip every Sunday to attend a Latin Mass. That heroic level of commitment is probably required of very few of us, although it’s worth noting that our forerunners in the faith often used to spend their entire Sunday in prayer; we can spend extra car time praying the rosary together, singing hymns, and so on. In any case, there’s likely to be a holy and wholesome Mass (and it needn’t be a Latin Mass) closer than two hours away. We have lived in various parts of one of the more liberal, and most unchurched, parts of the U.S., and we have never had to drive more than 40 minutes to find an acceptable (or better) liturgy.

Speaking of the Latin Mass, do go if you can. I’ve you’ve never attended, or have gone once or twice but don’t “get it”, prepare yourself with a little research first. In and of itself the traditional liturgy can bring you to deeper immersion in the Faith and, as an added bonus, attending the traditional liturgy, even if it’s only occasionally, will enrich your family’s experience and understanding of the Ordinary Form. Even watching a live streamed Latin Mass can be helpful; Fr. John Zuhlsdorf (a.k.a. Fr. Z) sometimes live streams his daily Extraordinary Form Masses and, trust me, you won’t catch him preaching communism from the pulpit.

“Evening Prayer” by Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, 1846

I also recommend making it a priority to go to church for more than Sunday Masses. In addition to daily Masses there are also Holy Week services, holy days, parish missions, saints’ relics on tour, Vespers services, etc. As simple a thing as hanging around and talking to people after Mass can have a big impact on your children. Most parishes will have opportunities to put the faith into practice such as outreach and charitable projects. For centuries in the early Church even laypeople were expected to be there in person for morning and evening prayer, if they could manage it. It’s a great way to remind ourselves where our priorities ought to be, and to show our children that being a Christian is not a part-time job.

Let’s bear in mind as well that we are meant to carry what we have experienced and learned in church out into our everyday life. Accordingly, we speak of the home as the domestic church, and, as Pope St. John Paul II tells us, “Parents are the first and most important educators of their own children, and they also possess a fundamental competence in this area” (Letter to Families, #16). Nobody knows and loves your children like you do, and the most fundamental lessons are learned in the family (whether or not we realize that we’re teaching them). Daily prayer together as a family is essential, but your children should also know that their father and mother have a personal prayer life. I began daily recitation of the Liturgy of the Hours when my children were very young, and several of them have continued the practice on their own at college.

Taking charge of our own childrens’ faith formation is also important. In our case, my wife and I chose to educate our children at home, even though I was teaching at a highly regarded Catholic school. Our reasoning was that, even if all the teachers were faithful Catholics (and it’s a rare Catholic school indeed where even all the religion teachers are faithful Catholics, much less the faculty in general), those who attend are formed at least as much by the other students as they are by their instructors, and most of the students are formed in the toxic culture described above. If you decide that you can’t home school your children, and even if you find a solid, orthodox Catholic school, understand that the most the school can do, at best, is to supplement the foundation in faith that you build up in your domestic church at home. The parents are the primary teachers of the Faith.

As for higher education, I can’t think of a more direct road to hell than that provided by most institutions of what passes for “higher learning” today, and that includes most self-described Catholic colleges. We still receive the alumni magazine for the allegedly Catholic institution that my wife and I attended and, well, let’s just say that my reaction to said magazine is generally unprintable. We told our children that they could go there if they wanted, but we couldn’t in good conscience do anything to help or encourage their attendance at such an institution. Fortunately, they weren’t interested. They have had very positive experiences with two of the colleges on the very short list prepared by the Cardinal Newman Society. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that going to most other institutions puts their souls at grave risk. Really.

There is much more that can be said on this topic; I expect it will come up in this space again. I can’t think of a more important issue than the matter of how we conduct our own lives and raise our families in the light of the Faith as handed down by the Apostles. Truly making Christ the foundation of our lives will have a much bigger impact on our children than the ranting of any misguided cleric, however elevated his pulpit.

*There’s a lot more that could be said about this word as it’s used here. Maybe another article . . .

May 2, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

What Do We Do When Our Priest Is A Communist? (Part I)

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68)

We live in scary times. It looks like our secular institutions in the West are collapsing, to be replaced by mob rule (which really means, as always, a tyranny of the elite who manipulate the mob). More frightening still for Catholics, the institutional Church appears to be experiencing a parallel slide. A commenter on my post about the Trappists and Icarians expressed his unhappiness at attending Mass where, as he put it, the priest “preaches communism.” He was not just concerned, however, that many Catholic clerics, from parish priest on up, are abandoning the Faith for a poisonous brand of politics, but also, on a more practical level, that the Catholic Church itself was not a safe place for his children.

The commenter raises some valid and important points, which deserve a better answer than I can give off the cuff in a social media combox. I’m finding it hard, in fact, to limit the discussion to even a single blog post, so today I’ll take a look at why leaving the Church is not the answer, and next weekend discuss some practical considerations, including my own family’s experience.

I was thinking about how to approach this topic Friday morning, when I received some timely help from the daily Mass readings. In the first reading, for instance, St. Paul says to those gathered in the synagogue in Antioch:

“My brothers, children of the family of Abraham,
and those others among you who are God-fearing,
to us this word of salvation has been sent.
The inhabitants of Jerusalem and their leaders failed to recognize him,
and by condemning him they fulfilled the oracles of the prophets
that are read sabbath after sabbath.“ (Acts 13:26-29)

Now, we might rightly point out that Paul is talking about religious leaders under the Old Covenant, not the New. At the same time, they were ministers of a true religion who had been given a sacred duty to carry out the will of God. It is clear in all the Gospel accounts that the religious leaders in Jerusalem were instead acting out of concern for their institutional prerogatives: as it says in Mark’s Gospel, “And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and sought a way to destroy him: for the feared him, for all the multitude was astonished at his teaching.” (Mark 11:18) We don’t need to look very far through Church history to find plenty of Christian leaders, including some at the highest levels, who “failed to recognize him.”

The fallibility of even legitimate religious leaders reminds us that the structures of the Church don’t exist for their own sake, but in order to lead us to Jesus Christ. The same day’s Gospel helps point us in the right direction:

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Do not let your hearts be troubled.
You have faith in God; have faith also in me. . .
Thomas said to him,
“Master, we do not know where you are going;
how can we know the way?”
Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14: 1; 5-6)

Now, St. Thomas had Jesus himself right in front of him in bodily form. Where do we encounter Jesus? In the Church he founded (see Matthew 16:18) which alone can bring us the the True Body, the Verum Corpus, of Christ in the Eucharist. The Church itself has also been called the Body of Christ, the Mystical Body, a term first used by the Church Fathers but drawing on St. Paul’s Letters (1 Corinthians 12:12-31 and Romans 12:3-8). St. Paul tells the Corinthians that “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free” (Corinthians 12-13). The Apostle is clear that the Church is not a body in the ordinary sense of the in which we can apply it to any group of people ; here he’s using it in a very specific sense (italics mine): “Now you are the Body of Christ and individually members of it.” (1 Corinthians 12:27) In this body Christ is the Head, and all the rest of us have specialized roles that we carry out, not by and for ourselves, but in cooperation with the other members. That very much includes all the members of the hierarchy, up to and including the Pope. Nobody exercises authority on his own behalf.

Not even the Pope . . . in fact, explicitly not the Pope. One of the most misunderstood Catholic doctrines is the teaching on papal infallibility. The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) didn’t take up the question of the Pope’s infallible teaching authority in order to create a new doctrine but to define (that is, to establish clear boundaries for) a belief that had already been held for centuries. The conciliar document Pastor Aeternus makes it clear that Papal infallibilty can be exercised only in extremely limited circumstances, and can never extend to promulgating new doctrine:

For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that by His revelation they might make known new doctrine, but that by His assistance they might inviolably keep and faithfully expound the Revelation, the Deposit of Faith, delivered through the Apostles.

“Vergil and Dante meet Pope Boniface VIII in Hell” by Gustav Dore (c. 1855)

The Pope’s role is to preserve and pass on what he has received; infallibility means that he has the authority to clarify, not create. It is authority that is invoked very rarely. In fact, it is generally agreed that there has been only one papal pronouncement since 1870 that meets the standard set in Aeternus Pastor (Pius XII’s definition of the Assumption in 1950), and only one prior to Vatican I (The Immaculate Conception in 1854). Any papal attempt to create a brand new teaching would have no binding force. The Pope himself, strictly speaking, is fallible; true doctrine alone is infallible. This is the Church established by Jesus Christ and no Pope can unmake it, however hard he tries.

That also means that fleeing from the Catholic Church, even if it’s because of real transgressions committed by its members (up to and including the Supreme Pontiff), necessarily means giving up the Body of Christ for a body composed of mere men. As Peter replies when Jesus asks “Will you also go away?”: “”Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:67-68).

But even if there’s nowhere else to go, what about the very real danger of one’s children being corrupted by priests (and, um, others in the Church) preaching communism or some other heresy? I’ll take up that question in detail in next week’s post.

Features image above: “St. Paul Preaching in Athens” by Raphael (1515)

April 22, 2021 iacobusm Faith and Politics

What We Owe to Caesar

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17)

Deciding how to balance what we really owe to Caesar with what we owe to God is a perennial issue for a believing Christian. In the age of Covid and related governmental tomfoolery that question has become, let us say, even more acute. This coming weekend I’ll take a more specific look at recent events; today I’m posting an updated version of something I first published a few years ago drawing upon the work of a certain Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger when he was head of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It’s an oldie (in keeping with Throwback Thursday), but, as they say, a goodie.

Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI)

One need not buy in to the confusing and often intentionally obfuscating “Wall of Separation” language here in the United States to understand that the proper role for a believing Christian in public and political life is not always clear. As in other areas of decision-making, we need to apply our personal judgment in determining how to act in specific situations, but we should form those decisions in the light of the moral law and the teaching of the Church. An enormously helpful guide in sorting out these questions is the Doctrinal Note On Some Questions Regarding The Participation Of Catholics In Political Life [text here], published November 2002 with the authorization of Pope (now Saint) John Paul II, and under the name of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

The Doctrinal Note, despite its brevity (it’s only about eight pages long) is a wonderfully rich yet concise discussion, as we have come to expect from Joseph Ratzinger. It deserves a much fuller treatment than I can give it here, but it’s worthwhile to consider a couple of its main points.

First of all, participating in public and political life is a good thing:

It is commendable that in today’s democratic societies, in a climate of true freedom, everyone is made a participant in directing the body politic. Such societies call for new and fuller forms of participation in public life by Christian and non-Christian citizens alike . . . The life of a democracy could not be productive without the active, responsible and generous involvement of everyone, “albeit in a diversity and complementarity of forms, levels, tasks, and responsibilities”. (sec. 1, citations omitted)

As Catholic Christians, however, we have a particular mission to fulfill, a “proper task”:

By fulfilling their civic duties, “guided by a Christian conscience”, in conformity with its values, the lay faithful exercise their proper task of infusing the temporal order with Christian values, all the while respecting the nature and rightful autonomy of that order, and cooperating with other citizens according to their particular competence and responsibility. (sec. 1, citations omitted)

In other words, we need to recognize our mission to be Salt and Light to a world in desperate need of the Truth (see Matthew 5:13), while at the same time respecting the freedom of those who might disagree.

The Doctrinal Note goes on to say that such involvement on our part is not only good, but is in fact essential if democratic governance is to survive:

At the same time, the Church teaches that authentic freedom does not exist without the truth. “Truth and freedom either go together hand in hand or together they perish in misery.” In a society in which truth is neither mentioned nor sought, every form of authentic exercise of freedom will be weakened, opening the way to libertine and individualistic distortions and undermining the protection of the good of the human person and of the entire society. (sec. 7, citations omitted)

That is to say, without the Christian witness of the truth about God and man, society will devolve into a self-indulgent free-for-all: amoral, undisciplined people are incapable of self-government.

Joseph Ratzinger was not the first to point this out. In fact, it was the accepted wisdom prior to the establishment of the United States two and a half centuries ago that republics in general, and democracies in particular, would eventually collapse in a self-destructive orgy of unrestrained appetites. That’s the traditional understanding that Abraham Lincoln was invoking “four score and seven years” after the American founding in his Gettysburg Address. Lincoln described the Civil War as a “testing” of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . . or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

The founders themselves were aware of the dangers, but saw the Christian faith of the American people as the key to overcoming those perils . . .as long as Americans held to that faith. John Adams warned that men “may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.” George Washington was very emphatic on this same point in his farewell address:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens . . . Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” -George Washington

Both the Church and American founders agree that the freedom to govern themselves is only possible for people who know, and who have been formed in, the Truth.

And that leads us to the limits of politics and government. Our actions as citizens in a republic are guided by, and in that sense subordinate to, our properly formed consciences; likewise, the policies of the government are subject to a higher moral law. If our consciences are not properly formed, no law can make us good. At best, we can hope to encourage good behavior by providing incentives for it, and discourage bad behavior by providing disincentives. And when you have a large number of people with improperly formed consciences combined with government incentives to bad behavior, you face societal and political chaos.

What that means for us is that our first and most important task is to be the best Catholic Christians we can be, before we ever cast a vote or sign a petition. To the degree that we create a more Christian society, we make possible a more just government. We should approach direct political action with the understanding that whatever we do politically (and not, certainly, to subordinate our consciences to majority opinion or the party platform), it is guided by, and in service to, the Higher Truth. This may seem ironic, particularly to an unbeliever, but the first and foremost thing that a Christian citizen owes to Caesar is that he or she be, in fact, a faithful Christian: without that, nothing else is enough.

Finally, it’s good to keep in mind that God and Casesar each have a claim on us, but that doesn’t mean that they have equal claims. Government can do many good and essential things: provide for a common defense, nurture a secure environment for civil society to flourish, build and maintain infrastructure, help alleviate the temporary effects of poverty and abuse. Government cannot do everything, however, nor should it try: in keeping with the Principle of Subsidiarity [link], we should beware of the government subsuming responsibilities that rightfully belong to individuals or other associations, especially the family or the Church. The very real dangers of government overreach of this sort have come into particularly sharp focus over the past year. And, of course, as Christians we have to know that, however much the state can do, only Jesus Christ can bring about the Kingdom of God.