The beauty of blogging

The best part about blogging is, if you play your posts right, you can get other people to write your best stuff for you. As witness the comments to the "Abandonment of a toady" post below. I mumble something that sounds reasoned -- like the mathematician's wife who learned to ask algebraists, "But do the roots lie in the field?" -- and people who know a lot of things I don't fill me in.

On the density of Balthasar's writings, Fr. Aidan Nichols, OP, has written a trilogy of guides to Balthasar's trilogy. They're basically a rewording of Balthasar's magnum opus, with a little bit of commentary here and there, and I expect them to suffice if or when the time comes for me to look more directly at Balthasar's theology.

(Frankly, I'm a bit disappointed that, so far, it looks like I'll turn out to be a paleo-Thomist. I'm working my way through TAN's Garrigou-Lagrange booklist, and I'm finding him brilliant. I'm such an Aeternipatrician.)

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You know how to and You can and You want to

Today is an excellent day to begin a novena to St. Catherine of Siena, whose feast day is in eight days.

You've probably noticed that St. Catherine has been frequently invoked since January 2002 as the model for how the laity should respond to clerical scandal. You've probably also noticed that she has been invoked both by those who want aggressive confrontation with sinful priests and bishops, and by those who want more passive and less public lay reactions. Who, if anyone, can claim St. Catherine's support is a matter of debate. As far as I know, she hasn't explicitly endorsed a particular group in this matter.

I hope to spend some part of the rest of April reading The Prayers of Catherine of Siena, if I can find my copy in time. (You can browse the entire text online, if you're feeling prayerful yet cheap.) The book is an English translation, by Sr. Suzanne Noffke, OP, of an Italian edition of the collected prayers of St. Catherine. Here is prayer number 5:

Eternal Father, Power,
help me!
Son of God, Wisdom,
enlighten the eye of my understanding!
Holy Spirit, tender Mercy,
enflame my heart
and unite it to Yourself!

I proclaim, eternal God,
that your power is powerful and strong enough
to free your Church and your people,
to snatch us from the devil's hand,
to stop the persecution of holy Church,
and to give me strength and victory
over my own enemies.
I proclaim that the wisdom of your Son,
who is one with you,
can enlighten the eye of my understanding
and that of your people,
and can relieve the darkness of your sweet bride.
And I proclaim, eternal gentle goodness of God,
that the mercy of the Holy Spirit,
your blazing charity,
wants to enflame my heart
and everyone's
and unite them with Yourself.

Eternal Father, Power;
with the Wisdom that is your only-begotten Son
in his precious blood,
and the Mercy that is your Holy Spirit,
fire and deep well of charity
that held this Son
fixed and nailed to the cross --
You know how to
and You can
and You want to,
so I plead with You:
have mercy on the world
and restore the warmth of charity
and peace
and unity
to holy Church.

Oimé!
I wish You would not delay any longer!
I beg You,
let Your infinite goodness force You
not to close the eye of Your mercy!
Gentle Jesus!
Jesus love!

This seems like a common or garden prayer of a saint, and I suppose it is, as long as we understand that a saint's garden is different from the gardens of the rest of us. The notes accompanying the prayer point out, not only the richness of the prayer's Scriptural basis, but also its theological depth. Note the Trinitarian understanding:

Father -- Power -- You can
Son -- Wisdom -- You know how to
Holy Spirit -- Mercy -- You want to

It would probably suffice for both my salvation and my perfection if I could merely learn to pray -- and I mean pray -- those final words, "Gentle Jesus! Jesus love!"

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It's like I was saying

Fr. Bryce Sibley quotes Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar on the relationship between the Father and the Son when Christ descended to Sheol: "the moment of their separation is paradoxically their moment of most intense union."

Now, I'm not a very sophisticated thinker. When I hear "the moment of separation is the moment of most intense union," I assume that the "separation" and the "union" do not refer to the same relation in the same respect. If I say, "I am never closer to my wife than when we are far apart," "far apart" is a measure of physical distance and "closer" an analagous measure of spiritual or emotional "distance." That way of talking is, at least since Chesterton, called a "paradox," but really it's a sort of rhetorical equivocation. It's just a pithy way of making your point.

I sense, though, that Balthasar does not intend his statement the way I interpret it. I think he really does mean "separation" and "union" to describe the same relation in the same respect. As Melanie suggested in a comment below, this is not a paradox; this is a contradiction.

I'm partial to the idea that theology happens at the point where the language breaks, but I'm not sure anyone is trying to break language here. Perhaps, following Mr. Riddle, Balthasar is better thought of as a misdiagnosed poet.

Standard disclaimer: I am not a theologian. There is no particular reason why my sense of what is sound theology should be accurate.

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Happy Easter!

Every now and then, I get my mind, my heart, and my soul aligned with the Church's calendar and have a life-changing solemninty. More often, though, they're out of phase, and the day passes much as any other day, only with better food.

Easter is a particular challenge for me, for a lot of reasons. Lent is too long; I could do a nine-day Lent for the ages, but after a month I am slouching toward Ordinariness. Children do not add a Cistercian-like quality to the Triduum home.

Mostly, perhaps, I am an Easter person anyway. You'd think that would make keeping Easter easier, but for me it means Easter Sunday isn't that much different from the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Even on Good Friday, by temperament I'm thinking about how the story ends (or rather, how it doesn't end).

I take some comfort in the thought that my life, interior and exterior, need not track the liturgical year like the artwork on the EWTN homepage. The point, I think, is to be formed by the liturgy's cycles, not perfected in an instant. Perfection is the goal, of course, and we shouldn't dawdle on the way, but since I wasn't perfect at sunset on Thursday, it's no surprise I wasn't perfect at sunrise on Sunday.

But just wait till sunrise on the Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time!

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On encyclicals and the Ginger Factor

So I'm racing through Ecclesia de Eucharistia, to finish it before tonight's Mass of the Lord's Supper, and I get to the point (in no. 37) where it mentions that the Code of Canon Law "states that those who 'obstinately persist in manifest grave sin' are not to be admitted to Eucharistic communion."

And it suddenly hits me why reporters seize on such bits of rehashed doctrine as the hook on which to hang papal letters. It may have less to do with reporter's prefab notions of the Church than with everyone's experience of the Ginger Factor.

The Ginger Factor, named for a well-known "Far Side" cartoon, is a measure of the ratio of words said to words understood. A dog named Ginger, for example, only understands the word "Ginger" in the sentence, "Okay, Ginger, if you get into the garbage one more time, you'll be spending the night outside."

I think most people, not just benighted reporters, experience a high Ginger Factor with most papal encyclicals; my post below includes a paragraph from an apostolic letter that has a high G.F. for me. Naturally, a reporter doesn't report on the parts of a papal statement that sound like, "Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah.^blah" And naturally, a reporter does recognize (and report on) the part that sounds like, "This means Senator Rawkins is being naughty."

But as I say, it's not just reporters. I haven't seen much commentary on St. Blog's yet about Ecclesia de Eucharistia; let's see how much of it amounts to, "The liberals better watch out!"

A corollary of this -- which is what made me stop reading the encyclical to post this -- is that all the other stuff sounds like "Blah blah blah," even to us knowledgable Catholics.

To choose a sentence more or less at random, in no. 4 the Pope writes, "Whenever the Eucharist is celebrated at the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem, there is an almost tangible return to his 'hour', the hour of his Cross and glorification." I read that and think, "Oh, umhm." It's not till I get to the bit about clean consciences that I sit up and think, "Oh, he's saying something to me, now."

The parts about specific, concrete disciplines or doctrines seem to actually be more concrete than the parts about union with God and others. The identity of the sacrament celebrated at St. Moribund's with the sacrifice on Calvary, that's just part of the comfortable background humming which is my experience of the riches and depths of the Catholic faith. But ooh, tell me an Episcopalian can't receive the Eucharist in my church, and now you're telling me something real.

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Abandonment of a toady

Scratch a boot-licking Vatican toady, and you'll find a cafeteria Catholic waiting to emerge at just the right (or wrong) papal statement.

Kevin Miller at HMS Blog identifies a papal statement that brings out my own "Here I stand" resistance:

When Christ says: "My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?", his words are not only an expression of that abandonment which many times found expression in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms and in particular in that Psalm 22 [21] from which come the words quoted. One can say that these words on abandonment are born at the level of that inseparable union of the Son with the Father, and are born because the Father "laid on him the iniquity of us all." They also foreshadow the words of Saint Paul: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin." Together with this horrible weight, encompassing the "entire" evil of the turning away from God which is contained in sin, Christ, through the divine depth of his filial union with the Father, perceives in a humanly inexpressible way this suffering which is the separation, the rejection by the Father, the estrangement from God. [Savifici Doloris, no. 19]

In my abjectly amateur opinion, Kevin is right to say that this passage is "consistent with, and perhaps indeed informed by, Balthasar's theology."

Now, I am familiar with only a tiny portion of Balthasar's theology. I understand only a tiny portion of what I am familiar with. But the funny thing is, the more I understand it, the less I like it.

Part of it is, shall I say, a discontinuity of style; the English translations of Balthasar's German don't make much sense to me. I mean, I have a hard time figuring out what the actual words strung together in paragraphs (and, occasionally, sentences) actually mean. (It's been suggested to me that my mistake is assuming they mean anything at all.)

And frankly, the difficulty I have understanding Balthasar extends to the Balthasar-informed passages by Pope John Paul II. Note in the passage quoted above, first the reference to "that inseparable union of the Son with the Father," and second the reference to "this suffering which is the separation, the rejection by the Father." So ... is there a separation?

There's a sense I get -- and this sense has been confirmed by at least one professional theologian I've read -- that Balthasar likes to have his cake and eat it, too. This is sometimes defended as a mysterious paradox, or perhaps as a paradoxical mystery, but I'm not buying the defense, either. A paradox is not the same as a mystery, and if a thing is both a paradox and a mystery, it's paradoxical and mysterious natures can (and probably should) be considered separately. A thing can't both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect, whether or not someone is waving his hands and saying, "But it's a mystery!"

So do I actually reject what the Pope teaches in Savifici Doloris? How can I, when I don't know what he's actually teaching? I take the point that Jesus' cry from the Cross signifies more than His fulfillment of the prophecy of Psalm 22, but I honestly can't make out what the Pope is saying that more is. This sort of "One can say...born of the level of that inseparable union...encompassing the 'entire' evil...through the divine depth" way of speaking is, I think, one of the least attractive contributions Balthasar has made to the Church, and I hope (though who am I?) the Church will soon learn to take what is valuable from Balthasar's theology and put it in more comprehensible terms.

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The kenosis of the Son, the kenosis of the mother

Which stations in the Way of the Cross do you most relate to?

It's not a question I'd considered before it came up in a conversation last week. I don't do the Way of the Cross that often, nor when I do it is it with much depth of heart.

What I settled on was the pair of "Jesus Meets His Mother" and "Jesus is Taken Down From the Cross." (The presence of Mary as Jesus walked to Golgotha and as His body was taken down are supra-Scriptural intuitions, you might say, consistent with but not explicitly mentioned in the Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion.)

The role of Mary in the Church is not -- as many people, including many Catholics, think -- a way of sneaking into heaven, past Christ the Stern Judge, by way of His softie mother. Can anyone really believe any other person could love us more than Jesus does? Rather, Mary's role in the life of the Church is the same as her role in the life of the Savior. When we reflect with Mary on the things she kept in her heart, we are "led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ and to experience the depths of his love," as Pope John Paul II put it in Rosarium Virginis Mariae.

"There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness," Isaiah prophesized of Jesus, "and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him." Did His mother see the beauty of the face of Christ as He was led to His death? I imagine her, as striken in her heart as her Son was in His. What did she hold in her immaculate heart? The memory of the angel's promise: "He will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end"; of her faith in that promise, her hope in its accomplishment, her love of God for His love of her.

And not just love of God, but of her child, her infant whom foreign magi worshipped. That unwavering faith and hope and love, renewed each time she caught sight of, even thought of her Son Jesus, todlding though the house, playing with other children, learning from His father, shocking His parents with a painful and confusing reminder that He was not theirs to keep always.

Mary carried her faith, hope, and love with her, and at the sight of her condemned Son, what was she to do? Lose faith, abandon hope, cry out bitterly against the God Who would ordain this for His, for her, only Son?

No. In the emptiness and abandonment of Jesus, Mary saw her own emptiness and abandonment. There was nothing for her to do but offer the husks of her faith, hope, and love, now hollow and weightless, to the Father. "May it be done to me according to your word."

Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. While others engaged in political machinations, His mother stood vigil over His body, the Bread of Life dead to bring forth fruit, to yield a hundredfold. At last, His body is released, first from Roman possession, then from the Cross. Mary receives the body, again not hers to keep always.

How can there be anything left of her faith or her hope? Jesus did not come down from the Cross. He was not given the throne of David. At the sight of His tortured body on the way to Golgotha, Mary offered God all that she had. God accepted her offering, and gave her nothing back.

And yet... offering up hope is not the same as giving up hope. As empty as the body she holds, Mary is still receptive to God's will and His ways. She is, so to speak, between breaths; she has exhaled all she has, and there will be a pause before she draws in the sweet fragrance of the news of Easter, before God fills her like an overflowing fountain at Pentecost, and gives her a crown above all crowns and honor above all honor once she is assumed into the presence of her Risen Son.

But that fulfillment must wait. Now she sits at the foot of the Cross, her dead Son in her arms a reality no knowledge of the future, no wisdom of divine providence, can set aside. And still she offers God her faith and her hope and her love.

Michaelangelo understood something of this moment, and his Pieta puts it better than words ever could. The expression on Mary's face, the gesture of her left hand, these do not belong to a woman for whom life has lost meaning, on whom God has turned His back. Rather, in her sorrow and misery, she sees that the Cross is not something Jesus had to endure along the way to His glory, but the very means of His glory. She is telling us, "Come, contemplate with me the beauty on the face of Christ. Experience the depths of his love."

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He has been silent because we make much noise

Zenit reports an interview with Fr. Georges Cottier, OP, theologian of the papal household, on the job of rebuilding Iraq. Here are some selections:

Q: In response to the Pope's appeal, millions of people prayed for peace. Have they been heard?

Father Cottier: By God? I think so. He listens to what we say, although the way he responds is something else. We hope for verifiable, immediate results, but we must not think that this is God's way of acting.

Q: Why pray then?

Father Cottier: Pray, pray ... because there is a very strong belief that peace is almost beyond man's ability. We are all ready to oppose, to dominate, to fuel hatred.

Peace is a gift of God. So we must pray that he will transform us into builders of peace. In this way, he answers our prayers.

...

Q: How should one act, then?

Father Cottier: We need prayer to obtain wisdom, courage and generosity....

Q: You say God is not absent, but many have perceived his silence as a weight.

Father Cottier: What is the silence of God? God is always silent. He speaks in the depth of hearts. He inspires us through the Holy Spirit -- let us think about the many persons during these days who have prayed and called on God.

I would not say, therefore, that he was absent. He has been silent because we make much noise.

You can read the whole report for the more political bits; mention of the United Nations seems to be distracting, and what I wanted to emphasize with the above edits is the primacy Fr. Cottier places on prayer as action. Note his answer to the question, "How should one act, then?"

God speaks silently in the depth of hearts. How, then, can He speak to someone who never attends to the depth of his heart? How can you hear a silent voice if you are never silent?

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Those passing by reviled Him

It seems to me that one source of anguish Jesus felt in the garden before He was arrested was how poor a job He had done convincing the Jewish religious leaders He was the Messiah. Only a tiny fraction of the Jews with whom He spoke would come to believe in Him. And remember, these were His Chosen People, His dearly beloved from among all the nations.

What might have made the anguish all the sharper was Jesus' knowledge that He had the power to make them believe. He could perform the signs they demanded of Him, call upon the angels who waited upon Him to show themselves. He could even have answered the taunts of the chief priests and scribes as He was dying, "He saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe." He could have come down from the cross.

Would they have then believed?

Suppose so. Suppose that, in a flash, Jesus came down from the cross and stood before the Sanhedrin in clothes of gold and purple, cherubim on His right and His left. Suppose that this, at last, opened their eyes, and they flung themselves on the ground before Him and worshipped.

Even then they would not have believed in Jesus!

God became man to die on a cross, forsaken and reviled. This is Who Jesus was, so much so that if He had done what, strictly speaking, was within His power and come down from the cross, the King in glory the Pharisees might have worshipped would not have been the Son of God. It would have been the Son of God playing the role of the Pharisees' idea of the Son of God. Faith in the Pharisees' idea of the Son of God never has and never could save anyone. Jesus had the power to make His enemies believe in Him, but it would have been a false belief. They would have known Him no better serving Him from His throne in the Temple than they did mocking Him from His throne on Golgotha.

I've sometimes wondered why Jesus tried to keep the Messianic secret, why He didn't adopt a more irenic approach to the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin, whether fewer insults and more diplomacy might not have won Him more believers. But maybe He did literally all He could to show them, short of disobeying the Father. Maybe the limit on what Jesus can do for those whom He meets is set, not by some divine tough love standard, but by the way we have closed off all but a narrow approach to our minds and our hearts, along which we insist the King travel if He is to reach us.

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"Defined not by history, but by faith"

Br. Don Kania, O.P., has written a brief essay on the Way of the Cross which is sure to infuriate all those who think The Last Temptation of Christ was produced and distributed by Satan. Others might find in it an opportunity to consider the Way of the Cross as something more than a simple fact of Catholic culture.

For example, I didn't realize the standard fourteen stations weren't fixed until 1731. That makes them venerable, but hardly ancient by Church standards. And since devotions exist for man, not man for devotions, there is surely room for development.

I see two different ways in which development can happen. One is a change in the basic devotion, as with the addition of the fifteenth station or the use of more scriptural stations. The other is the abstraction from the devotion of some of the aspects that has made it a success through the centuries -- I'd say the physical movement and prayers combined with a series of concrete but open topics for meditation (where have we seen that combination before?), a very appropriate mix for our human nature -- and building other devotions from it.

Development, of course, means change, and as we know, Change Is Bad. The first type of development is fixing what isn't broken, and often taken as an insult to one's personal traditions and memory; what's good enough for Fr. Faber is good enough for you. The second type is an attempt to replace a proven source of grace with an artifact of dubious provenance.

While there's the obvious problem -- and consequent intra-parish strife -- that a private devotion observed in public cannot both change and not change, I think we must also recognize that a specific form of a devotion isn't carved in stone.

Well, okay, maybe the Way of the Cross is carved in stone, as often as not. What I mean is there is no divinely mandated precept that it's St. Alphonsus Liguori's Via or no Via.

Back to Br. Don's essay, he makes an interesting point about the question of scriptural basis for Station Six, Veronica wipes Jesus' Face:

...it should not be categorized as having no scriptural antecedents. The inclusion of Veronica (station 6) is reminiscent of Luke's focus on the feminine and Luke's literary style of pairing men with women throughout his gospel. Thus, Veronica becomes a female counterpart to the male Simon of Cyrene (station 5): both encounter Jesus on the way to the cross.

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The leftists and the righteous

The Contrarian makes a valuable distinction (emphasis added):

I am no leftist and I usually disagree with most pronouncements and press releases on social justice issues that emanate from diocesan chanceries and bishops' conferences. Yet, I am not particularly perplexed or angered by those pronouncements with which I disagree so long as they flow directly from a belief that ... "if God took flesh, then this has social implications" and not out of allegiance to purely secular ideologies as a substitute for lapsed faith.

I infer a certain uncharitable imputation of motives in some of the "Democratic Party at prayer" derision aimed at American bishops. It's a cheap way out of listening to your bishop to say, "He only says that because he's a toady of the Left."

Maybe his toadyhood explains part of it; maybe it explains most of it. But if we ignore what our bishops say -- or worse, listen to them with a hermeneutic of suspicion -- from whom are we supposed to learn about the part Leftist toadyhood doesn't explain, the part based on a belief that the Incarnation has social implications?

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Don't forget "Complaining"

Dappled Things presents a couple of lists of Things Catholics Do. I call attention to one item --

Keeping blessed palms in one's home.

I keep blessed palms in on room in my home. In fact, that's all I keep in the room. There's no space for anything else, and every year we just keep getting more blessed palms. If it weren't for the compaction they undergo as they decompose into blessed mulch, we'd need to move to a bigger house. I'm just waiting for the day I see a notice in a church bulletin to bring in the palms for Ash Wednesday. I'll rent a truck and haul the blessed things in. There will be enough ashes to mark the foreheads of every Catholic in the diocese, plus those on Mt. Rushmore.

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Is "necessary evil" Greek for "just war"?

Here is an excerpt from an article by Fr. Stanley Harakas, a Greek Orthodox priest, as quoted in a Flos Carmeli comment box:

The West, beginning with St. Augustine, had developed a set of ethical prescriptions and proscriptions concerning entrance into war (jus ad bellum) and behavior during war (jus in bello). I couldn't find such ethical reasoning in the Greek Fathers or in the canonical tradition of the Orthodox Church.

... I found an amazing consistency [in Eastern Orthodoxy] in the almost totally negative moral assessment of war coupled with an admission that war may be necessary under certain circumstances to protect the innocent and to limit even greater evils. In this framework, war may be an unavoidable alternative, but it nevertheless remains an evil. Virtually absent in the tradition is any mention of a "just" war, much less a "good" war. The tradition also precludes the possibility of a crusade. For the Eastern Orthodox tradition, I concluded, war can be seen only as a "necessary evil," with all the difficulty and imprecision such a designation carries.

As you might guess, I think "necessary evil" is a difficult and imprecise designation. The only sense I can make of the term in this context is that the "evil" has the nature of a natural harm suffered rather than a moral fault committed.

Or is it perhaps a "natural fault," so to speak, when someone is required by circumstances to act in a way less perfect than he is capable of?

Fr. Harakas's conclusion is this:

[The East's] view of war, unlike that of the West, was that it is a necessary evil. The peace ideal continued to remain normative, and no theoretical efforts were made to make conduct of war into a positive norm.

I can see how having a just war theory to refer to can affect one's attitude toward war. That, at any rate, has been made absolutely clear over the past several months.

What I'm not convinced of is that this signifies a substantive theological difference between East and West. Is it really true that the view of war as a necessary evil is "unlike that of the West"? Saying just war theory makes conduct of war into a positive norm seems somewhat misleading, even if the applications suggest positively good wars. The theory, after all, is a set of negative propositions: Don't go to war if these narrow conditions don't hold, don't do these many things if you do go to war. St. Thomas places war among the vices opposed to charity, and preserves a teaching on clerical pacifism like that found in Orthodoxy.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say the peace ideal has always remained normative throughout the Roman Catholic tradition, I think it has always remained fundamental and the proper foundation for just war theory. And as a systematic Westerner, I don't find it adequate to say, "War is sometimes a necessary evil," and leave it at that. If you make no theoretical efforts to develop a norm of when war is "necessary," what do you do when the question arises as a practical matter?

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An argument on moral obligation

An interesting thought experiment is proposed at fotos del apocalipsis:

Let A be a conscious spectator of the following situation:

B suffers an evil. [1]

Suppose in addition that

A is able [2] to eradicate the evil.

Consider the thesis:

A has the moral obligation to eradicate B's evil.

Justify the affirmative answer: get rid of all false trails (evil should be "real"), reject apparent remedies (it's not worth eradicating one evil and creating another, greater one), consider the gravity of relief from evil and the temptation of the sin of omission, show the connection with the theological virtue of charity, and with the evangelical exhortations ("I was hungry and you did not feed me"). Carefully distinguish the domains of each concept; construct the syllogisms. Elucidated and frame the full argument, with all its considerations, restrictions, and precisions.

Revised it all.

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[1] Assumed complete generality, without characterizing: B can be a person, a group of persons, a nation, a world; evil can be a pure suffering without intervention of third parties, can be an evil committed against B by another or by B against B.
[2] In the physical sense of the word: "is in its power."

(My apologies for translation errors.)

When you're done, Hernán has a proposal for particular values of A and B against which to test the robustness of your argument.

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Metablogging: A programming note

For those who were wondering: Yes, you may comment on my blog. Yes, you may leave anonymous comments. Yes, you may be offensive. No, you may not do all three at once.

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Current events at the breakfast table

    "Daddy, who's that?" my young son asks, pointing to a file photograph in a newspaper.
    "Oh, that's the evil man our army is trying to stop being bad to his people," I answer.
    "What does 'evil' mean?"
    I set down my glass of orange juice. This is going to be an important discussion. "Evil," I say, "is the privation of a due good."
    His eyes grow wide. "You mean like corruption and our inability to preserve our own existence?"
    "Distinguo. Corruption is indeed an evil, being the loss or lessening of being, which is controvertible to goodness. But an ability to preserve our own existence is not a good due us as creatures."
    "So that's why you say evil isn't simply the absence of a good, but the privation of a good?"
    "Exactly. A stone lacks the good of sight, but we don't say, 'The stone's blindness is evil.' Just so, we don't say, 'My inability to conserve my existence is evil.'"
    "But you wear glasses, Daddy," he points out, looking worried. "That's a privation of eyesight, which is a good of your eyes. Does that mean you're evil like the man in the picture?"
    "No, son. The implication doesn't hold. There are different kinds of evil."
    "Like what?"
    "Well, there's involuntary evil and voluntary evil. Some of the privations of due goods a moral being such as man experiences aren't chosen by him, and some are."
    "Daddy, you're tricking me! No one would choose to deprive himself of a good due him."
    "It does sound strange, I know, but people do it all the time. We usually call it 'sin.'"
    "I call it dumb."
    "Well, yes, sin is foolish twice over. First because when he sins a man freely chooses to deprive himself of the perfect operation of his faculties. And second, because whenever he sins he incurs a penalty or punishment, the deprivation or diminishment of some form of good he does or should possess."
    "So what happens when the evil man in the picture does something bad to someone?"
    "Three things. First, when he chooses to do something bad his will becomes less perfect, which is an evil found in his operation. Second, whatever he does is experienced as an involuntary evil -- perhaps a physical injury, or the denial of something that is due -- by the person to whom it is done. And finally, he will experience some evil of punishment or penalty. He will lose some good that he would otherwise have possessed."
    My son wrinkles his nose. "That means that the evil man gets two evils, and the person he's bad to only gets one. So he's twice as evil."
    "No, it's not additive like that. The only evil that makes a person evil is the evil they directly choose, their sin, when they freely choose to do a less perfect act than they are capable of."
    "Oh."
    "But you're right to point out that, when one person does something bad to another person, it's the person doing the bad thing that winds up worse off -- at least from the perspective of human happiness."
    "I'm not very happy when someone does something bad to me."
    "No, but the happiness I mean is the state in which you have everything you desire, and everything you desire is good for you. If you lose something you desire due to an involuntary evil someone inflicts on you, you're better off than the person who inflicts it, who desires something that isn't good for him. What you've lost can be restored, but he may be stuck with his wrong desire for eternity."
    "But what if he kills me?"
    "That would indeed be a great evil to endure. But it is not as great an evil as the penalty of damnation which your murderer might incur for killing you."
    "Does that mean that stopping someone from doing something bad to someone else does as much good for the person doing the bad thing as it does for the person the bad thing is done to?"
    "It may be so, and remember that doing good for someone is the meaning of charity."
    "So if we drop four two thousand pound bombs on someone, it means we love him?"
    "Ah, now you're moving from speculative to practical questions. Why don't you run along and ask Mommy?"

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For those not yet at their limit

On the day Baghdad fell, Pope John Paul II spoke these words at the end of his general audience:

While in Baghdad and in other places in Iraq the clashes continue, with destruction and death, news no less worrying arrives from the African continent, where, in the past days, comes information about massacres and summary executions. The theater of these crimes is the tormented region of the Great Lakes, and particularly an area of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In raising to God a fervent prayer of hope for the victims, I direct a heartfelt appeal to the politicians in charge, and also to all men of good will, that they pledge to stop violence and abuses of power, putting aside personal selfishness and group interests, with the active collaboration of the international community.

For this reason, every effort of reconciliation between the Congolese, Ugandan, and Rwandese people is to be encouraged, as are similar efforts in Burundi and in Sudan, hoping that from them the dearly wanted peace will soon be able to bloom.

Why oh why would the Pope interrupt our taunts of, "We told you so!" to make the same old tired appeal to the "international community" -- read the dictator-coddling, abortion-and-contraception-promoting U.N. -- to help a region in the world achieve peace? Doesn't he know that the happiness of Iraqis to be freed from tyranny proves that the international community is in the dump truck on the way to the trash heap of history? Why won't he let us enjoy our triumph in peace?

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Those three little words

I'm sure you know the words I mean: Beware consequentialist thinking.

It's natural, when a plan of action turns out very well, to conclude that it was a good plan. Not merely good in the sense of effective, but even in the sense of moral.

That the end doesn't justify beginning, though, can be seen by imagining that I aim a deer rifle in the air and fire off a round. If the bullet breaks a window, scaring a man about to murder some orphans into dropping his knife and surrendering to police, I would be wrong to conclude that shooting the rifle was a good idea.

Now let's imagine a happy days ending to the war against Iraq. Fighting stops later today, humanitarian aid reaches all who need it, looting stops, Iraq gets off to a good political restart, the Coalition forces go home soon, no subsequent acts of terroism attributable to the invasion occur -- even, if you like, WMD are discovered.

Such a scenario will -- and to the extent it's begun to play out, already has -- lead many who supported the invasion to say things like, "The Iraqis were happy to be liberated. That shows this was a just war."

There are two problems with this sort of talk.

First, it's untrue; that the Iraqis were happy to be liberated does not show that the war is just (and not only because the cause of the war was not the subjugation of Iraq).

Second, most people who say such things will never believe it's untrue.

The time will come, if it hasn't already arrived, when conservative American Roman Catholics say, "If we'd listened to the Vatican in 2003, the Baathists would still be putting Iraqis into meat shredders." Maybe, although if they'd listened to the Vatican in 2003, they would have been praying the Rosary daily for a just peace without war. Maybe it isn't just the Vatican some conservative American Roman Catholics didn't listen to in 2003, but the Gospel.

Anyway, I am not sulking and saying, "The costs of the war were remarkably low, and the benefits remarkably high? Rats! But I don't care, the war was still immoral!" I am saying, "Whether the war's costs and benefits turn out to be low or high does not affect the morality of the decision to go to war."

And indeed, how could it? How can something that happens now affect circumstances in the past?

What something happening now can affect is the evaluation of the soundness of past judgments. Still, evaluating their soundness is not the same as proving their soundness. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you get help.

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Come then, let us set things right

Mr. Riddle of Flos Carmeli is right to caution against exaggerating the ineluctability of the conclusions of human reason. In the very first article of his Summa Theologica, St. Thomas admits the weakness of human reason by pointing out divine revelation is necessary even for "those truths about God which human reason could have discovered... because the truth about God such as reason could discover, would only be known by a few, and that after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors."

But I still think the way the matter of assassination of a tyrant is framed at Flos Carmeli is wrong insufficiently nuanced:

To take an old, proven, and accepted argument, when John da Fiesole presents an axiomatic system that says "God frowns as greatly upon the death of one as He does upon the deaths of millions," and shows proof of this, I understand the proof, and I even believe the proof. On the other hand, what kind of God, I ask myself, am I worshipping who allows the continued slaughter of millions by the interdiction of the death of one? While it is not good to think about God fashioning a squad of hit men, neither is it salutary to consider a God who sits back and allows the chaos that we see in many countries and forbids the obvious remedy.

(Speaking of unspoken assumptions, we'll take as granted that the circumstances are such that a tyrant is morally certain to kill millions, and that the means of preventing this by assassinating him are immoral.)

First, I think we need to look at the term "the obvious remedy." What is it that makes this remedy obvious? If, as we're supposing, it is morally impermissible to assassinate the tyrant, then assassination ought to be removed from consideration, as it is said "taken off the table." A bowling ball on a small table may be obvious, but if I take it off the table, then it is no longer "obvious" (in the way) to someone whose attention is limited to the table. We might analagously say that an obvious way of "remedying" the situation that I can't get a soccer ball past the other team's goalie is to pick up the ball and run it into the goal.

The soccer analogy looks weak, since the goal in soccer is not to get the ball in the goal but to score, while the goal with the tyrant is to stop him killing people, which will necessarily happen if we kill him. But I think framing the problem this way is incorrect; the end of the Christian is not "People aren't being killed," but "People are living according to God's will." Just as putting the ball into the goal does not necessarily constitute scoring in soccer, stopping a tyrant from killing people does not necessarily constitute the charity toward others required of us by God.

You cannot look at the sheer logic and not ask the question, "God would prefer the deaths of millions to the death of one?" Now the answer is that He would prefer no deaths--but what is the reality?

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. What is the reality? According to Mr. Riddle, it is this:

If God forbids the removal of the one, then He approves the slaughter of the millions. You cannot have Him disapproving both because if He did so, the slaughter obviously would not occur.

Here, I think, the reasoning is salted with additional propositions that come to us unproven. If God disapproves of an act, it is sinful; if an act is sinful, God disapproves of it. By construction, God disapproves of my assassinating the tyrant. But who is the moral actor slaughtering millions? Obviously, it is the tyrant. There is no dilemma or paradox or problem with God disapproving both my sinful act and the tyrant's.

Mr. Riddle's position, though, is that we somehow share in the act of slaughtering millions. I don't understand how he comes to this position, or perhaps I misundertand what his position really is.

As a member of the human race, I am not perfected until the whole human race is perfected. An act of adultery in Bhutan affects me; the Great Commission is not completed until there is no more sin anywhere.

But that mystery does not imply that I am morally culpable for each act of Bhutanese adultery. As I've argued before, the coincidence of my earthly life with a particular injustice does not imply my complicity in that injustice. Is it reasonable to hold a fifteen-year-old Christian slave in Sudan responsible for the enslavement of a fifteen-year-old prostitute in Thailand?

If we are not necessarily morally complicit in every act of injustice, the question still remains whether we are in fact morally complicit in a particular act of injustice. It seems to me that we cannot be morally complicit if we are powerless to stop or prevent it. Returning to the example raised at Flos Carmeli, we could say a just actor does not have the power to assassinate a tyrant. If physical options are limited to assassination and nothing, and assassination is not a moral choice, how can doing nothing physically be immoral?

That's not a rhetorical question. You could answer, "You can make me say, 'Doing nothing physically couldn't be immoral,' but you can't make me like it." That's fine. In fact, I'd say that's good. Impotence to oppose evil shouldn't produce a warm, fuzzy feeling. But neither should it produce a feeling that opposing a greater evil with a lesser evil is preferable to feeling impotent.

By now, several strong letters have begun to be composed pointing out that Christians are never impotent to oppose evil, that prayer and fasting are always and necessarily effective means of combatting sin. Amen, amen, this is true, and when on the Last Day the Lord shows us our knowledge of iniquity and asks where our prayers against it were, we may not have much to say. But this, I think, is a different matter from moral culpability for not physically acting to stop injustice.

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A little sorbet

To cleanse the blogging palate.

Whether borogroves are all mimsy

Objection 1. It would seem that borogroves are not all mimsy. For to say that one thing is all or entirely another is to say that the idea of the first thing is entirely contained in the idea of the second. But mimsiness is, as the Philosopher states (Organon), an accident, while a borogrove is a substance. And no substance can be an accident. Therefore borogroves cannot be all mimsy.

Objection 2. Further, borogroves are subject to change, which implies that either their mimsiness changes, in which case as its mimsy diminishes a borogrove cannot be all mimsy, that is to say, the perfection of mimsiness; or that something other than their mimsiness changes, in which case it is manifest that the borogrove is not entirely mimsy.

On the contrary, Lewis Carroll states, "All mimsy were the borogroves."

I answer that, to say that borogroves are all mimsy can be understood in three ways. First, in the sense that borogroves belong to mimsy as a species to a genus. Second, that borogroves always possess complete mimsy. Third, that under certain circumstances borogroves possess complete mimsy, and it is in this third sense that we understand the borogroves to be all mimsy.

Reply to Objection 1.This is the first sense, of relating species to genus, and this is not the sense intended.

Reply to Objection 2.This is the second sense, but that this is not the sense intended is shown by Lewis Carrol's observation that "'Twas brillig," implying that, if 'twasn't brillig, the borogroves would not necessarily be all mimsy.

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Everything's coming up roses

Hernán González has been posting a whole series of comments and reflection about St. Therese of Lisieux at fotos del apocalysis. She, in turn, was gracious enough to thank him by joining him for lunch.

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No hard feelings

Irritated by my typically true-but-useless words, Steven replies to my post below:

I, for one, would be vastly comforted to know how I am not sinning by complicity in support of a regime that we know destroys innocent human lives, and how I am not sinning in supporting a war that might be unjust (and if unjust, therefore a sin).

Let me start by saying that one reason my words are so often useless is because I have no particular competence to judge circumstances as they actually exist in the world. I am far more confident in my ability to parrot principles enunciated by others than in my ability to correctly apply them. Which is to say, in my memory than in my virtue.

I take "sinning in complicity" to mean "sinning by doing nothing to stop an evil." I don't really buy the "for us or against us," "objectively pro-Fascist" dichotomy that is sometimes proposed; I don't think omitting to act against a regime is a form of support for that regime.

But is "doing nothing to stop an evil" always a sin? Well, one ought to pray at least generally that everyone avoid evil and do good, and for the end of all current evil, so in the sense that prayer is doing something it's wrong to do nothing. But beyond prayer and fasting, is it always a sin of omission to fail to do something to stop an evil?

I don't think so. For one reason, beyond prayer and fasting, there is often nothing a person can do to stop an evil; what can I do (other than prayer and fasting) to stop, say, adultery in Bhutan? Further, in my judgment there is more evil in the world than I have time to fight (other than by prayer and fasting); there are two dozen armed conflicts per year, just for starters.

On the other hand, "doing nothing to stop an evil" is certainly a sin sometimes. How do we decide about a particular case?

It makes sense to say that, for it to be a sin, it is necessary to be able to stop the evil. But we need to be careful about what "to be able" means. It doesn't mean "physically able;" the U.S. is physically able to stop adultery in Bhutan by systematic nuclear strikes. Instead, it means "morally able," that moral means exist to achieve the end of stopping the evil.

Killing everyone living in a particular country is clearly not a moral means. Invading a country, perhaps even in the form of a decapitation attack, is not so clearly immoral. However, the fact that one country is physically able to invade another country and remove its oppressive regime does not imply that doing so is moral. In other words, just because our army can beat up their army, that doesn't necessarily mean it is a sin if we don't attack.

So it doesn't follow from necessity that someone who doesn't support the war against Saddam's regime is sinning by complicity in support of a regime that destroys innocent human lives.

Now, is it a sin to support a war that might be unjust? Again, I think we need to start by defining terms, in this case what "might be unjust" means. I'll take it to refer to an act whose justness I am not morally certain of.

The justness of a war is, as we know, a slippery thing to establish, but I don't think it is necessary for a private citizen to reach a prudential judgment that a war is just for him to support the war. Not so much because he should trust the proper authorities to make the proper prudential judgment as because the support of a war declared by an authority is, I think, a different moral act from the declaration of the war by the authority. The circumstances in which the individual is reasoning necessarily include the fact of the declaration of war; the choices he has to make, the likely effects of those choices, and the overall range of outcomes is different for the individual than for the authority.

In the particular case of the war in Iraq, once the fighting started I think there could be no worse outcome -- for Iraq, the West, and the world -- than for the coalition forces to unilaterally withdraw. I think the cease fire requested by the bishops of Baghdad -- an entirely understandable request, coming from a city under attack -- would be a military and political disaster. Since March 19, then, my prayer has been for a swift, complete, and bloodless victory, followed by a just peace. I don't see that so much as support for a war that might be unjust as support for the best possible outcome given the circumstances as I know them. (With, as always, the recognition that what I think is the best possible outcome is unlikely to be quite what God thinks it is.)

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A bad feeling

Flos Carmeli has a series of recent posts expressing conflict over conflict. It seems to me, though, that you can't resolve moral difficulties by denying what you know.

After stating, "Just war seems to me an irreconcilable verbal construction," Steven writes:

I also wonder whether it is just not to oppose and depose a person who oppresses, represses, tortures, and kills his people systematically. Don't we have Biblical precedent for this (Judith, for example). I speculated a while back that it might not be all that great a sin to remove someone like Hitler who was slaughtering millions rather than to stand by and allow them to be slaughtered. Are there instances in which the good of the many outweight the good of the few. John da Fiesole said, "Never," in my previous discussion of this, and I must submit to the logic of it--but this is where I do not trust logic.

Note that Steven speaks of "logic," rather than "reason." Who, after all, likes logic? Reason is a dubious enough enterprise, but logic is downright cold, inhuman, dead.

Personally, I wouldn't even call it "reason." The term I'd use is "revelation": "And why not say--as we are accused and as some claim we say--that we should do evil that good may come of it? Their penalty is what they deserve." [Romans 3:8]

Note also this expression Steven uses: "it might not be all that great a sin." Why not say that we should do not all that great an evil that great good may come of it? Ask St. Paul.

I cannot imagine that God regarding the relative merits of say Hitler and his would-be assassin would place them in the same frame. (Sorry, John, all the logical arguments in the world will not move me from the intuition that love expresses itself sometimes in actions that do not seem very loving--a deep love for humanity might have driven an assassin of Stalin, and the world might have been a better place sooner.)

When the standard for a Christian becomes, "I'm okay as long as I'm less evil than Hitler," the devil must throw back its head and laugh until sulfur tears roll down its cheeks. And I find the thought of an assasin acting out of "a deep love for humanity" terrifying.

So even apart from a just war--the meaning of which I find sufficiently slippery to be suspect, there are times at which we are given a choice of two evils--allow someone to continue killing, destroying, and terrorizing, or remove that person. Either one of them might be regarded as a sin. But personally, I would rather be complicit in the removal of a tyrant than in the destruction of a single innocent life.

Here Steven makes a very simple error, by claiming that it is possible to be in a situation in which one must sin. There's an equally simple syllogism that demonstrates his claim is false --

1. God commands us to avoid sin.
2. God never commands the impossible.
3. Therefore, avoiding sin is not impossible. --

but Steven, distrusting logic, prefers his intuition that love of God sometimes demands disobedience to God.

Well, my intuition is that an intuition that leads to an impossibility is a bad intuition. As the Kairos Guy pointed out regarding torture:

A person under threat of nuclear annihilation has very much less free will than a person not under such threat, in determining how best to extract information about the threat.

This is why we ought to reason about such things when we aren't under threat. What we ought to seek is not an excuse for doing evil, nor a clean conscience about doing evil, but an abhorrence of evil in our own souls at least as great as the abhorrence of the evil in the world as a whole. Such an abhorrence is not the selfish concern for ritual purity of the priest and Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, but an awareness that we are God's adopted children and temples of the Holy Spirit, and it is not for us to choose to defile our souls as a means to obtain some temporal good.

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The three-sided cup

In his Gospel, Mark uses the word "cup" six times:

"Anyone who gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ, amen, I say to you, will surely not lose his reward." [Mk 9:41]

Jesus said to [James and John], "You do not know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?" They said to him, "We can." Jesus said to them, "The cup that I drink, you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized." [Mk 10-38-39]

Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, "This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many. Amen, I say to you, I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God." [Mk 14:23-25]

[Jesus] said, "Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will." [Mk 14:36]

Notice that there are three ideas associated with the image of a cup: comfort and pleasure (9:41, 14:25); suffering (10:38-39, 14:24); and the blood of the covenant (14:24).

The suffering and the pleasure are clear contrasts. Many religions see suffering as something to be endured, if it can't be avoided. The special genius of Christianity, if I may so speak, is that it sees suffering as the very means to the joy and comfort to come.

I don't think many Catholics look at the chalice during Mass and think of it as the cup of suffering. It contains, rather, the Blood of the New Covenant, poured out for our salvation, and by receiving It we join ourselves more firmly to the Mystical Body of Christ.

But what if we identify the cup Jesus speaks of to James and John, that He asks be taken away in Gethsemane, with the cup He passes to His disciples in the upper room? Then by the same single act, we attach ourselves to Jesus as our savior and we accept the cup of suffering that Jesus accepted. Saying, "Amen," when we drink from the chalice is saying, "Not what I will but what You will," to the Father. It is an act of will that accepts the sufferings that might come our way as Jesus accepted His.

I've read that the Passover celebration of Jesus' day involved drinking quite a lot of wine. Who blames Peter, James, and John, after accepting the cup from Jesus, for falling asleep in the middle of the night while Jesus accepted the cup from the Father? But we do not, as a rule, show up for Mass after drinking and staying up late. Are we nevertheless asleep when we drink the Cup?

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Note to self

Next time I agree to let what I write here be cross-posted to a Dominican website at the editor's discretion, I will stick to criticizing Jesuits for at least a week.

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Signifying nothing

According to the three Dominican sisters arrested last October for depridation of federal property, painting a cross on a nuclear missile silo with their own blood (carried in baby bottles) symbolically "identifies the effects of war and portrays the essential element of life."

On the natural level, I find painting a cross in blood to be creepy and revolting. Using blood extracted earlier and carefully transported to the site -- which is something of the in thing in certain Dominican circles -- strikes me as a silly bit of contrived grandstanding.

But on the symbolic level, where does the idea that painting a cross in blood symbolizes the effects of war come from? Fr. Peter Murnane, OP, who soiled a carpet in the U.S. consulate in Auckland, New Zealand, claimed, "We made the sign of the cross. That's a sacramental gesture to sanctify the solidarity with the people of Iraq and to confront the power of the United States with the sacrilege that they are doing."

No. No, it's not a sacramental gesture. It's not the sign of the cross. The sign of the cross is a blessing. The gesture these people made was a curse, a curse using a sacred symbol of their faith in a ritual which, if not actually pagan, is certainly utterly foreign to Christianity.

If their acts did signify what they claim, why the extended "action statements" to explain them? According to the sisters,

We come in the name of Truth, an-Nur, the Light.... We walk in the name of the Shepherd, ar-Rashid.... We act in the many names of God the Compassionate, ar-Rahim.... We pray in the name of al-Qabid, the One who holds the whole world....

In my ignorance, let me say that this statement does not bear a stamp of St. Dominic that is visible to me. (The sisters are members of the Grand Rapids Dominicans, one of a distressingly large number of women's religious congregations affiliated with the Dominican Order that have managed to construct mission and vision statements that do not mention Jesus Christ. In fact, according to Google, the word "Jesus" appears on four pages of the Grand Rapids Dominicans' website, while the term "social justice" appears on thirty-nine pages. The entire site seems to have forty-one pages.)

In his statement, Fr. Murnane at least made explicit reference to Jesus Christ. But he also made explicit reference to his pouring of blood in the shape of a cross as "a covenant of [his] opposition" to the U.S. actions in Iraq. The idea of blood being poured out as the sign of a covenant is, of course, not unheard of in Christianity, but using your own blood ... that's just too close to blasphemy for me, whatever the expressed intent.

We are physical creatures, and the things we do have a meaning that we are not entirely free to define. I may read a statement asserting that my spitting in your face is a sign of love and respect, but spitting in your face does not signify love and respect.

Just to state the obvious: Although others may speak for the oppressed of Iraq or for an-Nur ar-Rahim ar-Rashid, I don't speak for anyone but me.

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Circumstantial torture

Some committed Catholics have, in recent weeks, expressed the opinion that torture is acceptable under certain circumstances; the canonical circumstances feature a terrorist with knowledge of where a nuclear bomb that will blow up in one hour is concealed in a large city.

Here is a description of what those who hold this opinion argue for:

To the marines of 40 Commando and myself it was becoming abundantly clear the building in this captured suburb of Basra was, in fact, a house of torture used to inflict pain and suffering on possibly hundreds of civilians.

Confirmation came in an upstairs room, the contents of which made us shudder.

There were two rubber car tyres and a long electric lead attached to the mains - still live....

One marine chief who had spent time in the Balkans on UN service told us his thoughts on the tyres and cable.

He said: "This is something we came across a lot in Bosnia.

"The interrogator would stand on the tyres while prodding the captive with the live cable. His own feet were insulated from the high voltage by the rubber.

"Primitive maybe, but a pretty effective and recognised form of torture in a lot of Third World countries.

"Electrocution is not only incredibly painful but also very frightening. The interrogators usually get more out of the shock effect of it rather than the actual pain the burns cause."

"Oh, give me a break, Mr. Moral Equivalence," some might rejoin. "We aren't talking about systematic torture and oppression of whole populations."

True, there is a difference. But it's a difference in degree, not in kind. An attempt to justify torturing the terrorist but not the populace is an attempt to cast the question of torture as a prudential judgment: One person may be tortured for the sake of ten million. Ten million may not be tortured for the sake of one. Where is the point, as you move people from victim to beneficiary, that the scales are even?

Catholics hold by faith that a single act of disobedience caused the fall of the entire human species. Can we really believe that a single act of torture will have no effect on the society that endorses it?

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Do you want to be well?

In a homily on John 5:1-16 yesterday, Fr. Lawrence Donohoo, OP, pointed out that the ill man at Bethesda didn't answer Jesus' question -- "Do you want to be well?" -- but rather explained why he had no living hope of being well: "Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me."

Fr. Donahoo suggested five reasons why, if Jesus were to ask us, "Do you want to be well?", we might say, "No, thank you, Lord." (This answer, odd at first thought but seen to be common on second thought, amounts to saying, "I do not want to be saved on Your terms, but on mine.")

1. Our wounds enable us to obtain attention and pity from others.
2. Our wounds give us an excuse to ignore other, deeper wounds we might have.
3. Our wounds give us an excuse to ignore the wounds of others.
4. If we were made well, we would have to change how we live, and we may be comfortable with our life as it is.
5. Being healed is likely to be a painful process, and we may prefer the known pain of our wounds.

The suggestion, of course, is that we examine our own lives to see whether we are using any of these perfectly rational yet wholly inadequate excuses to slip out of God's healing embrace.

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That hope which is in you

Christians -- particularly those raised as Christians -- often seem to forget just what it is that the promises of Christ entail. Jesus tells us, "Whoever loves me ... my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him." [John 14:23]

"Beloved," John assures us, "we are God's children now." In the next life, "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." [1 John 3:2]

Think about what this means:

• We are God's children now. Not in some vague sense that the Creator is by a weak analogy said to be the "father" of mankind, but as individuals we share in the sonship of Christ. When the Father looks at us, He sees His beloved Son.
• We shall see God as He is. Seeing God as He is is not something a lot of people are all that interested in doing, but that is the delight with which we will (by God's grace) spend eternity.
• We shall be like God. Can there be a more outrageous claim than that the fellow behind you at Mass -- you know, the guy who says, "May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of God's name, for our good and the good of all God's church," who reaches over your shoulder to grab your hand during the Our Father -- shall be like God for eternity?
• And even in this life, the Trinity will make Their dwelling with us. This isn't simply pouring the watering can of grace over us from heaven, nor even speaking to us face to face, but actually dwelling within our souls, turning our hearts into heaven itself. And this doesn't happen only in the next life. It's happening right now, as you read these words, if you've been baptized and are reconciled to God.

All of this is amazing beyond telling, and the cause of true Christian joy.

The problem is, I haven't been able to find out the easy way to obtain all that is promised us. I elided some words from John 14:23 above; the quotation begins, "Whoever loves me will keep my word." 1 John 3 goes on to say, "No one who remains in him sins; no one who sins has seen him or known him."

So sure, we can have eternal beatitude, even beginning in an imperfect but real way in this life, but in order to do so we must allow the Holy Spirit to love God and neighbor through us. Everything has a catch.

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Always happy to oblige

T. S. O'Rama admits to "an increasing curiousity about what my fellow blogland toilers look and sound like." For those wondering what I look and sound like, wonder no more.

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La corrupción de lo mejor es lo peor

Hernan Gonzalez, not terribly impressed by St. Blog's warblogging, points out a couple of reasons so many people decry the sins and failings of the U.S. but don't mention the sins and failings of Iraq:

I had hoped that a Catholic would at least remember that Jesus lays into the Pharisees more than the Sadducees, the scribes more than the publicans, the Jews more than the Romans... And don't they know that the corruption of the best thing is the worse thing?

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Heisenprayer

If it's Friday, it must be Steal Ideas from the Kairos Guy Day. In a comment below, he writes:

For I am sort of a Heisenberg-prayer kind of guy: if the outcome of a prayer isn't yet known, it hasn't yet been determined. So, my prayer at 9:00 can potentially prevent something from happening at 8:45am if I don't already know that thing is happened.

I suppose this sort of prayer is very common. "Dear Lord, don't let it be anyone I know who was hurt in that accident I heard about on TV."

I know a priest who uses an interesting term for this: Superstition.

I'm not sure how to even begin to find out whether Heisenprayer is theologically sound or merely a comforting habit.

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The neglected prayer of a just man doesn't availeth much

The Kairos Guy feels the world revolves around him, even though he knows it doesn't:

A horrible fear possesses me that one day I will forget to say my perpetual novena to Mary and Patrick for a disruption of terrorists, and that that will be the day that terrorists achieve their next major attack.

In spite of the flippant title to this entry, I'm very serious about this. We're all possessed of a certain amount of solipsism (ask anyone why it rained on the day they forgot their umbrella, and you know the umbrella-forgetting will be blamed) but honestly....

With me, it's more of a nagging sense than a horrible fear, and nothing so formal as a perpetual novena, but yes, I know what he means.

The feeling may not be entirely due to self-aggrandizement. A secondary cause may be an experience of the power of prayer.

The Gospel of Mark records this astonishing statement by Jesus:

Have faith in God. Amen, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, "Be lifted up and thrown into the sea," and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it shall be done for him. Therefore I tell you, all that you ask for in prayer, believe that you will receive it and it shall be yours. [Mark 11:22-24]

It's natural to think that Jesus was exaggerating. After all, as the Venerable Bede pointed out, "we have never been able to change mountains."

But he goes on to add, "It could, however, be done, if necessity called for it...." I'm inclined to think this is one of those "the happiest man was too poor to have shoes" paradoxes, whereby those who have faith enough to move a mountain have no desire, and those who have the desire don't have the faith.

Though well short of moving mountains, I have still experienced God answering my prayers. The more obvious the answer, the more unnerving. But if God answers some prayers in obvious ways, might He not be answering others in less obvious ways? And if He is actually responding to my prayer, then isn't a world in which I offered that prayer different from, and better than, a world in which I didn't offer it?

I think part of J.B.'s solipsistic fear is that his prayers are the only thing standing between the terrorists and their victims, as though all across heaven and earth other and better prayers aren't being offered for the same intention. But even that I don't find completely ridiculous. The underlying truth is that sincere prayer is a cause of God's grace in this world; the particular bit of grace, so to speak, that J.B.'s prayer causes can be given to the world by no other means. Even if the effects of that grace are not discernable, they are very real.

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Tis the season

I don't know why anyone would go to a mall to see a "Spring Rabbit". Spring rabbits are all over my yard.

And soon, perhaps, in my kitchen.

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Three weeks in

Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent. We're almost halfway through. How are your prayer, fasting, and almsgiving going?

Fr. James Sullivan, OP, preached at my church last night, highlighting a couple of new (to me) angles to these old traditions.

First, notice that we have three kinds of difficulties in this life: difficulties with God; difficulties with ourselves; and difficulties with others.

How can we resolve our difficulties with God? Prayer. "Lord, I'm not very happy with what You've been up to lately. We need to talk."

How can we resolve our difficulties with ourselves? Fasting. "Am I irritable and mean-spirited because I stay up too late watching mean-spirited TV shows?"

How can we resolve our difficulties with others? Almsgiving. "Gee, I gave her my full attention for ten minutes ... and I survived!"

Second, Fr. Sullivan mentioned that the Catechism refers to "the triple concupiscence that subjugates [fallen man] to the pleasures of the senses, covetousness for earthly goods, and self-assertion, contrary to the dictates of reason." [CCC 377]

How can we combat subjugation to the pleasure of the senses? By fasting.

How can we combat covetousness for earthly goods? By almsgiving.

How can we combat self-assertion contrary to the dictates of reason? By prayer. "O Lord, You are He Who Is, and I am he who is not."

Prayer, fasting, almsgiving: these are not burdens imposed by the joyless on the joyless, these are the means by which we become what we are supposed to be. And not just for forty days a year.

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Journalist goes beyond parody, likes the view

I've always had strong reservations about what Rod Dreher writes about Catholicism. I honestly think, for all the inside dirt he's privvy to, for all the priests who lament to him off the record, that he has some pretty basic and significant misunderstandings about what the Church is.

But now he's shown himself to be simply irrational on the subject of the Pope's opposition to the war against Iraq. Based on a 92-word Reuters report, which directly quotes fourteen words of the Pope -- "large part of humanity," "vast contemporary movement in favor of peace," and "comfort and hope" -- he writes:

Who would have thought that Karol Wojtyla would have thrown in with the communists of International ANSWER? Who would have thought that the hero of the Cold War would have turned into Jimmy Carter? St. Catherine of Siena, ora pro nobis.

This is not an encouraging post. It is the panicked, reflexive response -- complete with stock villains -- of Rod from Brooklyn, a radio talk show regular who half-overhears a news report before calling in with his take.

Think about it: If the Pope takes comfort and hope from a vast contemporary movement in favor of peace, then Rod Dreher's world is turned upside down. This, quite simply, is not a mindset from which to expect reliable commentary on the Church in the world.

Update: A Zenit article provides enough context for Rod Dreher to accept the Pope's words. He has admitted the fault of being hasty.

"Without a conversion of heart," the Pope said, "there is no peace!"

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Carmelites say "to-may-to"

Dominicans say "We have seen that the formal constituent of the divine nature according to our imperfect mode of knowledge is subsistent being, for this distinguishes Him from every other being and is the source from which all His attributes may be deduced, as man's characteristics are deduced from the fact that he is a rational being." *

So when Steven of Flos Carmeli writes:

My answer to the question of "why was Scripture give to us, if not for us to engage in 'the monumental task of completely exploring scripture for the truth'?" is very simple. It was given to us to teach us to love.

I must answer, "Well, nuts, what is the truth but to love?" And not just to love, but to love with the true mad deep love that would sacrifice your only son for your beloved?

And when La Madre says, "We are not called to know much but to love much," I answer that she should look who's talking, Mother Doctor of the Church and articulator of the profound mysteries of union with God. God grant I know in eterninty as little as she did at Alba de Tormes.

Yes, the end of knowledge is love, but we cannot love what we do not know.

I think part of Steven's concern here is to caution me against confusing my personal interpretation of what Scripture says about God with God Himself. That's certainly a risk I run, but the reason I began this whole look at universal salvation was in response to what I believe to be others' confused personal interpretations of what Scripture says about God. I think Scripture teaches us more about God than some people think, and I think it teaches us different things about God than some people admit.

And yes, I do mean Scripture teaches us, with all the study and argument and fallible reasoning and disputation that implies. If we do it right, it will be primarily a matter of listening to God's conversation within us, but frankly if I'm going to run the risk of advancing my own confused personal interpretation, I'd much rather base it on Scripture than on what I feel in my heart.

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* This quotation appears immediately beneath the section heading "The Divine Simplicity" in Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange's Providence. "If that's God's simplicity...."

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A soul full of God and a body full of suffering

I just received an embarrassingly large shipment of books in the mail. My long-suffering wife asked whether it is part of the Dominican charism to buy books when so many remain unread, and I mumbled that in fact the saints of the Order caution against it. Then I slinked away to put the new books on the shelves where, like so many volumes of purloined letters, she won't much notice them.

If I ever do read the books, I will know ever so much more than I know now, and I will of course share this knowledge with you. (I have to share it with someone; my wife plugs up her ears and hums whenever I start preaching to her about the six daughters of prudence.)

As a teaser, let me quote from the introduction of Johann Tauler's Spiritual Conferences:

What then remains to the man formed after God's image? There remains to him a soul full of God and a body full of suffering.

I'd say we have much more control over how full of God our souls are than over how full of suffering our bodies are, and most of the little control over bodily suffering we have is such that the more we suffer the fuller our souls become with God. Despite that, and despite the fact that our bodily sufferings will one day end but our souls will always be full of God, we pay a great deal more attention to our suffering than to our God. Why is that?

Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

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