The numbers game

With general elections coming up next week in the U.S. (though not for Congress), American Catholics are revisiting their concerns over how to vote. I've already suggested we worry too much about voting and not enough about the rest of our civic duties, but for the sake of conversation consider this situation:

For a particular office, there are three candidates. Candidate A, belonging to Major Party X, has an Evil Position Rating of 80 (the higher, the more evil). Candidate B, belonging to Major Party Y, has an Evil Position Rating of 40. Candidate C, belonging to Minor Party Z, has an Evil Position Rating of 0. Suppose the polls show A and B divide the vote, with C getting a statistical goose egg.

There are those who would reason, "Since C cannot win, I'm throwing away my vote if I vote for C, and in fact taking a vote away from B, who isn't nearly so bad as A. So do I have a moral obligation to vote for B?"

I suppose the first question to ask is, "Does how I vote make any practical difference in who wins?" In which case, the first answer is, "No."

Suppose a poll accurately shows two candidate to be statistically even, each getting 50% of the vote with a margin of error of 1%. If there are 100 other voters, they will be split 49-51 (B wins), 50-50 (tie), or 51-49 (A wins). If you vote for B, you change the outcome in 1 of 3 cases -- pretty good leverage for a single vote.

If there are 1000 other voters, though, your vote for B gives B the election in 1 of 21 cases, or 4.76% of the time. With 10,000 other voters, it drops to less than 0.5% (1 of 201 cases).

Personally, I don't think odds as good as 20:1 against imply a moral necessity to vote for the lesser of two evils when a non-evil candidate is running. And of course, the odds get stiffer when either candidate has even a tiny edge or the margin of error is greater (as it always is). So unless there are significantly fewer than 1000 voters, I'd go with Candidate C every time.

More generally, "a vote for C is a vote for A" reasoning is fundamentally flawed. A vote for B-instead-of-C will look a lot like a vote for B to people who can't perceive your intentions from election results. You get more of what you reward; voting for B instead of C will get you, in public discourse, more of B's positions and less of C's. Why would anyone take C's positions seriously if even his supporters won't vote for him?

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My will for living

Peter Nixon puts it simply:

We need to be a community of "less than perfect" people who show how "less than perfect" lives can be sacramental.

I've told my wife that I have no objections at all to being a burden on her or on anyone else, but I may be in the minority on this. Almost everyone I've heard express an opinion has, in essence, recoiled in horror at the thought of being physically helpless. Very often, they say they would hate to lose their dignity by needing others to feed and bathe them.

But here's the thing: The dignity you can lose isn't much worth holding onto. True human dignity is part and parcel of true human nature. That cannot be lost; it can only be failed to be recognized. We, as Catholics, Christians, moderns, and human beings, can recognize this inalienable dignity in ourselves and in others if we choose to look for it.

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Well, I'm going to read it

A cloistered Dominican nun has written a novel about a cloistered Dominican nun: Amata Means Beloved

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In the end

All that said below, I return to the notion that medically assisted feeding is ultimately a prudential matter to be decided by the patient. I may not believe a particular treatment is burdensome for a particular patient, but in general I have no more right to decide that on the patient's behalf than I have the right to decide who someone else should marry.

If a patient determines that a particular treatment or care -- even assisted feeding -- is excessively burdensome, then, as long as he is not directly intending his own death, by any non-rigorist opinion he may refuse that treatment or care.

What changes in cases where the patient cannot make decisions about his care? I think this is right: Whoever is responsible for making the decisions ought to make them in accord with whatever is known about the patient's wishes (adjusted if necessary by correct moral principles; you can't choose evil on the patient's behalf simply because the patient would if he could). If the patient's wishes are not sufficiently known, the decisions ought to be made in favor of maintaining biological life.

I think it's important to note that the "excessively burdensome" criterion must be judged from the patient's perspective. There is a burden on the patient, a burden on the caregivers, and a burden on the family. The caregivers and the family may feel excessively burdened by caring for the patient, but it seems to me as I type this that what matters is whether the patient believes the caregivers and family are excessively burdened. If like me the patient has no objection to being a burden to others, I don't think those deciding on his care have the right to invoke the "excessive burden" principle on the others' behalf.

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My opinion on the opinions

Just to get this down in one vague but single piece, rather than having it drawn out in even worse fashion in the comments, let me react to the "three opinions," viz.,

The first opinion views AHN as ordinary care and morally obligatory. The second viewpoint contends that AHN is a medical treatment that should be offered unless it is physiologically futile or excessively burdensome. The third opinion states that AHN may be discontinued in the case of the patient in PVS primarily because it offers no benefit to the patient and secondarily because it may at times impose a grave burden.

Again: all this is in the context of a PVS patient who, by assumption, functions only at the biological level. If that assumption isn't true, then ... um ... there's not much point in this exercise, and you can go here for some good clean fun.

I've tried below to indicate why I'm unpersuaded by the first opinion.

I see the difference between the second and third opinions as primarily this: The second opinion regards the preservation of biological life to be a much greater good than the other goods at issue. The third opinion regards the preservation of biological life to be a good whose value is much closer to those of the other goods.

What to do in doubtful matters? In general, I'm inclined to take the safer approach if there is one, and to take the more probable approach if there is one. It seems to me that opinion 2 is both safer and more probable.

It's safer in the sense that it can be followed even if the Church doctrinally adopts opinion 3. These opinions, recall, only say whether AHN may be withdrawn; none require it. Opinion 2 is more probable, as far as I can tell, because it seems more in accord with the statements of bishops, episcopal conferences, Vatican congregations, and popes.

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Clean as you go

Let me straighten up my thoughts a bit before moving on.

Catholic moral teaching is unambiguous on the following points:

1. A person can never choose to die as the means to an end.
2. A person can never kill another person as the means to an end.
3. Decisions regarding medical care have, from a moral viewpoint, two compontents: the intent with which an action is taken, and the action in itself. Both intent and action in itself must be moral for the decision to perform the action to be moral.

We might also dust off the Principle of Double Effect:

An action that has a forseeable bad consequence may be taken if all of the following are true:

• The action is not immoral in itself.
• The bad consequence is not intended.
• The good consequence outweighs the bad consequence.
• The bad consequence is not the means of obtaining the good consequence.

So, how does a decision to withdrawal medically assisted hydration and nutrition -- or a decision against beginning it, which morally speaking is equivalent -- relate to all this?

What jumps out at me is the importance of intent. There is an argument against ever withdrawing AHN that claims the intent is necessarily to "starve the person to death." But that begs the question, because starving a person to death can never be morally intended. And, as a matter of empirical observation, people do have other intentions than starving a person to death.

I think it is also clear that Catholic moral teaching has never required food be given to all patients whether they want it or not. (See Neil Dhingra's comment below about the history of Catholic teaching on the general question of patient care.) From this, I conclude that forcing food into a patient is not a moral imperative.

But there's another point that needs to be made:

Catholic moral teaching is unambiguous that assisted feeding -- be it with spoons or tubes -- is morally necessary in almost all circumstances.

I think this point gets obscured when people start bringing up various medical scenarios as though, because they also require assisted feeding, they were morally equivalent to a case of PVS. "It's immoral to not nurse an infant, so it's immoral to not feed a PVS patient" is not a valid argument. The arguments that are actually being made in favor of the morality of withdrawing AHN in certain cases are based on circumstances that are not present in cases where all Catholics agree AHN is morally necessary.

According to O'Rourke and Norris, among the circumstances present in diagnosed permanent vegetative states are the following (emphasis added):

A person in PVS is still a human being, but functions only at the biological level... People in a permanent vegetative state have "sleep-wake" cycles meaning that their eyes are often open but they do not track on anything and have no meaningful response to stimulus. Grunts and groans may also be emitted, but they have no meaningful significance. Because of injury or dysfunction in the cerebral cortex (sometimes called the "higher brain"), the power to think, choose, love, and relate to others is lost. The function of eating is also lost due to a lack of coordination between chewing and swallowing even though gag, swallowing, and cough reflexes may be preserved and the functions of digesting and waste elimination are maintained. Bodily nutrition may be maintained through AHN. As far as medical research is able to discern, withdrawal of AHN from patients in PVS does not cause any change in pain level for the patient.

How much of this is true, and how much simply guesswork by medical researchers, I have absolutely no way of knowing, but there are claims made here about PVS that are not made about a lot of other medical conditions that require assisted feeding.

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Is AHN comfort care?

By "comfort care," I mean the sort of care that is always and everywhere, regardless of medical circumstances, to be given to whoever can't provide such care for himself. Bathing, watching out for bedsores, and adding or removing blankets are examples of normal care.

Assisted hydration and nutrition, as a form of feeding the patient, seems at first thought to be undoubtedly comfort care. You bring food to the bedside of someone too sick to get out of bed, you bring food to the mouth of someone unable to use his arms. So certainly you put food into the stomach of someone unable to swallow.

But AHN is not just a form of feeding. It is also a form of medical care. (I use the acronym from O'Rourke and Norris to mean "assisted hydration and nutrition," but the full term in the PLC document is "medically assisted hydration and nutrition.") Very limited anecdotal evidence suggests to me that, the more you know about medicine, the more you see AHN as "artificial," invasive, and potentially burdensome in a way utterly unlike spoon-feeding.

I think this fact -- for whatever it might be worth -- is easy to see if you imagine yourself caring for someone in your home. Most parents know how to care for a person with no bowel control. Few people could, on their own, do much about someone who cannot swallow. The helplessness of a healthy baby is simply not a good analogy to the helplessness of a PVS patient.

It's also true that such Church documents as have been issued, with such authority as they possess, do not seem to see AHN as morally-obligatory comfort care. The PLC document answers the question, "Is the withholding or withdrawing of medically assisted nutrition and hydration always a direct killing?" by denying both that it can never be a direct killing and that it is in all or most cases a direct killing. AHN, then, would be neither always necessary nor always optional. Various dioceses of the United States have followed the PLC document; the Archdiocese of New Orleans, for example, makes what I think is a useful distinction:

First, nutrition and hydration administered orally or through a peripheral vein should normally be considered as care rather than treatment. When, however, this brings no comfort to a person who is imminently dying or when it cannot be assimilated by the patient's body, even this need not be continued.

Secondly, nutrition and hydration via a nasogastric tube or a stomach tube are usually considered medical treatment since the necessitate a physician's involvement or surgery. When the benefits outweigh the burdens, these should ordinarily be used. When the burdens outweigh the benefits, these need not be initiated or continued.

This makes a great deal of sense to me. In fact, I think I can adopt it as it stands.

The next question is, what are the burdens and benefits of AHN, and how much do they weigh?

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The three opinions

"Care of PVS Patients: Catholic Opinion in the United States," by Kevin O'Rourke, O.P. and Patrick Norris, O.P., is a 2001 article that presents "three opinions held by people in the Catholic community in regard to the use of AHN [artificial hydration and nutrition; popularly, "feeding tubes"] for patients in PVS [persistent vegetative state]." Knowing no better, I will follow their division.

The three opinions, in my paraphrases, are:

1. Feeding a patient whose body can process the food is basic care, like bathing and keeping him comfortable. Therefore, feeding such a patient is always morally necessary. A feeding tube is no different, morally speaking, from a spoon as a means of delivering food to the patient. Withdrawing AHN amounts to euthanasia.
2. AHN is a form of medical care, and can therefore be withdrawn when it offers "no reasonable hope of sustaining life or pose excessive risks or burdens," to quote the U.S. Bishops Pro-Life Committee's "Nutrition and Hydration: Moral and Pastoral Reflections" 1992 document. In the case of a PVS patient whose body still processes food, AHN clearly offers reasonable hope of sustaining life, and so must not be withdrawn.
3. AHN is a form of medical care, and can therefore be withdrawn when it is "of limited usefulness to the patient or unreasonably burdensome for the patient and the patient's family or caregivers," to quote the same PLC document. Prolonging life in a permanent vegetative state is of limited usefulness to the patient, and so AHN may be withdrawn. (Although I've quoted it here, the PLC document comes down explicitly behind Opinion 2.)

We begin as always by looking at our terms. In this case, there are two that jump out at me: AHN and PVS. To know what they mean morally, we need to know what they mean medically, but even before that point, what do the initials stand for? Is AHN "artificial hydration and nutrition," as O'Rourke and Norris say, or "assisted hydration and nutrition," as the PLC would say? The O'Rourke and Norris paper refers to "a permanent unconscious condition, in medical terminology often called persistent vegetative state (PVS, although more precisely for our discussion: permanent vegetative state)." But surely "persistent" can be distinguished from "permanent"!

So out of the blocks, the terms we use are influencing the discussion (and I'm not even talking about terms like "murder" and "starving to death"). An action that is "assisted" has a somewhat different moral flavor than one that is "artificial," don't you think? "Persistent" is descriptive; "permanent" is prescriptive. Saying a vegetative state is "permanent" seems, to me, to beg a crucial medical question. If we aren't careful, we might wind up with a solution to a moral problem that no one actually faces, or at least improperly applying a very specific solution (for "permanent" cases) to more general circumstances ("persistent but not necessarily permanent" cases).

To move as carefully as possible, I think I will use "assisted" and "persistent" for now.

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If it really is mud, how do you clarify it?

The 1980 "Declaration on Euthanasia" from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith contains this remarkable passage (emphasis added):

Everyone has the duty to care for his or he own health or to seek such care from others. Those whose task it is to care for the sick must do so conscientiously and administer the remedies that seem necessary or useful. However, is it necessary in all circumstances to have recourse to all possible remedies? In the past, moralists replied that one is never obliged to use "extraordinary" means. This reply, which as a principle still holds good, is perhaps less clear today, by reason of the imprecision of the term and the rapid progress made in the treatment of sickness. Thus some people prefer to speak of "proportionate" and "disproportionate" means. In any case, it will be possible to make a correct judgment as to the means by studying the type of treatment to be used, its degree of complexity or risk, its cost and the possibilities of using it, and comparing these elements with the result that can be expected, taking into account the state of the sick person and his or her physical and moral resources.

So there we have it: a correct judgment about whether a particular means of care for a patient is necessary can always be made.

Thanks for clearing that up, your Eminence.

It seems to me, though, that one thing Catholic teaching makes entirely clear is that these decisions are, fundamentally, prudential ones. The Church can and does provide guiding principles, but it's up to individuals to apply them to concrete situations.

To want the Church to issue, in effect, a detailed algorithm for making medical decisions, where by answering a set of detailed medical questions you get the "right" answer in every case, is understandable. No one wants to do the wrong thing in matters of suffering and death. But such an algorithm seems incompatible with the reality that these matters force us, as moral agents, to act on our own authority and by our own judgments.

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Minority opinion

David Morrison expresses misgivings about the Terri Schiavo case.

I think, more precisely, he's expressing misgivings about the "feeding tube as morally required care" opinion expressed by many on Catholic blogs.

I find that the more I know about the specifics of this debate -- even granting that nearly all information comes from sources siding with the Schindlers -- the less it seems exemplary of end-of-life care questions in general.

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A home away from Rome

Camassia announces:

I decided to stop being an ecclesial nomad and pitch my tent at a Lutheran church.

News which should prompt all Catholics of good will to respond with the traditional saying, "Nishkosheh, nisht erger."

She asks for recommendations for good introductory readings on "Uncle Marty" Luther. The only introductory book I've read is Demon Monk of Wittenburg, by Dom Delirareus Controriformati (reprinted by was it TAN Books?), which I don't think is what she's looking for.

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Hard cases make good laws

Teresa of Calcutta had been beatified for just two days when the Florida legislature passed a bill to save Terri Schiavo's life and the U.S. Senate passed a bill banning partial-birth abortion. Talk about hitting the ground running.

I am delighted -- and a bit unnerved, as I always am when God seems to act without His usual subtlety -- by what has happened in Florida.

At the same time, though, it really isn't the business of the state to assign the right to make medical decisions for a patient to the governor in general. We're happy with this law because it has preserved a life that should be preserved. But "Life at all costs!" isn't Catholic teaching, and I think a lot of us would be unhappy with a law demanding our own loved one be kept alive by means that impose burdens without providing benefits.

Following the Terri Schiavo case has shown me that there are two questions we, as a Church and as a society, need to answer:

• How are "feeding tubes" to be understood morally?
• How is "persistent vegetative state" to be understood medically?

I think we need to know what PVS is medically -- if, in fact, it's anything at all beyond a term to cover medical ignorance -- before we can know how to respond to it morally. As it happens, I am completely dependent on the work of others about all such medical matters.

As for feeding tubes, despite the dogmatism sometimes expressed, the question is not yet settled. I've heard a lot of calls for the bishops to settle the question already, but I've also seen evidence that some of these calls are really for the bishops to agree with the caller already. How long do you suppose it would be between the time an authoritative "Declaration on the Use of Feeding Tubes" was issued, which provided precise and unambiguous guidelines for all cases, and the first time the statement, "The bishops are exceeding their spiritual authority by meddling in medical matters," was made?

I'm not right now sure of my provisional answer to the right moral understanding of feeding tubes. I should probably do something about that.

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A couple of links via Zenit

You know how, early in a movie, when the bad guy's right hand man leers at some innocent who's about to die unpleasantly, you just know the bad guy's right hand man is going to die about ten times more unpleasantly before the lights come up? I have to think that interfering with shipments of rosaries is the police state analog of a movie bad guy's right hand man's leer.

And the Poor Clares of Ireland have a new website, including a page titled "Prayer: Ideas for busy people." Take a look at their "Psalms to suit different moods." How blessed is he who has been given the Psalms to pray!

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Another temperamental dimension

Sometimes overlooked in the concentration on the alleged conservative/progressive dichotomy is the less-frequently-but-still-at-times-alleged authoritarian/libertarian dichotomy, which really is a way of saying to what degree a person submits to authority other than himself.

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Round-heeled comment seeking

An easy way to generate a lot of comments is to ask, "How do us feel about them?" Because either you're an us and have certain feelings about them, or you're a them and have certain feelings about us, or you're neither and have certain feelings about both, and the Internet makes no sense unless you understand how much of it has to do with the opportunity to express feelings.

If you're not a secular journalist, you know how inadequate labels like "conservative" and "progressive" are when referring to contemporary Catholicism. Yet they continue to be used because they're so darn convenient. I think this is because human temperament really does have an "attraction to novelty" dimension. A person has a certain temperamental inclination -- which expresses itself in habit -- regarding doing new things.

I'll anticipate an objection and say I don't think of this "novelty temperament" as binary ("you're either conservative or you're progressive"), but more of a vague scale or partial order ("I'm more conservative than him and more progressive than her").

Chesterton's famous formulation -- "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." -- suggests that neither a progressive nor a conservative temperament is, in itself, any great virtue. St. Paul's more famous formulation of the Church as a body with many parts suggests the Church can benefit from both temperaments.

Several things seem to happen when these temperaments go out into the world. First, many people self-identify as "progressive" or "conservative."

This reinforces opinion clustering -- people with similar temperaments arrive at similar opinions on disputed questions -- and that's what makes it useful (though less useful than many think) to speak of "Progressive Catholics" and "Conservative Catholics."

Another thing is temperaments often cross domains: it's not unusual for someone who is religiously progressive to be politically, socially, and economically progressive.

A result of all this, I think, is a devaluation of the progressive temperament among self-identified conservatives and of the conservative temperament among self-identified progressives. There's a lot of ad hominem reasoning -- "He has boneheaded ideas on tax policy. Therefore, he's a bonehead. Therefore, his ideas on church polity are boneheaded." -- and a lot of guilt by association -- "If I have no opinion about it, but he's for it, then I'm against it."

If you're playing a video game, then yes, you have to rely on reflexive actions. But if you're trying to arrive at the truth, or determine the prudent course, then such statements as "Progressives feel no need for rational or substantive arguments" or "Conservatives check their minds at the door of papal pronouncements" will not help you.

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Or not so great?

This is to provide a comment box for people who don't like Pope John Paul II and are ill-mannered enough to think a post commemorating the Pope's silver jubilee is just the place for them to say so.

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Where is everyone?

Domenico Bettinelli was asked a question I suspect a lot of us have asked ourselves:

Where are all the 'progressive' Catholic bloggers?

While there are a few "progressive Catholic blogs" on Gerard's list -- Ono's Thoughts and Jcecil3's Progressive Catholic Reflections come to mind -- it's certainly true that the predominant perspective among the Catholic blogs I'm familiar with is opposed to the sort of things the National Catholic Reporter considers progressive.

I'm not as quick as some of Domenico's commenters to explain the disparity by an appeal to the particular vices of progressive American Catholics, tempting as that may be.

I think the first consideration should be any self-selection bias. Surely there are factors, independent of religious perspective, that make someone more likely to blog. Imitation, I think, may be one of the most important. Most or all of the most influential Catholic blogs in March 2002, just before the St. Blog's boom, were "conservative," so most of the blogs inspired by them would be conservative as well.

That, of course, raises the question of why most or all of the most influential Catholic blogs in March 2002 were "conservative," and I suspect part of the answer is, "Rod Dreher." The influence NRO and The Corner had on the nascent St. Blog's might explain, not only the predominance of "conservatives" among Catholic bloggers, but also the predominance of political conservatives among Catholic bloggers. And the influence of NRO would take us back to September 11 and its aftermath, which met the Boston clergy scandals like sodium meeting air.

There's also the self-selection of readership. If most of the blog readers are "conservative" Catholics, "progressive" Catholic bloggers won't get many visitors and so are (arguably) less likely to keep blogging. (Althogh, speaking of self-selection, if they did continue blogging I would be less likely to notice or to care.)

Then there's the question of age. If (and I don't know that it's so) "progressive" Catholics tend to be older, then they will tend to be underrepresented on the Web, regardless of other factors.

Finally, as a category, "Progressive Catholics" tends to be used in a well-defined sense to mean "favoring such things as artificial birth control, optional celibacy, women priests, acceptance of active homosexuality, and abolition of the death penalty." If "Conservative Catholics" is a category defined to mean "Not Progressive Catholics," then St. Blog's is almost entirely composed of "Conservative Catholics," but beyond opposition to "Progressive Catholicism" there is among Catholic blogs, as in the Church as a whole, a much greater variety of viewpoint than is typically credited by the casual observer.

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An unforgivable paraphrase

No one likes being misquoted.

Here are the synoptic Gospels on the "unforgivable sin":

Matthew: "Therefore, I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but whoever speaks against the holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come."

Mark: "Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin."

Luke: "Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but the one who blasphemes against the holy Spirit will not be forgiven."

Notice a word none of the Evangelists uses? Like maybe "unforgivable"?

In comments on my post below, Rob wondered:

And if there is hope, then aren't all sins of that category just currently "unforgiven", rather than inexorably "unforgivable"?

And Kevin pointed out:

Might be worth noting that when Jesus speaks of this sin, it's in the context of his having been accused of casting out demons by the prince of demons....

All of which leads me to think that, CAUTION: AMATEUR THEOLOGY AHEAD! when Jesus said, "Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit ... is guilty of an everlasting sin," He wasn't speaking as our Teacher, but as a prophet. In other words, He was saying what will happen to the actual, specific persons who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, not what must, per se, be a consequence of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. (On this reading, the folks I quoted before explain why the sin is "everlasting," rather than literally "unforgivable.")

Meanwhile, Lynn beats me at my own game by quoting extensively from the Catena Aurea. To make things worse, I had looked at the Catena Aurea on Friday, without seeing anything I wanted to quote.

In reparation, I'll link to the Catena Aurea's chapter on Matthew 12, which has a few extended selections from St. Augustine, including a development on this idea:

The first benefit therefore of them that believe is forgiveness of sins in the Holy Spirit. Against this gift of free grace the impenitent heart speaks; impenitence itself therefore is the blasphemy against the Spirit which shall not be forgiven, neither in this world, nor in that to come.

There's also a point made by St. Gregory:

Hence we may gather that there are some sins that are remitted in this world, and some in the world to come; for what is denied of one sin, must be supposed to be admitted of others. And this may be believed in the case of trifling faults; such as much idle discourse, immoderate laughter, or the sin of carefulness in our worldly affairs, which indeed can hardly be managed without sin even by one who knows how he ought to avoid sin; or sins through ignorance (if they be lesser sins) which burden us even after death, if they have not been remitted to us while yet in this life. But it should be known that none will there obtain any purgation even of the least sin, but he who by good actions has merited the same in this life.

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"A corner office in the Kingdom of God"

That was a memorable phrase from my pastor's homily yesterday, in reference to the Apostle's expectations once Israel recognized their Master as the Messiah.

Nowadays, we seem to have more moderate expectations for ourselves: eternal and perfect beatitude, but not a particularly exalted beatitude, since after all we're good people but not holy or anything.


Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.

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On to Mark 3

Nobody likes an unforgivable sin.

Camassia, for example, writes:

Of all the sins out there, the unforgivable one is just something you say? I mean, religion doesn't have a first amendment, but this still seems like a very strange priority.

The idea that a sin is unforgivable also raises the scary possibility that once you do it, it doesn't matter what you do afterward, you're still doomed. As I understand it, the Catholic Church has resolved this by saying that you're doomed only if you die still in the sin; so long as you're alive, you can still be saved. That makes sense, although that caveat is rather conspicuously lacking in Mark's account.

The Catechism says of these words of Jesus:

There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit.

It refers to Pope John Paul II's Dominum et vivificantem, which includes a section dealing with "The Sin Against the Holy Spirit." The Pope writes:

Why is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit unforgivable? How should this blasphemy be understood ? St. Thomas Aquinas replies that it is a question of a sin that is "unforgivable by its very nature, insofar as it excludes the elements through which the forgiveness of sin takes place."

According to such an exegesis, "blasphemy" does not properly consist in offending against the Holy Spirit in words; it consists rather in the refusal to accept the salvation which God offers to man through the Holy Spirit, working through the power of the Cross. If man rejects the "convincing concerning sin" which comes from the Holy Spirit and which has the power to save, he also rejects the "coming" of the Counselor-that "coming" which was accomplished in the Paschal Mystery, in union with the redemptive power of Christ's Blood: the Blood which "purifies the conscience from dead works."

The idea of measuring sins by how easy they are to forgive, or how readily they are forgiven, and placing blasphemy against the Holy Spirit in the "impossible"/"never" range – of, more generally, understanding Jesus' statement to refer to God's attitude toward the sinner rather than the sinner's attitude toward God, seems to get things the wrong way round.

The Pope quotes St. Thomas in the middle of an analogy with disease:

[A] disease is said to be incurable in respect of the nature of the disease, which removes whatever might be a means of cure, as when it takes away the power of nature, or causes loathing for food and medicine, although God is able to cure such a disease. So too, the sin against the Holy Ghost is said to be unpardonable, by reason of its nature, in so far as it removes those things which are a means towards the pardon of sins.

A terminal disease is fatal, then, because if it weren't fatal it wouldn't be a terminal disease. Similarly, blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable because if it were forgiveable, it wouldn't be blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

St. Thomas, by the way, goes on to add a caveat rather conspicuously absent in Mark's account:

This does not, however, close the way of forgiveness and healing to an all-powerful and merciful God, Who, sometimes, by a miracle, so to speak, restores spiritual health to such men.

If you think of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit as a discrete act, that would sound like a contradiction. Thinking of it as a rejection of the "convincing concerning sin" which has the power to save, though, the caveat is more of a complement.

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A few public service links

For religion journalists everywhere.

And a question: When did "abortion" first get slipped in between "birth control" and "married priests" in the list of things that show how retrogressive the Pope is?

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Ya gotta believe

I'm not a big baseball fan -- being from Philly and living between Baltimore and Washington can do that to you. I've followed the MLB playoffs closely this week, though, and I'm struck by how religious so much of the reporting is. And not just religious, but medievally Catholic, with curses and exorcisms and everything. (There was even a sincere call for an actual exorcism, Catholic priest and all, at Wrigley Field.)

Professional football is my spectator sport of choice (despite being from Philly and living between Baltimore and Washington). My impression is that football is covered in more of a Norse pantheon way: occasionally this or that god might zap somebody or guide a ball into the right guy's hands at the right time, but by and large what happens is a matter of good or bad fortune. (Kurt Warner's alleged deal with the devil may be the exception that proves the rule.)

But there's something about baseball, at least in a week with two Game 7s, that brings out the Christian hierarchy of spiritual beings. The players, of course, are religious (and, I'd guess, more Catholic percentage-wise than in the NFL); even the Marlin's manager asks for St. Therese's help.

What's striking, though, is that the sports columns -- at least in Boston and Chicago -- are filled with religious references. Just now, I was looking for something I read a couple of days ago, and I see a Boston Globe article that begins:

The reward for all that fidelity will surely come in another life.

This is Red Sox fans as anawim, sports columnist as minor prophet.

One Chicago writer quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins -- from a poem first published in 1918, a significant year for several reasons -- after the Cubs lost game 6. And today there's a piece at ESPN.Com imagining God's conversation with the spirit in charge of overseeing baseball:

"Our compliments on your work. Downright diabolical, you little torturer."

"Well, I tried."

"Nonsense. You were brilliant. You know how much we value the Cubs and Red Sox and the way they make their fans believe in Us. You have no idea how often they have told Us they would stop drinking, whoring, coveting and generally screwing around if only We would grant them a World Series."

"True, Sir and/or Ma'am, but aren't they likely to keep their promises and become better people if their teams ever do win?"

"Of course not, you naïve little ball of plankton. The minute either one of them wins, they'll be standing naked on cab roofs, drinking bad beer out of a policeman's boot and swearing like the entire Russian navy on leave."

And when was the last time you saw a priest with a halo in a newspaper cartoon?

I'd be interested in a poll that compares answers to the questions, "Does God care whether you get married in a church?" and, "Does God care whether Pedro Martinez keeps his slider from hanging too high?"

Maybe the difference is that football has a season, and its name is Fall. Baseball's season is so long, it's more like a lifetime. (Each game seems to last a lifetime, too, which is one reason I'm not a big fan.) And a lifetime is time enough to learn to do good and avoid evil, to develop virtues... like hope. And when this lifetime ends, to look forward to the next.

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A silverplate triolet

Pope John Paul the Great.
What man better matched his time?
Asked for heroes, simply state,
"Pope John Paul the Great."
"Totus Tuus" his one gate,
Petrus now as in his prime,
Pope John Paul the Great:
What man better matched his time?

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My fifth secret of the Rosary

I don't know if anyone really bought my first secret, so this last one might fall flat as well, but the Rosary is a profoundly Marian devotion.

Yeah, I know: "No kidding."

But I mean something more than what is immediately obvious about the form of the prayer, and even more than what becomes obvious when you realize that to pray the Rosary is "to contemplate the face of Christ in union with, and at the school of, his Most Holy Mother."

I mean that, if you are devoted to the Rosary -- even merely committed to its regular recitation -- you are probably going to find yourself becoming Marian.

What does it mean to find yourself becoming Marian? In my case, I have in mind two major changes.

The first is the development of a personal, filial relationship with Mamma Mary, in place of the more impersonal, political relationship with the Queen of Heaven. Invoking and honoring Mary makes a great deal of practical sense, considering that never was it known that anyone who fled to her protection, implored her help, or sought her intercession was left unaided. But as you come to see her as your spiritual mother, given to you at Calvary, you find yourself turning to her simply because children turn to their mother when they need help. The personal relationship with Jesus the importance of which evangelical Protestantism reminds us of is reflected in -- strengthens and is strengthened by -- the personal relationship with His mother.

The second change, following on the first, is acting like a child of Mary in public. You join in others' praise of her, you feel brotherly toward those who consider themselves her children, you defend her from others' attacks. Marian dogmas become personal matters, in a way that, say, the question of St. Peter's arrival in Rome does not. When the goofball associate pastor makes a passing reference to his devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, you immediately and unreservedly forgive all his homiletic invocations of his hometown baseball team.

And the thing is, these changes are in no way intentional. They just happen. I firmly believe that, given the slightest opportunity, Mary is able (by God's grace and through His will) to make a place in your heart for herself, and therefore her Son, just as she did in Galilee and, later, at the foot of the Cross.

Her message, as always, is, "Do whatever He tells you." And He tells us, "Behold your mother."

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

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Ordered thoughts on detachment

A thought from St. Augustine:

For when you consider things beneath your53self to be admirable and desirable, what is this but to be cheated and misled by unreal goods? The man, then, who is temperate in such mortal and transient things has his rule of life confirmed by both Testaments, that he should love none of these things, nor think them desirable for their own sakes, but should use them as far as is required for the purposes and duties of life, with the moderation of an employer instead of the ardor of a lover.

A thought from St. Thomas:

Now the attachment of man's affections to earthly things is not only an obstacle to the perfection of charity, but sometimes leads to the loss of charity, when through turning inordinately to temporal goods man turns away from the immutable good by sinning mortally.

A thought from St. Teresa:

[I]f anybody is attached to any one thing, that is a proof 317 that he sets some value upon it; and if he sets any value upon it, it is painful to be compelled to give it up. In that case, everything is imperfect and lost. The saying is to the purpose here,--he who follows what is lost, is lost himself; and what greater loss, what greater blindness, what greater calamity, can there be than making much of that which is nothing!

A thought from Fr. Thomas Dubay, SM, via the Anchorhold:

It may be easier to see the point by explaining what attachment is in the pejorative sense. A handy and accurate definition is: a clinging or desiring of the will to do something created for its own sake.

There are three elements here: It is a willed desire, not a mere feeling; it concerns something finite, not God; "for its own sake" makes a mere means into an end, that is, something of an idol.

St. Paul puts the matter positively in 1 Corinthians 10:31: "Whether you eat or drink or do anything else, do all for the glory of God." All created goodness and beauty is meant to bring others and us to the unspeakable enthrallment of the beatific vision in risen body. To willingly cling to anything merely created for its own sake reminds me of Dostoyevsky's analysis: It is either idolatry or it tends in that direction.

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My fourth secret of the Rosary

I've mentioned this before, so even I can't pretend it's much of a secret, but the Rosary is an extraordinarily human prayer. By that, I mean the Rosary is extremely well-matched to the kind of being a human is.

It's a stock observation, when discussing the Rosary, that prayer beads are found in many different cultures and religions. I have my doubts about how similar the Rosary really is to the prayers Hindus count on their malas (despite "mala" meaning "rose" or "garland"), but I think the use of beads as a way of measuring prayers reflects the fact that we are creatures with both physical and spiritual existence.

The use of a rosary while praying the Rosary isn't necessary, of course, but it does get our bodies involved in our meditation and prayer. The same is true of vocal recitation; in my experience it's possible to pray the Rosary silently, but not satisfying, since getting the meditation and the silent "recitation" to happen in my mind at the same time is very difficult.

Posture and visual cues also add to the richness of the physical dimension of the Rosary, without interfering with its spiritual dimension.

A common analogy is that the vocal prayers compose the "body" of the Rosary, while the meditations compose its "soul." Certainly the prayers (along with counting them, and expressing them physically by kneeling, standing, or bowing) relate the Rosary to our bodies, while the meditations occupy our souls. But there's more to the humanness of the Rosary than the way it recognizes, and teaches, that man is body and soul.

The Rosary has been evolving ever since Our Lady's Psalter of 150 Aves (ending, as you probably know, with the words "blessed is the fruit of thy womb") was introduced a millenium ago. In its earliest form, there was no explicit "soul" to the devotion; it was a repetition, not even of prayers, strictly speaking, but of salutations. It may have been the "poor man's Psalter"; it was certainly a poor psalter.

Over time, meditations were attached to the prayers, one for each Ave. This is fine, but impractical for those with imperfect memory or without written lists of meditations. The Rosary would have died out outside of monasteries if it required prayerbooks for secular layfolk to pray it. The brilliance of the fifteen mysteries across fifteen decades is that it made it possible for nearly every Catholic alive to learn how to pray the Rosary, and then to actually pray it.

Furthermore, by giving the reciter three to five minutes to meditate on each mystery, the Rosary works in a naturally human way. A decade is neither too brief nor too long a time for such meditation. It allows a person to call the mystery fully to mind, to think on it or perhaps simply contemplate it, so that the mystery can subtly conform the person's soul to Christ -- and subtly conformity seems to be the natural human rule, with road-to-Damascus moments much rarer -- and then to move on, before the mind tires or the mystery gets too stale.

The rhythm of the mysteries -- from joy to sorrow to glory -- is also very human, as you'd expect of a meditation on the life, death, and resurrection of the One Perfect human. (I don't mean to slight the Luminous Mysteries here, I'm just thinking more in terms of the Rosary as it's been adapted through the centuries, and the new mysteries are quite new.)

And while I'm talking about how well the Rosary conforms to human nature, I should point out how well it conforms to the grace which perfects human nature. Joy and sorrow (and, for that matter, illumination) are constants of [fallen] human nature. Our Christian faith, though, teaches us that our end is not sorrow, nor illumination (as some philosophies more or less hold), nor even joy (as some uncareful Christians think), but glory. Moreover, glory isn't merely our eventual end; glory is ours today. The Kingdom of God is here, among us, even as we journey toward it. By praying the Rosary through to the end, we not only prepare ourselves for the glory that awaits us, but conform ourselves to the glory that is ours today. Our bodies have not yet been glorified, we have not yet been given our paper hats at the Bridegroom's banquet, but Christ's Resurrection and Ascension, His mother's Assumption and Coronation, are not simply pledges of future glory, but also signs of present glory.

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

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Happy Feast of St. Teresa of Jesus!

Stop by today for a little celebration.

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A couple of links

Every now and then, I remember that this site is a weblog, which is a regularly updated page containing links to other sites of interest.

You may have seen this page.

You may not have seen this page.

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Assumption discussion, cont.

The Assumption assumptions discussion is continued at Minute Particulars. Mark writes a bunch of sensible stuff, concluding:

And so, again, I find the suggestion that Mary died prior to her assumption a bit problematic... It suggests that Mary, a human being who was without sin and who had been preserved from the stain of original sin, a person who had not assumed any defects of human nature that resulted from original sin (as Christ did, though without committing sin as Aquinas discusses above), still ought to be subject to death. Why?

In my opinion, characterizing the dormition of Our Lady as a "suggestion" does grave disservice to the importance of historical witness in the Church as a whole, as well as the dogma of the Assumption in particular. And so, again, I see the sort of arguments Mark advances as a case where, when given a choice between theory and fact, we discard the fact and keep our theory.

I think Mark's theory-centric question -- "Why ought Mary be subject to death?" -- comes at the issue from the wrong angle. Oughts are very difficult to establish when you're discussing graces, especially graces that are unique privileges.

A question that better expresses the fact of historical belief is, "Why would it have been fitting for Mary to die?" Here we can offer the standard answers, along the lines of Mary following in Jesus' footsteps. Such answers may not be convincing to some -- "Still, wouldn't it have been more fitting for her not to die?" -- but I think a grounding in historical assertion is stronger than one in theological speculation.

Mark finishes (practically speaking) with this point:

It just doesn't seem fitting that she suffer the greatest privation we encounter in this life, a privation that is the result of sin. It seems to dissolve somewhat the connection between sin and death and fracture the integrity of human nature unstained by sin. And, finally, by obliquely suggesting that death is a necessity of our human nature, it fails to face squarely the horrible death that Christ freely chose and that was integral to the saving act of a crucified God.

I have a feeling the Eastern "environmental" understanding of original sin would help address these concerns. The Blessed Virgin may be free from all stain of original sin, but the world she lived in was not. Did she need to eat? Did she stop ageing? Did she, a peasant woman of First Century Palestine, experience no lesser privation before completing the course of her earthly life? How did she relate, human to human, with the fallen people around her?

I do want to be as deferential as possible toward the traditional understanding of the Fall and its effects on human nature. At the same time, Mary is unique, and we can only extend prelapsarian human nature into a postlapsarian world in a very doubtful and speculative way. Moreover, we can still accept that Mary need not have died yet died anyway.

The larger question, as I've said before, is reconciling East and West on all matters touching on Original Sin, not by constructing a single composite understanding, nor by discarding one wholesale, but by invigorating and informing each by the other.

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Three in One

Camassia (Greek for "one who asks questions we'd better be able to answer") writes:

I've been having a lot of problems with the idea of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, and not just because of the problem of evil. So it makes me wonder: why do Christians insist on this point?

... What has triple-omni really brought to Christianity, except torturous metaphysics and a lot of Calvinist/Arminian/whatever factionalism?

Personally, I'd be satisfied with the answer, "Because it's true," but I suspect the more important point is, "Because it's revealed."

Scripture is full of claims that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. If these claims are false, Christianity has a much bigger problem than factionalism.

There's more to the "triple-omni" than a fact of revelation, of course. I've read a little about and by Christians who choose to drop one or more of these attributes from their understanding of God. Often they do this to resolve some immediate problem -- such as the problem of evil -- without thinking through the implications to see the brand new problems their decisions cause. You want really tortuous metaphysics, try a creation by a god who's making it up as he goes along.

Camassia makes one of my favorite points for me:

And to be perfectly honest, I don't think a lot of Christians I know really have that image of God [as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent] in their minds. They will say he's omnipotent if you ask, but move on to other matters and they'll depict a God who sounds really human.

Some evangelical atheists sneer at "imaginary sky gods," but such errors are easy to make when confronted by Christians whose faith is, essentially, in a Really Big Invisible Human. Language is a lousy way to communicate -- maybe that's why the angels simply sing, "Hosana!" -- and faithful Christians need to understand the limitations and analogies inherent in any language we use to communicate ideas of God to each other.

We might start, for example, by observing that when we say "God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent," what we really mean is God is not limited in power, knowledge, or love. This may be the easiest way of avoiding the kind of error that imagines some sort of love or knowledge not in or from God without noticing that sort of love or knowledge is logically impossible (see "Can God create a square circle?").

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My third secret of the Rosary

Perhaps the most surprising and enheartening thing I've learned about it is that you can't finish praying the Rosary.

Sure, the pamphlets all imply the Rosary can be finished. After all, it comprises a finite number of vocally recited prayers, and even if you break it up into five-decade batches you can recite the whole thing over the course of a few days. An hour and a half tops, all told.

But that isn't how the Rosary really works.

I'd guess most of us know people -- and many of us are people -- who say, "I tried the Rosary, and never got anything out of it." In fact, they might feel a net loss, with frustration at wandering thoughts and a sense of failure to "pray well" outweighing any benefits received.

Their mistake is to think that, having gone through all fifteen decades (assuming they last tried the Rosary more than a year ago), they were finished. If, though, the Rosary is a meditation on the Gospel, a self-evangelization, why would they think they were finished?

No: the power of the Rosary lies not in its form but in its constancy. Its chief repetition is not in the Aves, but in meditating on each of the mysteries twice a week for the rest of your life. That is how it forms the devotee in the life of Christ from the perspective of the Blessed Virgin.

Of course praying five decades won't be very satisfying, especially if you sit in with the little old ladies speed-reciting after daily Mass. Who can conform his soul to Jesus in twenty minutes? But if you enter into the rhythym of the Rosary, day after day and week after week, the rhythym of the Rosary can enter into you, and by golly you just might get somewhere with it.

The first corollary of this secret is, "Don't worry about a distracted decade." If you get all the way through to the big bead without a coherent thought on the Visitation, so be it. I wouldn't say it's a positive good, but there's always Saturday, and next Monday, and next Saturday. The habit of the Rosary means that, two or three times a week, there will be a four-minute interval during which something wonderful may happen in your heart or your mind regarding each mystery. If nothing wonderful happens today, nothing wonderful happens today. Or are you on a fixed Return On Investment schedule?

Another corollary is, "The Rosary is a big commitment." It doesn't have to be, of course. You can dust off your beads for the occasional holy hour, relying on someone else to know which mystery comes next, and still get into heaven. You might even find the occasional five decades fruitful. But I think to really get the Rosary, to understand why there are so many books so gushing over it, you need to make it a daily habit. To be devoted to it, even if you aren't a leaving-literature-in-the-pews, "Have You Prayed the Rosary for Peace?"-bumper-sticker devotee.

That's not to say every temperament is or ought to be Rosarian. I never cared for commentary implying there is some lack or fault in a person who cannot stand to pray the Rosary. If someone has tried the Rosary and found it not to his liking, or even if he has never been interested enough to try it, that's fine by me. My only point would be that, possibly, he was asking too much too soon of himself or of the Rosary.

I am slightly more doubtful about certain claims to have outgrown the Rosary -- that is, to be spiritually advanced beyond the need for words and ideas (as opposed to being spiritually situated such that other forms of prayer are more fruitful) -- but then the spiritual life is richer and more diverse than I imagine it to be.

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

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The Family that prays together

Many committees with the words "Dominican," "Peace," and "Justice" in their names have a tendency to generate documents that don't mention there was neither peace nor justice in Iraq prior to 1991. These pages give a good flavor of what Dominican Peace and Justice committees have been saying about the war.

As someone with doubts about the morality of the wars and sanctions against Iraq, I find this instance of historical blindness inexcusable, and I take the committees and their documents far less seriously than the subjects of peace and justice deserve.

A report of a recent letter from fr. Jean-Jacques Pérennès, OP, Vicar provincial of the Dominicans in the Arab countries, offers a much more balanced view of the current situation. After visiting Iraq with his provincial, Fr. Pérennès wrote:

Anyone can enter the country without visa since nobody checks who you are, and then nobody will protect you... These [U.S.] soldiers are not able to move easily in the country, and so, the reconstruction of Iraq seems to be left for the future... Because they really don't seem to be in control of the situation, I do think that now, other countries should accept to be involved in the reconstruction of Iraq, with a clear mandate of the UN, of course...

[It is important to note] the Iraqis are happy with their new freedom (150 daily newspapers now in Iraq, satellite antennas every where on the roofs - this was forbidden in Saddam's time), but they are very concerned about the insecurity, and one can understand it, given the violence which is going on (attacks of the UN building, on the Najaf mosque, etc). Also, this situation evidently doesn't help to give jobs to people. The black-market is flourishing; many devices are now being imported without any control at the borders. How can you rule a country like that?

A lot of U.S.-based discussions about Iraq take place at a theoretical or abstract level. Democracy. Baathism. Timetables. $87 billion. But nobody's life is lived at a theoretical level.

One of the Dominican mottoes is Veritas, and part of St. Thomas's legacy is the recognition of the relationship between the lesser truths of creation and the Truth Who Is. Seeing clearly what is -- before what should be, or what we want to be, or what we are afraid might be -- is essential to a successful Dominican apostolate. May the professional committee members and position paper writers -- and, for that matter, the vicars provincial and the lay bloggers -- see clearly what is.

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My second secret of the Rosary

You may have noticed that this whole "my secrets of the Rosary" business is just a cheap gimmick to dress up some commonplace observations in profundity suited for the Month of the Holy Rosary. A more accurate description would be "some things about the Rosary I didn't learn when I was eleven."

That said, my second secret of the Rosary, which may come as a surprise to the millions of people who have prayed the Rosary longer and better than I, is that the Rosary isn't a prayer.

(Okay, so yesterday I quoted the Pope writing that the Rosary "is at heart a Christocentric prayer." Obviously, then, saying the Rosary isn't a prayer is another cheap gimmick. But bear with me.)

If the Rosary isn't a prayer, what is it? It's a meditation on the Gospel. Not the "Gospel as a literary form" but the "Gospel as the Good News of Jesus Christ." When you "pray" the Rosary -- the standard Joyful/Luminous/Sorrowful/Glorious Rosary, at least, which isn't the last word in praying the Rosary -- you are calling to mind the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, framed by the experiences of His blessed mother.

I've heard a common criticism of the Rosary is that it is "vain repetition." But what really gets repeated is not the words of the Ave so much as the thoughts of the Nativity and the Scourging and the Ascension and so forth. I doubt many of the fiercest Bible-only fundamentalists would consider repeatedly calling to mind Jesus' life, death, and resurrection a vain endeavor.

If the Rosary isn't a prayer, why do we speak of praying the Rosary? Because many or most people do pray while reciting the vocal prayers of the Rosary. You can be aware of the meaning of the words you are saying, you can even pray the words you are saying -- and indeed, with such things as the Fatima Prayer there's little point in saying them if you aren't praying them.

The Rosary is in a way a variation on the four-step lectio divina, where the reading (step 1) is usually (though not always) from memory, and the meditation (step 2) and the prayer (step 3) usually (though not always) occur in a more structured order (e.g., I might plan on praying the Our Father and the first Hail Mary, meditate while reciting the next nine Hail Marys, then pray the Gloria and the Fatima Prayer). (The fourth step, contemplation, comes when it comes with the Rosary as with lectio divina.)

And what about "praying the Rosary for peace"? How do you meditate for an intention? Well, as I mentioned people do pray while reciting the Rosary; those prayers can be offered for some intention. But I think that, in addition, the act of reciting the Rosary -- which, after all, is indulgenced -- can be a votive act. It's a sacrifice (sometimes joyful, sometimes not) of time and effort, and that can always be offered to God for a specific intention.

One of the major points of this secret, though, is to remind myself not to assume that "praying the Rosary" meets my recommended daily allowance of prayer. It's not -- for me, at least -- twenty minutes of conversation with God. My "best" Rosaries give me some new insight into a mystery that hadn't yielded any new insights for a long time, but an insight isn't love. Once Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are called to mind, it's time to speak with Him about them, not just put away the beads until tomorrow.

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

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My daily heresy

I'm thinking the act of voting is the least important act a Catholic can perform as a citizen. To put it another way, the importance of casting a vote is inversely proportional to the hand-wringing done over how to decide whom to vote for.

This, I'm told, is unthinkable by any decent American. Don't I know how many people have fought and died for my right to cast a vote for the people I want to represent me?

But consider:

Every election cycle, American Catholics like me start worrying about how to vote. We try to construct a heuristic guide:

1. If no candidate is opposed to all legalized abortion, go to step 4.
2. If one candidate is opposed to all legalized abortion, go to step 9.
3. If more than one candidate is opposed to all legalized abortion, go to step 17.
4. ...

Some Catholics live in districts where they can automatically start at Step 4. Others see voting a straight anti-abortion ticket as folly -- and not without reason; the major policy initiative of the only pro-life candidate on the ballot to represent me in the House of Representatives last election was to make the secret UFO technology the government was hiding available to the public.

In any case, a lot of us spend a lot of time essentially trying to construct -- or wishing our bishops or the Vatican would give us -- a manual of moral voting.

But you know what? I get one vote. So does everyone else. I have never been in an election for public office in which my vote determined the winner. And where I now live, the people I vote for rarely win at all.

So all of my "o is this material cooperation in evil" whinging is utterly disproportionate to the actual, observable effect of my vote -- which is at most to increment a handful of numbers by less than 0.05%, and often a couple of orders of magnitude less than that.

Meanwhile, letters go unwritten, politicians go unmet, rallies go unorganized, procedures go unreformed, governments go unpersuaded, political parties go unfounded, petitions go unsigned.

Voting is the lazy man's measure of citizenship. We're called to more, and people like me who spend all their political energy worrying about how to vote aren't answering the call.

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Who then can be saved?

The story of the rich young man is coming up in this Sunday's Gospel reading.

Fr. Jude Siciliano, O.P., has a take on the young man's wealth I don't think I've heard before. The canonical homily teaches that there's something about worldly riches that so fill up a man it is impossible for him to be filled with God, which is necessary for salvation.

Fr. Siciliano mentions what we know of the common attitudes of Jesus' day (not so different from our own, if more frankly expressed back then):

Riches were considered a reward from God for good behavior. They were looked upon as a concrete sign that the one who owned much must be doing something right in their lives...

In addition, remember that Jesus is talking to disciples who were themselves poor and had left what little they had to follow him. If one were poor, in their way of thinking, then that person must have done something wrong, or not enough good things in their life to deserve good fortune from God. If they were poor, they were suffering the consequences of being lazy or having broken the commandments, or of being born to sinful parents... Thus, they had little "proof" they were blessed or favored by God since they had no material signs of that favor in this life.

When His disciples asked, "Who then can be saved?" they didn't mean, "Who is so poor as to be able to fit through that needle's eye?" People that poor were common enough. They were trying to work out how what Jesus said about the rich fit in with their understanding of the sinfulness of the poor. Jesus' answer -- "With God, all things are possible" -- wasn't just an explanation of how the rich (who, suddenly, were no longer guaranteed to be favored by God) could be saved, but of how the poor, too (who, suddenly, were no longer guaranteed to be out of His favor), could be.

This have some very unsettling implications for us today. I've been understanding this story as carrying the moral that I must not let material goods come between me and God. That's true, but it isn't the whole story. For the rich young man, his material goods weren't things that interefered with his love of God, they were proof of God's love for him. Jesus wasn't merely telling him to abandon physical comfort, He was telling him to abandon the spiritual comfort he had always drawn from his wealth.

If you wish to be perfect, Jesus is telling us, let go of everything that isn't Me, including the consolations and blessings you regard as proof of My love. It may be wealth, it may be a sense of accomplishment after a well-prayed Mass, it may be a feeling of closeness to Me. Then come, follow Me to the Cross, and beyond, to the place prepared for you by My Father.

Fortunately, such a radical emptying isn't demanded of all of us today. Just those who wish to be perfect.

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My first secret of the Rosary

I have a list of five secrets of the Rosary. They aren't what you'd call profound or mystical secrets. I think of them more as corrections to errors people have about the Rosary.

The first secret is the Rosary isn't particularly Marian.

One reason for not praying the Rosary is that it has all those Hail Marys and the pamphlets on how to pray it always have pictures of doe-eyed Mary statues on the front, and a lot of people simply aren't into Mary enough to find the Rosary appealing.

But if you actually pray the Rosary, you find that Mary isn't as central as she appears from the pamphlets. Starting from the first mystery, the Annunciation, she moves steadily off-stage, so to speak -- or up-stage is probably better -- until, following the Miracle at Cana, she is all but out of sight until, at the Third Glorious Mystery, she is filled with the Holy Spirit, then completes her role as the disciple par excellence in her Annunciation and Coronation. Throughout the Rosary, she is seen as receptive to the actions of God and responsive to her Son. You could say (if you weren't being too picky) that, in the Rosary, the drama of our faith is presented as a two-person play, with Jesus as the major character and Mary as the supporting character who frames, and thereby emphasizes, the actions of Jesus.

In short, to quote Rosarium Virginis Mariae, "The Rosary, though clearly Marian in character, is at heart a Christocentric prayer. In the sobriety of its elements, it has all the depth of the Gospel message in its entirety, of which it can be said to be a compendium."

Praying the Rosary, then, is not fundamentally an act of Marian piety, but of evangelizing yourself.

Labels: My Secrets of the Rosary

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And when it comes say, "Welcome friend."

Just as a compress stops the bleeding, but does not heal the wound, so too the theology of the Baroque period kept the faithful from spilling into the errors of the day, but it did not heal the wounds caused by nominalism, voluntarism, and the rationalism of the early Enlightenment. For this reason, just as a bandage must be removed before the wound can fully heal, so too the perspective of the manuals had to be set aside before the wounds in moral theology could be healed.

If that doesn't make you want to read "Four Challenges for Moral Theology in the New Century," by Michael S. Sherwin, O.P., I don't know what will.

(The four challenges, by the way, are reintegrating moral theology back into the whole of theology; developing a new philosophy of nature and philosophical anthropology as a theological foundation for reflecting on the effect of God's love on human nature; renewing our understanding of growing, by grace, in relationship with Christ; and living a life that expresses the spirituality required of a moral theologian.)

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Reflexive errors

Here is my hypothesis for the day: "A is like B, and B is C, so A is C" is a very common error.

I even have a theory for one way this error propagates: Professional commentators are under deadline to generate a certain number of words per week or month. A technique that helps them meet their deadlines is to master the "B is C" argument, then keep an eye out for some A that is like B, then generate an "A is C" piece. Consumers of the work of professional commentators pick up this habit, and practice it in private or informal conversations.

A related situation is the argument, "A is like B, and B is C, so B is C." A professional commentator who uses this is a goldbricker. An amateur who uses it is a bore.

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Corrupting influences

A final point on the Minute Particulars post. Mark writes:

The dispute is not about whether Christ died, versions of most creeds through the centuries squelch any such notions, but about whether his body corrupted at his death. This is important because it must be the same Christ who suffered, died, was buried, and rose. If Christ’s body corrupted then it would not be Christ in the tomb prior to the Resurrection, but decomposed matter....

Aquinas acknowledges this problem and explains in ST 3, 51, 3 that “Divine Power” prevented the corruption of Christ’s body. And elsewhere, in his Commentary on the Sentences, he explains that it is because of this divine intervention that it is accurate to say that it is the same Christ who suffered, died, was buried, and rose again.

This is a very subtle point.

After St. Paul died, his body was buried. One day, his soul will be reunited with that body, which will be glorified. It will be the same soul and the same body, hence the same Paul of Tarsus who once preached the Crucified Christ to anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn't).

I think St. Thomas's concern is how we can say "Christ was buried" when, strictly speaking, we can't say "Paul was buried," because Paul's body isn't Paul. If that isn't his concern, I'm not sure what is.

Still, he makes a curious claim in that Summa article:

Christ's body was a subject of corruption according to the condition of its passible nature, but not as to the deserving cause of putrefaction, which is sin....

If so, Christ's mother's body would also be a subject of corruption according to its passible nature but not according to the deserving cause of putrefaction. (Which leads us back to the problem of St. John the Baptist's relics, as according to tradition he was freed from original sin at the Visitation.)

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It matters

As a follow-up, let me say that the question of whether Mary died is not a hermetically closed academic matter, like, "Were any of the Apostles left handed?"

If Mary did not die, then we need to deal with the fact that the historical basis on which the definition of the dogma of the Assumption was made was wrong, and with the fact that the Eastern Churches (and many in the Roman Catholic Church) continue to be wrong. Practically speaking, reunion with the Orthodox would be impossible.

And if Mary did die, then we need to adjust our theological understanding of original sin to account for that. If we have a wrong understanding of original sin, we have a wrong understanding of anthropology, which can lead to all sorts of errors all over the place.

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More on the Dormition

There is a line of reasoning popular in the Roman Catholic Church that runs like this: "Death entered the world through Adam's sin. But the Blessed Virgin was free from all stain of original sin from the moment of her conception. Therefore, she did not die prior to her assumption into heaven."

I've written about this before (check the August 2002 archives, if you'd like), but I think Mark of Minute Particulars misses the point when he writes:

Death is unnatural. It entered the world when humans turned from God. To insist that Mary undergoes death seems, to my mind, to undermine this important point and attenuate the significance of Mary’s life and her perfect response to God.

The question of whether Mary died before her Assumption is not a matter of competing theological arguments. To insist she did not undergo death is a theological argument; to say she did is simply to state the belief of the universal Church for more than a millenium.

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception -- and in particular to its definition in Ineffabilis Deus -- may seem to some to imply as a logical necessity that Mary would not die; to Mark, it implies her death would be an "extra" and "unnecessary requirement." Those implications, however, do not seem to have been drawn by the Church as a whole.

To pick two examples: Pope Pius XII approvingly quoted ancient liturgies referring explicitly to Mary's death in Munificentissimus Deus; Eastern Churches in union with the Roman Catholic Church, all of which accept the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, continue to celebrate the Feast of the Dormition of Mary. (I've encountered the claim that "dormition" means "sleep" rather than "death," but that's a feeble semantic argument that evaporates upon the slightest inspection.)

I wonder, too, what it would mean that the Blessed Virgin "completed the course of her earthly life" if, due to her preservation free from all stain of original sin, she were immortal. I need to read up on this, but I don't think anyone believed that had Adam not sinned, he would have completed the course of his earthly life and been assumed into heaven. So there's more going on than Mary being in a prelapsarian state.

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Fly, Eagles, Fly!

Wait a minute. I thought McNabb was Irish!

It's hard for me to abstract a principle from the Rush Limbaugh/Donovan McNabb brouhaha. For one thing, I'm an Eagles fan. For another, I don't much like the word "brouhaha." But let me try:

There are a lot of commenters on Catholic blogs who like Limbaugh and don't much care for, or about, McNabb. These people, understandably enough, tend to support Limbaugh.

What bothers me -- apart from the stupid (and occasionally offensive) things said about McNabb, but then I'm an Eagles fan -- is the unthinking reflexivity of the support.

Mark Shea likes to say that people get in trouble when they "fail to observe the pieties" of the liberal media. Maybe so, and maybe failing to observe liberal pieties isn't a good reason to get in trouble with the media.

But it doesn't follow, contrary to what I infer many believe, that an act that fails to observe the liberal pieties is a good act. For that matter, not every liberal piety is a bad thing. "Anything that makes those liberals mad is good" is bad.

The thing about reflexes, whether physical or mental, is that they are reflexive. They occur without thought; "instinctively" is how it's often (and inaccurately) put. What occurs without thought isn't fully human, because what makes an act human is its rational basis, its intentionality.

Responding reflexively is great if you're playing football. (Being able to throw a touch pass from a five-step drop would be nice, too.) But a reflexive response in a cultural, social, political, or religious discussion is one that not only brings nothing new to the discussion, but also lacks the integrity of the full human person making the response.

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Personal vocations

Germain Grisez, in a Zenit interview regarding his co-written book Personal Vocation: God Calls Everyone by Name:

We argue that there is no shortage of vocations -- the shortage, if you will, is a shortage of vocational discernment.

I think what Grisez talks about in the interview is among the most important challenges facing the Church today: to get Catholics to become disciples:

We define personal vocation as God's call and plan for one's entire life... Personal vocation is unique for each one, and it includes absolutely everything -- all the good choices God would prefer one to make, all the things he allows to come one's way and expects will be handled rightly...

Finding, accepting and faithfully fulfilling one's personal vocation is the way to respond to the universal call to holiness, for that means doing God's will in everything and accepting whatever comes as coming from, or at least permitted by, him....

It might help if I spelled out the three different but complementary senses in which the word "vocation" is used in the Church.

First, there is vocation in the sense of the common Christian vocation that comes with baptism...

Second, there is vocation in the sense of state in life. The clerical state, the consecrated life, the state of marriage, the single lay life in the world -- these are state-in-life vocations...

Third, there is vocation in the sense of personal vocation. This concretizes the common baptismal vocation and a Christian's state of life into the unique and unrepeatable part in God's redemptive plan that the Father calls each of us to play.

One point Grisez makes that I hadn't considered before is that the failure of Catholics in general to consider their personal vocations has lilely led to the failure of many Catholics in particular to recognize their personal religious or clerical vocations. The rise from "Do you go to Mass once a week?" to "Do you want to be a priest?" is pretty sharp without any intermediate steps.

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Happy Feast of the Guardian Angels

I once asked what the difference was between a feast and a solemnity. Someone answered that, with a feast, you get salad and a dessert.

So I'm thinking: appetizer, main course, dessert. All served with a suitable beverage.

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Wenn der Gegner schüchtern oder dumm ist

Steven Riddle provides a link to Schopenhauer's The Art Of Controversy.

It's full of great ideas, like a perverse Boy Scout manual for Usenet. Which means there's a lot of "been there, done that" to it as well.

The final paragraph, though, is worth quoting in full, even if I don't endorse it categorically:

The only safe rule, therefore, is that which Aristotle mentions in the last chapter of his Topica: not to dispute with the first person you meet, but only with those of your acquaintance of whom you know that they possess sufficient intelligence and self-respect not to advance absurdities; to appeal to reason and not to authority, and to listen to reason and yield to it; and, finally, to cherish truth, to be willing to accept reason even from an opponent, and to be just enough to bear being proved to be in the wrong, should truth lie with him. From this it follows that scarcely one man in a hundred is worth your disputing with him. You may let the remainder say what they please, for every one is at liberty to be a fool - desipere est jus gentium. Remember what Voltaire says: La paix vaut encore mieux que la verite. Remember also an Arabian proverb which tells us that on the tree of silence there hangs its fruit, which is peace.

I don't know how many in a hundred are worth disputing with, but those who are are to be cherished as one cherishes the truth.

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Light of Patriarchs, pray for us

Having read the chapter on St. Joseph's assumption in the somewhat creaky prose of The Life and Glories of St. Joseph, reprinted from long ago by TAN Books, I am moving from "deep skepticism" to "no real opinion."

This belief is different from a belief in a particular physical gift St. Joseph might have possessed in that it's based on the explicit Revelation of Matthew 27:52-53:

...and the bodies of many saints who had fallen asleep were raised. And coming forth from their tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.

These words must mean something, and I see no sound basis for denying that they mean what they say.

The Catena Aurea isn't much use here. St. Remegius is quoted as writing:

But some one will ask, what became of those who rose again when the Lord rose. We must believe that they rose again to be witnesses of the Lord's resurrection. Some have said that they died again, and were turned to dust, as Lazarus and the rest whom the Lord raised. But we must by no means give credit to these men's sayings, since if they were to die again, it would be greater torment to them, than if they had not risen again. We ought therefore to believe without hesitation that they who rose from the dead at the Lord's resurrection, ascended also into heaven together with Him.

This puts the teaching in general back to the Sixth Century.

It's no surprise that St. Joseph wasn't named as one of the "saints who had fallen asleep" in the Sixth Century. No one gave him much thought in those days (which also goes a long way to explaining the lack of venerated relics). But then, if he had been resurrected and assumed, wouldn't he have been given more thought? But then, none of the saints who had fallen asleep were given much thought, as far as I know. Does that suggest a non-historical reading of Matthew 27:52-53? Deep waters.

Still, I'm unpersuaded by the arguments that St. Joseph must have been raised and assumed. They tend to be phrased in terms like "it is unthinkable that," "we cannot entertain the supposition," "whose heart is so cold as to imagine," and so forth. As an empirical matter, I can think, suppose, and imagine St. Joseph is not in heaven body and soul. Some of the arguments, like those on the re-establishment of the Holy Family in heaven, I even find theologially dubious.

As for what I wrote yesterday about the uniqueness of Mary's Assumption: It occurs to me now that uniqueness may lie in the combination of death (which Enoch and Elijah, according to some, did not experience) and incorruption in the tomb (which the saints who had fallen asleep did not experience) prior to her Assumption (and, obviously, the incorrupt saints known to us have not experienced bodily assumption (and, for that matter, their incorruption seems to be somewhat different than Mary's)).

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Joseph most prudent, pray for us

My attitude toward the pious belief that St. Joseph was assumed bodily into heaven following Jesus' Resurrection hasn't changed much in the ten or so years since I first encountered it. It remains one of deep skepticism.

El Camino Real and And Then? have been discussing the belief, with the former defending the belief (as a legitimate opinion, at least) and the latter expressing deep skepticism.

The evidence in favor of St. Joseph's bodily assumption includes the opinions of St. Bernadine of Siena and Bl. John XXIII. The evidence against includes the lack of opinions of nearly everybody else.

My own skepticism is based on two points. First, there seems to be nothing about St. Joseph's assumption during the first millenium of the Church, and I've heard nothing about it from the East. That suggests the belief is based on theological speculation of a kind developed in the West not long before the Fifteenth Century.

Now, far be it from me to look unkindly on theological speculation of a kind developed in the West not long before the Fifteenth Century, but I think it's important to recognize that this particular speculation concerns a historical fact of which absolutely no hint of historical records exist. (In fact, the unimportance of St. Joseph throughout the First Millenium is evidence no one gave his assumption any thought.)

The other point is one that, to me, seems to trump the testimony of both St. Bernadine and Bl. John: namely, the stated or implied uniqueness of Mary's Assumption.

St. Bernadine lived long before the Assumption was infallibly declared a dogma, and I'd guess Bl. John's pious opinions were set well before 1950, so I don't see any competing authorities here. (For that matter, Bl. John's endorsement of St. Joseph's (and St. John the Baptist's) assumption as something "we can piously believe" came during a homily, an extremely weak exercise of teaching authority.)

But Munificentissimus Deus states (emphasis added):

What is here indicated in that sobriety characteristic of the Roman liturgy is presented more clearly and completely in other ancient liturgical books. To take one as an example, the Gallican sacramentary designates this privilege of Mary's as "an ineffable mystery all the more worthy of praise as the Virgin's Assumption is something unique among men." And, in the Byzantine liturgy, not only is the Virgin Mary's bodily Assumption connected time and time again with the dignity of the Mother of God, but also with the other privileges, and in particular with the virginal motherhood granted her by a singular decree of God's Providence. "God, the King of the universe, has granted you favors that surpass nature. As he kept you a virgin in childbirth, thus he has kept your body incorrupt in the tomb and has glorified it by his divine act of transferring it from the tomb." [MD 18]

Playing theologian, I suggest these two things are well attested in the Church:

1. The connection between Mary's virginal motherhood and her assumption.
2. The uniqueness of her assumption.

If St. Joseph (or anyone else) was assumed bodily, then both of these tenets fail...

Unless one suggests Mary did not die, but was assumed alive. But this suggestion is contrary to everything the Church said about Mary, excepting roughly the same times and places that people said St. Joseph was assumed bodily. Even the above excerpt from Munificentissimus Deus approvingly quotes the Byzantine liturgy's reference to Mary's "body incorrupt in the tomb."

I have the impression that the pious belief in St. Joseph's assumption is based on an intuition of what is "fitting" or "right" for God to do. I certainly do not want to toss out categorically all that has been written about the priviledges and special graces of St. Joseph over the past several centuries, but at the same time I think it's important to ask whether the intuitions by which they were written were themselves fitting or right, and what the implications are if they weren't.

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