Catholic Stand: When the Needle on the Spiritual Tank is On “E”

So I went to Confession last Saturday (March 25). I don’t go to Confession nearly often enough. I go so infrequently that I have an app to remind me how to say the Act of Contrition (Laudate). I won’t tell you when the penultimate time was, but I will say Obama was President. That was one of the things I had to confess.

The last few times, I blurted out my biggest sin first. Without fail, the relief of having got that off my chest was so overwhelming I forgot to confess other sins. This time I managed a full examination of conscience and managed to get everything out, despite the sense I got that Father was trying to rush me through it.

Sunday Morning Follies

No, dagnabbit, not quite everything, I realized to my dismay at Mass the next day, having been reminded of two more besetting faults by the sight of an attractive young lady in the pew in front of me. (Yes, yes, I know — men are pigs). My purpose of amendment may be firm, but my power of amendment, like my body, seems rather flabby right now.

Six years ago, I wrote a post on Outside the Asylum about sedevacantists. The same Sunday morning after I went to Confession, I found two responses on that old post from the same person. First, the respondent said I misrepresented sedevacantism. Then — in an incoherent blither of false assertions, bad grammar, and condemnations of Pope Francis as a heretic — he justified everything I’d written. Having just confessed to a radical lack of charity not sixteen hours previously, it was all I could to not tear into him. That combox is now shut down; I’m seriously considering doing away with comboxes altogether.

Fifteen minutes afterward, I was reading a post by The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named, in which he admits he also went to Confession that day and apologizes to those whom he had written of disrespectfully. The Blogger is a knowledgeable fellow who has an endearingly goofy sense of humor; however, as a culture warrior, he is often his own worst enemy.

But then, so am I. So are we all, in this world of sin and sorrow. Satan can only lead us to sin if we choose to follow. I can’t take the speck out of his eye until I take the plank out of mine.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Give Us This Day Our Supersubstantial Bread

“Give us this day our daily bread” … what does that mean? On the surface, it’s a simple acknowledgment that the things we need to live all have their source in God, as well as a request that our needs for the day be provided. However, hiding under that simple word “daily” is many centuries’ worth of puzzlement and scholarly debate. The cause of the debate is a troublesome Greek word, the definition of which may open that line to a whole new layer of meaning. If you can stick with me, you’ll see why it matters.

St. Jerome Coins a Word

The word in question is epiousios (ἐπιούσιος, Matthew 6:11 SBLGNT; Luke 11:3 SBLGNT). The trouble is, the word had never been written before Matthew and Luke. If Jesus spoke to his disciples in either Hebrew or Aramaic, we have a further problem: we don’t have texts in either language predating the Greek. We have texts in Syriac, a close cousin to Aramaic, but the Syriac Matthew and Luke are most likely translations of the Greek. Greek had perfectly good words for “daily” — hēmera, kathēmerinos (closer in sense to “ordinary” or “usual”), and ephēmeros (“for the day”). In fact, hēmera is also in Luke 11:3. Why coin a new word?

We have one possible clue. Saint Jerome, the fourth-century scholar who translated Scripture into Latin, had received a copy of the Aramaic “Gospel of the Hebrews”, which now exists only in fragments (i.e., words and phrases found in other writings). In writing of the Lord’s Prayer in that Gospel, Jerome glosses the Aramaic word as meaning crastinus (“tomorrow’s”; that is, belonging to tomorrow). So perhaps Jesus is saying, “Give enough sustenance today to get through to tomorrow,” right? This would fit with the end of the chapter, where Jesus advises us not to worry about the future (Matthew 6:25-34).

But this won’t do. First, epiousios also appears in Luke’s version, which is shorter and occurs in a different context that doesn’t so neatly end in a “don’t worry” passage. Second, whatever St. Jerome thought of the Gospel of the Hebrews, instead of using crastinus he coined a Latin neologism of his own: supersubstantialis. To make matters more confusing, he translated the same word in Luke cotidianus (quotidianus, “daily”), giving us the redundancy, “Give us our daily bread every day.” Finally, Greek had plenty of words sufficient to translate such a thought without having to mint new Koine. So what was Jesus really saying?

Read more at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Political Control and the Freedom of Weakness

There’s a certain freedom in powerlessness, the loss of control. Recently, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput wrote that the “astonishing flaws” of both major candidates was “depressing and liberating at the same time. Depressing, because it’s proof of how polarized the nation has become. Liberating, because for the honest voter, it’s much easier this year to ignore the routine tribal loyalty chants of both the Democratic and Republican camps.”

Control of Our Lives

It’s liberating when you realize that, no matter what you do, the results will be the same. You don’t always have the luxury of knowing that your action will have only minimal effect on the outcome. It’s like a message from God: “Dude, I got this. You go do the right thing, and let Me handle the rest.”

Have you ever just sat and thought about all the ways in which your life is affected, impacted, changed for better or worse, by people whom you will most likely never meet and over whom you have no control or even influence? I’m sure commercials promising you security from identity theft and credit-card fraud have got you to thinking, now and again, how your financial security is tied up in a network of computers over which faceless strangers must keep perpetual watch against other faceless, more malicious strangers. Think of the people in the security agencies and defense services laboring 24/7 to prevent a terrorist attack from occurring or a war from breaking out.

Something so simple and quotidian as filling your gas tank doesn’t just involve you and the pump. It involves hundreds of people in a number of industries moving the original oil from the well to the refinery to the distributor, as well as making the pumps, the tanks, the trucks, the pipes, and the car you’re putting it in. And as you’re cruising down the six-lane expressway, do you think about all the people who labored for months to expand the original two-lane blacktop highway while you suffered delays and jams in frustration? Whatever made you think you were independent? Whatever made you think you had complete control of your life?

Usain Bolt hits the gym every day for 90-minute workouts to develop explosiveness and build stability while staying lean. He controls when he shows up at the gym, how rigorously he follows his workout routine, and what he eats. He can’t control the possible rise of another runner even faster than him, or the potential for career-ending injury, or the slow wear of entropy that will eventually subtract from his speed. Why worry about these things, when worrying about them won’t prevent them from happening?

“Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to your span of life?” (Matthew 6:27)

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Men and the Rape Conversation

Recent events in the story of convicted rapist Brock Turner force the conversation about rape into a deeper understand of this complicated subject. It is a multifarious conversation, touching upon sex, consent, sexual differentiation, women’s equality, and college campus culture, among other things. But in many respects, it is the wrong conversation, full of false assumptions and askew stereotypes. It is also a conversation from which, as I hope to make clear, men cannot and should not be excluded.

Men as Victims of Rape

Rape is commonly presented in the conversation as a “women’s problem”; that is, as a crime only women suffer and only men commit. Sixteen percent of women, according to statistics gathered last March, experience attempted or completed rape, as opposed to only 3% of men — at least as far as the sources know. An estimated 95% of rapes on campus, and 60% of rapes overall, are never reported. Whenever we discuss rape, we almost take it for granted that men are only raped in prison.

This trope is false and misleading. As Hanna Rosin reported in Slate a couple of years ago, sexual assault against men is vastly under-reported. Men are almost as often victims of sexual assault as are women, and women are very often the perpetrators. The 2013 National Crime Victimization Survey found that 38% of the incidents reported were against men. Because the U.S. military is predominantly male, it should be no surprise that more than half of military sexual-assault victims are men. Last year, Huffington Post ran an article detailing male experiences of sexual assault on campus; one advocate estimated that as many as 1 in 6 males are sexually assaulted before the age of 18.

Precisely because all forms of sexual assault are under-reported, it is impossible to say for certain whether proportionally fewer male victims than female victims report being raped. At least part of the under-reporting problem for men, though, is the cultural emphasis on alpha-male machismo: men are discouraged from “whining”, and expected — by both men and women — to shut up, “put on their big-boy britches,” and get over any problems they may have. Also, our culture takes it for granted that men are irresponsible about when, where, and with whom they have sex. We find it especially difficult to believe that a woman could force a man to have sex against his will, due to the assumption that rape must involve penetration of the victim by the assailant.

Under-reporting also diminishes our knowledge of the incidence of same-sex rape. According to Men Against Abuse Now (MAAN), being assaulted by another female, especially a partner, can be more traumatic for women “because of the levels of trust, attraction, and love involved.” Gay males have greater difficulty finding help because of “attitudes that gay men are promiscuous or that rape is something that only happens to women”. And a study done by the CDC in 2010 revealed that women tend to be more physically aggressive and controlling than men in intimate partnerships. In sum, women are not the only ones affected by rape in our society.

Read more at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Amoris Laetitia and the Progressive Pope Myth

In a discussion of the God-as-watchmaker metaphor with Jonathan Witt, philosopher Jay Richards remarked, “It’s amazing how a simple image can hijack a discussion for a century and a half.” (Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, p. 54) Almost as soon as he was elected, before he had done anything substantive beyond greeting the people in Saint Peter’s Square, the Western chatterati had dubbed Francis a progressive pope. This hasty assessment, fraught with Western political and cultural implications, has similarly hijacked discussion of Francis’ actions by many people both inside and outside the Church.

The Progressive Pope and the “Hermeneutic of Rupture”

The progressive pope myth, in its essence, is a smaller iteration of the larger “hermeneutic of rupture” (or, as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI originally called it, the “hermeneutic of discontinuity”) that has persisted in the Church for the last fifty years. To wit, the progressive pope myth has assumed from the very beginning that Pope Francis’ differences in style mark a break not only away from the traditions of the papacy but also away from the dogmas and doctrines of the apostolic tradition.

For example, many commentators made heavy weather of Francis’ refusal to wear red shoes and live in the Apostolic Palace. Few, however, noted his decision to visit Santa Maria Maggiore and pray at the tomb of Pope St. Pius V — a Dominican, a former inquisitor, and a major figure of the Counter-Reformation — the day after his election. Surely the latter was more significant than the former! Yet any clear and unmistakable sign from Francis of orthodoxy or respect for tradition is usually greeted with profound silence … or explained away as “holding out an olive branch to conservatives”.

The progressive pope myth is an a priori construct, albeit one without the benefit of valid first principles. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence,” said Holmes to Watson in A Study in Scarlet. In “A Scandal in Bohemia”, he elaborates: “Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” The myth of the progressive pope continues to validate Holmes’ dictum, most recently in the veritable blizzard of analyses that have followed the release of Pope Francis’ recent apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia.

Read more at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: How Should We Honor Our Elderly Parents?

In response to Dr. Denise Hunnell’s December 29, 2015 Catholic Stand post, “Family Life as ‘Domestic Pilgrimage’”, a loyal reader brought up a question in regards to the Fourth Commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Exodus 20:12; cf. Deuteronomy 5:16):

I have yet to hear, never mind expounded upon, what would constitute a mortal sin in a family context setting. In today’s mobile society where siblings leave for far-away places seldom to return, is talking to one’s parents (or siblings) less than a week a year the kind of DIS-honor God envisioned when He placed that omission on the top ten? Would continuing to live one’s own life thousands of miles away while an aging parent or sibling slips the bonds of life in a medical setting or at home constitute a mortal or grievous sin, and should such a family member be denied Communion for acting this way? After all, it is very similar to divorce when you think about it.

This is a topic that touches me personally. Since 1994, I’ve devoted a good chunk of my life and time to taking care of physically disabled family members — first my younger brother (who passed away in 2011), and now my mother. Both my other siblings pitch in as well, to the extent they’re able. Between the three of us, we’re doing what we can to make sure our mother’s final years are lived in comfort and company.

But before we can attempt to answer our loyal reader’s question, we should first ask ourselves, “How does the Catholic Church understand the Fourth Commandment?” Before we can ask whether the situations the reader describe constitute dishonor, we need to know what’s meant by honor.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: The Politics of American Narcissism

Egotist, n.: A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

In 2000, you probably could have asked twenty of your friends and coworkers and found only one person who knew something about narcissism. Fifteen years and a gazillion selfies later, narcissism and narcissist are tools of the trade for the commentariat; activists demand empathy where once they would have been content with sympathy. Often, though, like Bierce’s egotist, it’s a matter of the pot calling the kettle “self-absorbed”.

Narcissism and the Appeal to Pity

Let me give you an example: In 2010, neuroscientists Jennifer N. Gutsell and Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto in Scarborough published a paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Gutsell and Inzlicht claimed that an experiment showed people displayed differences in “mirror neurons” between viewing people of their own race having difficulty and those of “outgroups” in the same situations. In the latter case, they claimed, to those who had tested high on racial prejudice, the effect of watching “outgroups” in difficulty was similar to “watching a blank TV screen”.

To be fair, Drs. Gutsell and Inzlicht tried to use neutral terms and generalize their conclusions. However, the test subjects were exclusively white. Had they tested non-white subjects in the same manner, I submit they would have found the same correlation, and done better science to boot. They simply hadn’t neutralized the experiment sufficiently. Since they didn’t, the test results were interpreted by the press as a uniquely “white” problem; and outrage generators like Democratic Underground said, “See? They don’t empathize enough with us!”

In informal logic, it’s called an ad misericordiam fallacy, or “appeal to pity”: You must agree with me because 1) I have suffered; 2) I am suffering now; and/or 3) I will (continue to) suffer if you don’t give me what I demand. The narcissist demands that we agree with him, not because he’s right, but because he’s wretched. At its worst, it becomes a manipulative whine: “If you really loved me (if you really empathized with me), you’d do X.”

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Happy Thanksgiving!
 

Catholic Stand: Why Do We Still Expect Marital Fidelity?

The fallout from the Ashley Madison “data dump” has only begun. Much of the media attention has focused on B-list celebrity Josh Duggar, from his parents’ broken hearts to the inevitable amateur long-distance psychoanalysis and condemnations of the purity movement. However, sidebars do go into the hundreds of federal employees who have accessed the site from their offices, themarriages dissolving as suspicious spouses do their checking, and the expected questions about the morality of offering such a service.

The Oddity of Fidelity

It’s hard to feel any sympathy for either Avid Life Media, the owner of the website, or its many millions of subscribers. In every culture, which has some form of marriage, some definition of adultery obtains; the practice is largely frowned upon, in some cases incurring sanctions ranging from potential civil penalties to death. The oddity in our culture is not that so many people cheat, but rather that some expectation of fidelity is still kept, even after the sweeping changes wrought by the sexual revolution.

On the one hand, according to research published earlier this year, 22% of men and 14% of women have strayed at least once in their married lives; 74% of men and 68% of women admit they would cheat if they knew they would never get caught. On the other hand, the Gallup 2013 Values and Beliefs Survey recorded that 91% of Americans held affairs to be morally wrong, and that the number of people who thought it was acceptable had actually dropped 1% from 2001 to 2013. The most trenchant comment comes from Hugo Schwyzer: “We’ve become more willing to embrace diverse models of sexual self-expression even as we’ve become ever more intolerant of hypocrisy and the human frailty that makes hypocrisy almost inevitable.”

The “why” of cheating is the source of endless speculation, rationalization, and research. Unfortunately, a lot of the speculation ends up at the conclusion, “Monogamy is a myth” … even inarticles which claim to be premissed on established scientific fact. However, such a sweeping conclusion leaves behind an unexplained fact: if monogamy is a myth, in the sense of being a fiction or false knowledge, then surely the oddity is not the rate of infidelity, but rather the outrageously high rates of marital fidelity.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Christianity “Found Difficult and Left Untried”

Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. My point is that the world did not tire of the church’s ideal, but of its reality. Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, but for the unchastity of monks. Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, but of the arrogance of Christians. Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. … [T]he great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. (G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (1910), ch. 1.5)

Although this passage was written some years before Chesterton’s formal conversion to Catholicism, one can be very certain that at no point after his conversion would he have taken a single word back; most likely, he would have restated it in a different yet equally blunt way. He also knew the Church wasn’t established for the sake of the righteous, but for sinners (cf. Mark 2:17): “The Church is justified,” he would write in The Everlasting Man (1923), “not because her children do not sin, but because they do.” His point was that Christian hypocrisy made the Christian ideal appear unachievable and not worth attempting.

To read the body of Chesterton’s work is to get quick baby pictures of the monster ideologies that plague our culture — free-market capitalism, socialism, modernism, and progressivism — before they climbed out of their cribs to eat our souls. Taken a century ago, the baby pictures are a marvelous corrective to the temptation to blame everything on the Sixties (or any of the last five presidents). However, the above passage reminds us that it more likely began five hundred years ago, with Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, Henry VIII’s dynastic concerns, the trial of Galileo, and the widespread publication (thanks to the printing press) of classical literature.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Are Catholics the “Resurrection People”?

“We are an Easter people, and ‘Alleluia’ is our song!”

These words are attributed to St. John Paul II. And, indeed, he did deliver them; once, during an address at a black parish in Harlem in 1979, and again before leading the congregation in the Angelus at a Mass in Adelaide, Australia, in 1986. However, the Pope was paraphrasing a quote from St. Augustine of Hippo, some 1,500 years before: “We are a resurrection people, and our song is ‘Alleluia’.”

If you don’t hear or read these words again this Easter, you probably will next year. If nothing else separates the post-Vatican II Catholic from the traditionalist, it’s the trope of “the resurrection people”. I’m not trying to import what’s been called the “hermeneutic of rupture”, the belief that the Second Vatican Council changed the DNA of the Catholic Church or the substance of Catholic dogma. However, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the Council created, or at least promoted, a different style — a different perspective from which to view our doctrine and expound it. And the “resurrection people” trope is a key to that difference.

Error usually begins with the emphasis of one doctrine, or a collection of related doctrines, over the rest. For instance, had Martin Luther truly understood what St. Paul meant by works, he might have ended his days still an Augustinian priest in communion with the Church. Far be it from me to suggest that either Ss. John Paul or Augustine were in error by saying “we are a resurrection people”; for both men were well-versed in the evangelium. However, the saying can be easily misunderstood.

For it would be just as true, if not more, to say we are the “people of the crucifixion”.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Just the Moral Facts, Ma’am

As I write this article, former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling is giving some young cyberpunks a much-needed lesson in moral facts.

Here’s the story: Last week, Schilling’s daughter Gabrielle was accepted by Salve Regina University on a baseball scholarship. (According to Wikipedia, Schilling is a “born-again Christian”.) As proud daddies want to do in the twenty-first century, Schilling tweeted his joy to his followers.

Being social-media savvy, Schilling anticipated some ragging among the congratulations. (When you’re a celebrity, you need to expect and be prepared for trolls among your followers.) However, the usual amateur heckling and expected offers to date Gabby turned ugly, as Schilling described “tweets with the [words] rape, bloody underwear and pretty much every other vulgar and defiling word you could likely fathom began to follow. … Worse yet? No less than 7 of the clowns who sent vile or worse tweets are athletes playing college sports.”

“If I was a deranged protective dad,” Schilling writes, “I could have been face to face with any of these people in less than 4 hours. I know every one of their names, their parents, where they go to school, what they do, what team they are on, their positions, stats, all of it. I had to do almost nothing to get ANY of that information because it is all public.” Emails, tweets, and texts were sent; athletes were suspended, and a college DJ dismissed. Other repercussions to follow; Schilling has also enlisted readers willing to help in the persecution.

Moral Fact #1: In the real world, actions have consequences.
Moral Fact #2: Don’t threaten Daddy’s little girl … not even in jest.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

A big announcement

Thursday, July 17, the editor-in-chief of Catholic Stand, Dr. Stacy Trasancos, did me the incredible honor of asking me to join the leadership as a Managing Editor. My CS editor, Diane McKelva, also asked me to accept the position.

Although I did accept the position, it wasn't without stepping back for a few minutes to think about it. Yes, "Managing Editor" is a great honor (and it looks pretty good on a résumé, too), but it's also a big responsibility, although in this context it promises to be not too time-consuming.

You see, a good editor makes sure the writer conforms to the style guidelines of the journal without overwhelming the voice of the writer with his/her edits. S/He checks spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation, insuring that nothing in the post distracts the reader from following the thoughts of the writer. S/He also does what s/he can to boost the visibility of the post, adding SEOs — search-engine optimizers, such as tags, subheads and links — as needed so that Google, Bing and Yahoo! can find it more readily.

At the end of the day, the writer is the one who ultimately wows the crowd. The editor simply makes sure that the writer's costume is clean and that his fly is zipped. And that he gets proper billing on the marquee.

In any event, I did accept, conscious that I would be doing for others as Diane, and Stacy before her, have done for me. And I publicly thank both of them, and Tito Edwards the founder of CS, for showing so much confidence in me as a Catholic writer. And may I remember: Non mihi, Domine, sed Nomine Tuo da gloriam!

Cor Sacrum Iesu, miserere me.

Sancte Hieronyme, ora pro me.

Sancte Joanne Paule, ora pro me.

Omnes Angelos et Sanctos, ora pro me.

Catholic Stand: Pessimism, Optimism, Hope and Change

Over my lifetime, I have been called many things, some of which are printable. Within the last six years’ worth of blogging, I’ve had a little mud slung at me, which if nothing else proves I can occasionally write well enough to provoke a reaction, and maybe even a thought, in those who disagree with me. However, of all the tags with which I’ve been yclept, the most puzzling is that of pessimist.

I don’t say it’s puzzling because I see only good in the world and can’t understand how someone would believe I think otherwise. If I tried to make such an assertion I would be a blatant liar. Rather, it’s puzzling because, even as an ad hominem attack, it’s pretty insubstantial. It implies that every fault I see with modern society would disappear if only I take a course of antidepressants and listen to some Zig Ziglar talks. Not only is the road to Hell paved with good intentions, you can have some really pleasant experiences along the way. It’s much easier to get there if you don’t pay attention to which direction the road is going.

Catholics, you may have been told, are a “both-and” people. It’s difficult to put us into either one of any set of binary categories (liberal/conservative, rational/emotional, positive/negative) because you’re bound to trip over aspects that belong to the other of the pair. The Catholic mind is also more attuned to truth expressed as paradox. When you can grasp the idea of Christ holding his own body in his hands at the Last Supper, you can more easily see the truth in expressions such as “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” or, as in di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo: “In order for things to stay the same, some things have got to change.”

So, it is with optimism and pessimism. Logically, the glass can’t be half-full without being half-empty at the same time; to find the silver lining in the dark cloud, you must first acknowledge that the cloud is dark. But to recognize that there are demons in the world is not necessarily to forget that there are also angels.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand—The Century of the Self: We the Sheeple

If you’ve got about four hours to spare — better make it five, for the occasional break — watch all four parts of the 2002 BBC documentary miniseries The Century of the Self. Written and directed by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self explores the rise of public relations and marketing, as well as the influence of various members of the Freud family, especially Sigmund Freud himself.

Because CoS is a British documentary, the average American might never guess it was pushing an agenda. Instead of screaming “THOSE EVIL BASTARDS ARE MANIPULATING US!”, Curtis calmly, thoughtfully, dispassionately suggests that the corporations, which have used the techniques developed by Edward Bernays, Anna Freud and their successors, have subverted our critical thinking skills. Selfish, instinct-driven creatures, Curtis intones quietly, are “ideal consumers”, and consumerism is “a way of giving people the illusion of control while allowing a responsible elite to continue managing society.”

Although we feel we are free, in reality we … have become the slaves of our own desires. We have forgotten that we can be more than that, that there are other sides to human nature. (Curtis, A. [2002]. Century of the Self, Part 4: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering [motion picture])

Although CoS is mild anti-big business agitprop, what it says about the subtly destructive effects of Freudian consumerism bears consideration.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Dancing with the Devil — The Final Cut

This post is the final version of an essay I published on May 9, 2014 in Outside the Asylum, and updated twice with additional news and commentary. It was rewritten for Catholic Stand at the request of my editor, Diane McKelva.

“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.”

—Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

In today’s academic milieu, you should expect that a Black Mass performed by a group calling itself “The Satanic Temple” under the auspices of an Ivy League university to be a bold, daring exercise in transgressing boundaries, right? Especially if the celebrants use a consecrated Host for the ritual desecration that was retrieved at a legitimate Catholic Mass.

Well, not so much. For one thing, a spokesperson for the Temple, Priya Dua, officially denied the use of a real Host (after initially confirming it) in a conversation with Elizabeth Scalia (The Anchoress). Later, the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club released a statement that read in part, “Our purpose is not to denigrate any religion or faith, which would be repugnant to our educational purposes, but instead to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices.” A still-later statement repeated the peaceful intent, albeit in the midst of a blither of revisionist history and boilerplate insults calling Catholic objections “closed-minded” and “based on intolerance and ignorance”. (See Thomas L. McDonald’s post in God and the Machine for an acerbic yet accurate outline of the relevant history.)

But Doug Mesner, aka “Lucien Greaves”, supposedly the head of The Satanic Temple, didn’t seem to be reading the same script. According to Kaitlyn Schallhorn of Campus Reform, Mesner asserted that the HECSC Black Mass “[would have] mock[ed] rituals of other mainstream religious rituals [sic]”, so Catholics wouldn’t be the only ones dissed. On the question of the consecrated host, Mesner was suspiciously coy, telling The Anchoress that he doubted anyone would “waste time going to all that trouble” to get one (Really? Only falling off a log would be less trouble), but telling Schallhorn “he couldn’t call it a ‘consecrated host’ as Catholics do” … which, The Anchoress pointed out, implied that Catholics could call their host consecrated.

On May 12, the event was “postponed indefinitely”; like Eliot’s hollow men, it ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

Read more at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?"

This article originally appeared as two separate posts in The Impractical Catholic: "Good Friday" and "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" Since the two posts complement each other, I decided to collapse them into one larger post.

*     *     *

Dear God.

First, the frenzied, howling Sanhedrin. Slapping, punching, spitting all the while … perhaps kicking him if he fell. During the night watch, his anxiety and fear for what he knew is coming is so great that the net of blood vessels around his sweat glands constricted, then hemorrhaged. Hematidrosis. As a result, his skin is extremely fragile and sensitive; every punch and slap is exquisitely painful.

The humiliation of the crowning as Rex Iudaeorum - not a wreath or circlet but a cap woven out of branches from the local thorn bushes, each thorn a nail in his scalp, with a staff made out of reed for a scepter,  a scepter with which he’s struck like a club.

But that isn’t enough. Two Roman soldiers with flagella - whips of leather, with small bones tied to the ends that rip the skin off his back and tear pieces of muscle out. Tied to a post, there’s no way he can move, even involuntarily, that could avoid the clawing fragments that shred his back. There’s no way I can not hear him screaming his agony; slaves have been known to die as a result of the forty lashes.

Then the crossbeam is loaded onto his shoulders, raw and bleeding from the whips, bringing a fresh agony. Weakened, his heart already beginning to be squeezed and his lungs filled by fluids, he stumbles along the travertine-paved road from the castra praetoria to the place called Golgotha. He has probably already lost a liter of blood, if not more: category 3 shock numbs his mind, but doesn’t deaden the pain. He stumbles once, twice, a third time … a passerby is dragooned into helping him, not for mercy’s sake—what Roman soldier chooses mercy over duty?—but to speed things up: the Galilean isn’t moving quickly enough.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Why You Ought to Come Inside the Church

G. K. Chesterton remarked once that the Catholic Church is larger on the inside than it appears from the outside. Saints come from all walks of life, and pursue their sainthood in multifarious ways. They include such diverse personalities as the gentle, innocent Thérèse of Lisieux, the acid-tongued scholar Jerome, the mirthful mystic Teresa of Ávila and the hard-headed, combative Wilfrid. It includes people who were saintly their whole lives (Philip Neri), people who found sainthood after years of sin (Ignatius Loyola, Camillus de Lellis), at least one who was martyred before his hair was dry from his baptism (Genesius of Rome), and one who was promised heaven while he hung on a cross for thievery (Dismas). They come in both sexes and from all around the world in ethnicity.

They also come from “inside the walls” and “outside the walls”. That’s to say, the Church recognizes as saints not only clergy and members of religious orders but also laymen, people who lived their lives radically separated from the world (Antony the Great) and people who fully participated in the world (Thomas More), and many others in between these extremes.

Because we can encounter Jesus in so many different ways, often when we least expect it, I get suspicious when anyone seems to propound a Best Way to Encounter God. I get even more suspicious when, to sell that Best Way, the proponent seems to diss going to church. Such carelessness is hard to excuse in a time when people are making a false dichotomy between Christianity and “churchianity”, rejecting church membership altogether as if religion were a do-it-yourself project.

The “inside/outside the walls” dichotomy comes from an essay in The Huffington Post’s religion blog, “Why You Ought to Leave the Church (John 4:5-42)”, by Matthew Skinner, an associate professor of New Testament (studies?) at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul. Skinner’s piece is an exposition on the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well, and has some interesting things to say.

Read more at Catholic Stand!

Contraception: A Hill Worth Dying On!—CATHOLIC STAND

Is contraception “a hill worth dying on”? asks Austin Ruse, one of the Catholic Church in America’s most sage, most lucid commentators.

There is no question that the Catholic politician is duty bound to limit and then to stop legal abortion. After all, abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. Protecting the innocent from abortion is not a uniquely Catholic matter. Is contraception the same as abortion, or is it more like divorce, a fundamental Catholic teaching but one that we do not seek to impose on others[?]. We may seek to convince others but we do not seek to impose it on them through public policy.
There are good public health reasons to be against contraception. Hormonal birth control pills can cause cancer, for instance. And this is a very important point to make when we properly try to undermine public confidence in contraceptives. But this is not a Catholic reason to vote against them …. We do not see any great Catholic campaigns against smoking and smoking probably causes more cancer than the pill. [Bold font mine.—ASL]

Ruse warns us, “Abortion advocates everywhere are eager to use contraceptives as a cudgel to beat us with and they would love nothing more than for us to actually fight on that ground.” Indeed, the vast majority of Catholic Americans, both men and women, have registered dissent on this teaching, if on no other. Seemingly, to be against contraception is equivalent to being a Holocaust denier or a proponent of the flat-Earth theory. After all, according to Angela Bonavoglia anyway, “every major health organization maintains that [contraception] is crucial [to] the health of mothers and babies”; whether or not that statement is true, it’s certainly part of the mythos of the sexual revolution that women need access to birth control and abortion for their health.

(A myth, Michael F. Flynn reminds us, is “an organizing story by which a culture explains itself to itself”. In this sense, a myth is not necessarily false or fictional in its details; modern histories fulfill this function as well as did the tales of the Celtic bard or the Norse forteller. The major difference between, say, Herodotus or Suetonius — or even Homer — and the late Stephen Ambrose is footnotes: history is story at its very core … the tale we tell about us.)

Ruse’s comments come in the context of a couple of specific fights, in which open opposition to the sale of contraceptives is playing a role. However, to speak of “a hill worth dying on” is to speak of the contraception issue as if it were extractable from the rest of our fights.

Read more at Catholic Stand!

My First Fifty Years: What I've Learned

Yes, I still play. (Photo: Steve Thelen.)

Eight years ago, I was playing around with Microsoft^® Money and found an add-in for investment advice. As part of the program, it asked various questions about my general health background. Being interested, I followed through, answering the questions as honestly as possible then hit the “submit” button. The program digested my answers, thought for a couple of seconds then generated its answer. Among its conclusions, I found the rather disturbing prediction: “Life expectancy: 46 years.”

If you’ve done the math, you’ll have figured out that I was 42 at the time. Yikes.

Considering that I’m celebrating my fiftieth year of life today, rather than decomposing in a pine box somewhere, is merely a reminder that actuarial tables have the force of neither physical nor human law.  The longer you live, the longer they expect you to live. (That is, no combination of answers will ever cough up the result “This guy should have died four years ago,” or “Check your watch; you could go any second”). In fact, since 1996, when I survived being robbed at gunpoint for the second time, every breath I’ve taken has been in the knowledge that life is an unmeritable gift.

 Read more at Catholic Stand!

Catholic Stand: Talking white trash

People of a certain age ought to remember the routine that made comedian Jeff Foxworthy a household name. And I’ll give just one example: “If you mow your yard, and you find three cars and a couch, you might be a redneck.”

What Foxworthy was describing, though, wasn’t really a redneck. No, there’s another name for the ignorant, slovenly boors Foxworthy’s jokes painted in such garish colors: white trash. We could go less race-specific and use the term I heard growing up — trailer trash. Either name makes the egalitarian-minded liberal shudder; and yet, while progressives are good at talking populist, when the crunch comes they can be as elitist as any Porcellian among the Boston Brahmin.

The term white trash has been popping up here and there since the infamous Phil Robertson GQ interview; understandably, since Robertson used it to describe himself and the people he came from (post-WWII, pre-Vietnam rural Louisiana). Peter Lawler, in the blog “Postmodern Conservative” on First Things, remarks:

The phrase “white trash” is, in fact, one of the most unattractive features of aristocratic Southern Stoicism. The Stoic, aristocratic (not to mention gay and racist) poet-philosopher William Alexander Percy disparaged “white trash” far more than southern blacks. And we see that same sort of stereotyping in To Kill a Mockingbird, where the white trash are really, really trashy — so trashy that nobody minds how cruelly Stoic attorney Atticus Finch deconstructs the pretensions of their way of life in the service of justice for a noble — if simple — black man. And of course the white trash jury was too trashy to keep an innocent black man from being convicted. …
When a Stoic Walker Percy character says that the behavior celebrated on our talk and reality shows is that of white trash — of people who don’t know how to act because they don’t know who they are — we can’t help but want to agree. … White trash, any real Southern Stoic would say, describes a way of living not confined to the impoverished or the South. (Here I refer you to the novels of Tom Wolfe.)

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