Ask Tony: What's the Catholic Church's position on "enhanced interrogation techniques"?—UPDATED

Source: Washington Post.

A: "Enhanced interrogation technique" is simply a euphemism for torture. The Church teaches that torture is intrinsically evil.

It's really not rocket science. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, cruel practices, even when used to maintain law and order by legitimate governments, are not "in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person". (CCC 2297-8) In a speech in Sept. 2007, Benedict XVI stated unequivocally, "In this regard, I reiterate that the prohibition against torture 'cannot be contravened under any circumstances' (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 404)." Nobody should expect Pope Francis to support it, either.

In Romans 3:8, St. Paul specifically denies that the apostles teach a consequentialist message. This rejection is restated in Catechism § 1789: "One may never do evil so that good may result from it" is a rule "that applies in every case".

One of the many things St. John Paul II apologized for in the name of the Church was the sanction of torture in securing confessions to heresy. It really doesn't matter, for our purposes, that its use was hedged about with many restrictions, that the clergy never directly participated, or that it was a matter of discipline rather than dogma (and so is covered by neither infallibility nor "tradition").The Church was wrong to do so, and there's an end to it.

Then why, you may ask, did so many white Catholics (the only Catholics represented) come out in favor of torturing suspected terrorists on the recent ABC/Washington Post poll?

Stan Goff, the author of Chasin' Jesus, suspects that part of the answer is due to relentless indoctrination by Hollywood:

... [T]he whole subject is embedded in carefully formulated, dramatic hypotheses. Moreover, we are all indoctrinated with ... "electronic hallucinations" nearly from birth that implant these hypothetical situations in our heads. Television and film, to be more precise, the most effective tools for mass indoctrination in the history of the world, have bombarded us with concocted stories that revolve around something that the late Russian film theorist Sergei Eisenstein labeled the "tempo task." ...

Any time we have this debate, those who want to justify torture evade discussion of the actual acts of torture (breaking someone's limbs with iron bars, for example, or letting him be chewed up by attack dogs, or pumping pureed hummus up his ass, or plunging him into ice water until his core temperature drops), and instead deploy a tempo task scenario. What if he has armed a nuclear bomb in Times Square and you have ten minutes to find it and disarm it? The purpose of the tempo task scenario is not to establish some moral line, but to dispense with morality altogether in favor of pragmatism in extremis.

The Impractical Catholic's predictions for 2015!

Making New Year predictions has much more potential for fun than making New Year resolutions, precisely because the chattering classes take them more seriously. I don't know why; they're fulfilled less often than are the resolutions. I suspect it has something to do with politics being a grand game, like watching a real-life, non-violent version of The Highlander ("There can only be one!"). So, following Elizabeth Scalia's lead, I made my own predictions for the year:

1: Pope Francis' apostolic visit to the US will be a smash hit; and the tour will be extended for several more arena dates through the South and Southwest. Ticketmaster will report record sales; his dope new single, "That's Not What I Meant", will defy all expectations by replacing Taylor Swift at the top of the charts for one week.

2: Speaking of Taylor Swift, her torrid relationship with Lena Dunham will last for most of the year, marked by some squabbles over dominance and presence at each other's public engagements. The relationship, which will be considered the power romance for the feminist movement, will end when the two women realize they're not really gay. "But it was kinda cool and empowering while it lasted," Swift will confess. Dunham will marry herself around Christmastime.

3: Vice President Joe Biden will suffer a massive coronary and die at his desk. Cleaning crews will discover his body two days later. His final wish, to be burned in a Viking longboat at sea "just like Richard Mulligan in S.O.B.," will be protested by Greenpeace.

Sunday Snippets — A Catholic Carnival

Hello, and welcome again to Sunday Snippets — A Catholic Carnival, to which I've been very bad about contributing this last year and will hopefully make up for it this next year.

The point of Sunday Snippets is to introduce you to obscure Catholic bloggers whose work you might not ordinarily come across as you hopscotch through the blogosphere. I link a post from each of my blogs through the main page hosted by RAnn at This, That and the Other Thing, and also write up a referring post on the blog you're reading now.

In previous installments of this post, I would usually write up and link a list of post I'd written the previous week, in both this blog and The Other Blog. But not this time; I just haven't written enough to justify it. Besides, you're perfectly capable of scrolling down from the home pages to see what I've written recently. Moreover, the point of this post is to get you over to the Sunday Snippets page, where you can get tasty writing from other Catholics!

So tolle lege: click, read, and enjoy! And have a blessed First Sunday of Christmastide!

Surprise! Better English = better pay

Last week, I received this graphic from Grammarly.com. Memes from Grammarly come across on my Facebook status frequently; they're generally funny to those of us who are considered "grammar Nazis". (I really don't care for "Nazi" as a descriptor for anyone who's punctilious about anything; what the hell is so evil about demanding clearly-written prose and properly-spelled words that merits such a comparison?)

While the memes Grammarly puts out are funny, though, the Grammarly people are deadly serious about spreading English literacy. So am I; my only concern with ESL courses is that, unless you start early and go for complete fluency in English, you're cutting non-Anglophone students out of a lot of national and international jobs. 

So Grammarly asked me, Your Humble Blogger, to post this on my blog. They also sweetened the pot for me by offering to donate $100 in my name to Reading Is FUNdamental — a really great deal, since I don't have the money to make the donation myself.

Better English means better pay? Quoth Iago (the parrot in Aladdin, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried): "Oh, there's a big surprise! What an incredible — I think I'll have a heart attack and die from that surprise!"

Ask Tony: What did Jesus mean by "fulfilling" the Law of Moses?

Last year, I created the meme to your left to counter another meme based on a rant by John Fugelsang (isn't it indicative of how screwed-up our culture has become that people would make an actor/comedian an authority on religion?).

Fugelsang argued that Jesus wasn't anti-gay, based on the fact that the Gospels don't record anything from him on homosexual relations. However, as I've argued on The Other Blog, if Jesus had said anything supporting gay relationships or controverting Leviticus 18:22, "you can be morally certain the disciples and apostles would have made much of such a counter-cultural affirmation. Jesus' silence, in view of what was taught both before and after his mission, must be construed as consent to the Law: Qui tacet consentire videtur" [loosely, "Silence must be seen as consent"].

However, in creating the counter-meme, by reminding that Jesus "did not come to abolish the law ... but to fulfill [it]" (Matthew 5:17), I stepped into some quicksand. And a non-Christian caught me on it:

[Jesus'] "silence" on abortion and homosexuality could be seen as his "going along" with previous Jewish law, but doesn't that leave you with the problem of all the other kinda awkward Jewish laws ... like about eating pork or not touching menstruating women? (Please address this — I'd love to know why homosexuality is different in this regard.)

 I hate to admit it, but I got sloppy. The fact is, Jesus' fulfillment of the Law of Moses did free us of the Law. What Jesus' fulfillment of the Law didn't do, however, was free us of the spiritual need for moral behavior, or make the concept of sin irrelevant.

Merry Christmas

Shut your computer off. Go play with your kids; eat some food; hug your spouse; go to midnight Mass ... whatever. Do something with your Christmas that isn't staring at a monitor and is engaging with the people in your house and neighborhood.

Merry Christmas, and happy New Year.

Anti-intellectualism has already taken over the US

Prof. Patricia Williams. (© David Shankbone;
courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

According to legal scholar Patricia Williams, anti-intellectualism is "taking over" the US. Depending on how you define it, however, one can make the case that intellectualism, as such, has been dead — or at least on life support — for more than two or three decades, and that now we're simply fighting over the ideology in which students will be indoctrinated.

What is "intellectualism", after all? What does it mean to be an intellectual? I'm afraid it's one of those words, the meaning of which we think is fairly obvious and held in common, but on closer examination really conveys different things to different people — a verbal cart made to carry different weights of psychological and social baggage.

On the surface, to be an intellectual is to enjoy the life of the mind more than the life of the body: to enjoy reading, writing, discussions, and arguments; to prefer work and entertainment that engages critical faculties and abstract reasoning abilities more than physical skills. More to the point, while such activities may have practical applications, the intellectual pursues these things more for their own sake than for any pragmatic reasons. The intellectual may be in pursuit of TRVTH or Wisdom. If so, though, it's not necessarily a high-speed chase for a quick capture; the intellectual is perfectly content to enjoy the ride, and catch up to TRVTH/Wisdom eventually.

That, at least, is what I think is a fairly basic yet accurate description of an intellectual. However, if there's anything intellectuals tend to hold in common, it's the presumption that they're part of a small, exclusive club; and they tend to feel put out when anyone is acclaimed as an "intellectual" who doesn't fit membership criteria much narrower than I've defined. Moreover, since intellectualism implies some degree of education, there's the tendency to define intellectuals solely by their degrees, their professions ... even the school from which they graduated. Behind the most egalitarian façade may hide a quiet, smug elitism.

One trait, however, that's definitely not held in common is the willingness to engage with different, opposing ideas. In fact, fewer intellectuals each year even trouble to pay lip service to it.

Ask Tony: Did Pope Francis just teach that animals go to heaven? — UPDATED

The short answer: No. The Pope didn't say anything like that; the Pope didn't say anything remotely near that.

This is possibly the most bizarre case of papal malreportage I've seen since I started writing. Somehow, Pope Francis' simple reassertion of orthodox teaching about the future renewal of creation got transmogrified into a declaration that animals go to heaven.

Let's begin with the papal general audience of November 26, as reported by Zenit. The general audience has often been an opportunity for the reigning pontiff to catechize the people directly, as well as to make remarks on current events or give a report on what he's been doing the last week.

Francis began the homily, "In presenting the Church to the men of our time, Vatican Council II was very conscious of a fundamental truth, which must never be forgotten: the Church is not a static, still reality, an end in herself, but is continually journeying in history towards the ultimate and wonderful end which is the Kingdom of Heaven, of which the Church on earth is the seed and the beginning. ... And some questions arise spontaneously in us: when will this final passage happen? What will the new dimension be like, which the Church will enter? What, then, will happen to humanity and to the creation that surrounds it?"

The end towards which the Church journeys, "Paradise", is "[m]ore than a place, it is ... a 'state' of mind in which our most profound expectations will be fulfilled overabundantly and our being, as creatures and children of God, will reach full maturity," said the Pope. "We will finally be clothed with joy, with peace and with the love of God in a complete way, no longer with any limit, and we will be face to face with Him! It is beautiful to think this, to think of Heaven. All of us find ourselves down here, all of us. It is beautiful; it gives strength to the soul."

So far, so good. Then:

At the same time, Sacred Scripture teaches us that the fulfilment of this wonderful plan cannot but be of interest also to all that surrounds us and that issued from the thought and heart of God. The Apostle Paul affirms it explicitly, when he says that "creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Romans 8:21). Other texts use the image of a "new heaven" and a "new earth" (cf. 2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1), in the sense that the whole universe will be renewed and will be freed once and for all from every trace of evil and from death itself. What is anticipated, as fulfilment of a transformation that in reality is already in act since the Death and Resurrection of Christ, is, therefore, a new creation; not, therefore, an annihilation of the cosmos and of all that surrounds us, but a bringing of everything to its fullness of being, of truth and of beauty. This is the plan that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit has always willed to realize and is realizing. [Bold and italic fonts mine.—ASL]

A medieval Icelandic poem

Yesterday, my friend and Catholic Stand colleague Susan Anne posted on her timeline Heyr, himna smiður (Hear, O heaven's smith). The poem was written around the beginning of the thirteenth century by Kolbeinn Tumasson, an Icelandic chieftain, supposedly as he lay dying from an injury received at the battle of Viðines; over 700 years later, the late Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson gave it a musical setting.

(By the way, in case you're wondering what those strange letters are and how they're pronounced, ð is called eth and Þþ is called thorn; both are pronounced close to the English th. Eth does have a capital; however, it isn't used in Icelandic.)

You can follow the link above to find the hymn sung by Ellen Kristánsdottir. It's an absolutely haunting melody that intentionally recalls medieval music. The video gives a literal English translation; I decided to recast the translation into a more poetic form.

Heaven’s Smith, give ear
To the poet’s prayer.
May come soft to me
Thy loving mercy.
So I call on Thee;
Thou didst create me.
Servant am I Thine;
And Lord art Thou mine.

God, I call on Thee,
That Thou wouldst heal me.
O Mild One, take heed,
For Thee we most need.
Rid, O Suns’ great King,
From Thy kind loving,
All care and distress
From the heart’s fastness.

O Mild One, guide me;
For we most need Thee
Ev’ry hour we spend
In this world of men.
Grant, O Virgin’s Son,
That Thy will be done,
All Thine aid divine
To this heart of mine.

Now the fundamentalist paranoia begins

Yes, buildimg one world religion, because we're commanded
to do so by Christ (Mt 28:19-20).

The image to your left is from a site titled Now The End Begins, a fundamentalist site pretty much dedicated to hating the Catholic Church as the "whore of Babylon".

It's no particular secret that Evangelical megapastor Rick Warren is a fan of Pope Francis. Warren recently met Pope Francis at the 2014 Vatican Conference on Marriage and Family, and spoke along with Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore at a colloquium led by the pontiff.

This wasn't bad enough. Although he's given no indication that he's about to "cross the Tiber", Warren is advocating closer ties between Catholics and Protestants.

"We have far more in common than what divides us," Warren said in a two-minute video. "When you talk about Pentecostals, charismatics, evangelicals, fundamentalists, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, on and on and on and on. Well they would all say we believe in the trinity, we believe in the Bible, we believe in the resurrection, we believe salvation is through Jesus Christ. These are the big issues."