Ask Tony: Is opposition to capital punishment “heresy”?

There are some people who can’t be satisfied with just being right — they have to spoil it by going that extra yard, so they’re not only not as right as they could have been, they’re also a bit meshuggeh to boot. It’s almost like watching a player on the defense grab a fumble and down it ... in his own end zone.

Recently, four major Catholic media sources — well, three Catholic and one that insist it’s Catholic — published a joint editorial calling for the end of capital punishment: America magazine, the National Catholic Register, Our Sunday Visitor, and the National Catholic Fishwr — er, Reporter. Naturally, this announcement caught the Catholic Blogisterium by not-universally-pleasant surprise. 

One of the least pleased was Br. Alexis Bugnolo of the blog From Rome, who lashed back with a post titled, “It is a heresy to say Capital Punishment is immoral, or can be abolished”. No, really ... that is the title, and that is his argument:

Rome, March 6, 2015:  The agenda of  Communism* to disarm Christendom more and more has reached fever pitch this week with pronouncements by the Vatican Observer at the United Nations, the Pope, and several media outlets in the United States against the death penalty. [* Marx held that the way to social justice was through class revolution, and that capital punishment was the tool of the rulers to suppress the masses: this error promoted through liberation theology has spread from Europe to most of Latin America. (So how does this make the various calls to end capital punishment “communist”? Damned if I know.)] ...
Patheos a left-wing, [?] source for news and opinion for Catholics in the English speaking world, is running a story today about this, entitled, “Catholic Media Unite in Opposition to the Death Penalty”. [Specifically, the post Br. Bugnolo linked was in Kathy Schiffer’s Seasons of Grace. Whatever else Kathy may be, besides a very pleasant writer to read, she’s no leftist. Neither are Fr. Dwight Longenecker, Kat Fernandez, Elizabeth Scalia, nor Mark Shea; but then, anybody not as far to the right as Br. Bugnolo must appear to be a leftist.] ...
The title of their article is more than misleading, it is implicitly heretical.° [° Inasmuch as it says that such pronouncements are Catholic. (Inasmuch as the title makes no such claim, the charge is explicitly hysterical; the word Catholic modifies Media, nothing else.)] For this simple reason, that it is de fide, that is a truth of Divine Revelation itself, that the State has the authority to punish wicked doers with capital punishment.

Heresy is “the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith” (Code of Canon Law 751; cf. CCC 2087 – 2089). Catholics who oppose the death penalty don’t deny that Church teaching permits or tolerates the death penalty. To justify his calling anti-death penalty writings heresy, then, it isn’t sufficient for Br. Alexis merely to argue that Church doctrine tolerates the death penalty; he must show that Catholic teaching mandates the death penalty as a moral duty of the State.

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!

Ask Tony: What if a priest were to bless the entire ocean?

Blessing of the Sea, Whitstable.
(© 2010 Matt S., via Flickr.com)

So there's this question making the rounds that, on first glance, simply confuses Catholic priests with clerics from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons™:

what if a catholic priest were to just bless the entire ocean would it turn the entire thing into holy water or do priests have an effective blessing range? does that range increase based on your level? can the pope bless the entire ocean?

The obvious first response is to ask in return, "Why would any priest want to turn the whole ocean into holy water?" Holy water is confected (the proper term) for specific liturgical purposes; none has yet been found or even thought of that would require every drop in every ocean be consecrated. Priests, generally speaking, don't perform sacred rituals just to satisfy curiosity or scratch an itch. The obvious second response is, "How would the blessing of a Catholic priest differ from that of an Orthodox, or Anglican, or Lutheran priest?" Catholic priests are not the only ones who bless water; so why the question is asked specifically of Catholic priests is itself a question worth pondering ... just not one I'm going to ponder now.

Having cleared that crap out of the way ....

First, let's discuss what holy water is, and what it is not. Holy water is called a sacramental, that is, a sacred sign "by which effects, especially spiritual effects, are signified in some imitation of the sacraments and are obtained through the intercession of the Church." (Code of Canon Law 1166) Sacramentals, generally speaking, weren't instituted by Christ but rather by the Church, in aid of carrying out its mission. (Cf. Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, p. 349) While the ritual of blessing may create an ontological change in the water, giving it spiritual influence, the liturgical point is to reserve the water for sacred purposes; holy water isn't supposed to be used for cooking, or washing your dirty clothes, or as a substitute for your hypertension medication.

Catholic Blogisterium overreacts to German bishops’ statements

Cdl. Reinhard Marx at 2010 consistory: “That's the one that got away!”
(Allessia Giuliani/CPP/Ciric)

In a completely unsurprising move, traditionalist members of the Catholic Blogisterium, such as Catholic Connection and Rorate Caeli, have flown into a panic over reports that the bishops of Germany have declared independence from Rome.

On Tuesday, the German bishops, already met in plenary assembly, introduced the members who would attend the next Synod of the Family meeting as representatives of the Church in Germany: Cdl. Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising, Bp. Heiner Koch of Dresden-Meissen, and Bp. Franz-Josef Bode of Osnabrück; with deputies Bp. Karl-Heinz Wiesemann of Speyer, and the auxiliary of Münster, Bp. Wilfried Theising. Regina Einig of Die Tagespost, present for the announcement, then wrote up a summation of the bishops’ hopes for the conference. 

In fairness — and I’m not ordinarily predisposed to fairness where reactionaries are concerned — Rorate Caeli did refer back to Die Tagespost, through an English translation provided by “Reader ‘K’”. At the same time, only the paragraphs which were sufficient for RC’s conclusion (that the Germans were trying to “blackmail” the Synod or go it alone) got printed, not the whole article. 

Far better, however, than Catholic Connection, which referenced Matteo Matzuzzi’s blog in Il Foglio: Matzuzzi, as journalists are wont to do, played fast and loose with the translation from German into Italian, making the hierarchs out to be more defiant than they really were. Catholic Connection also provided a link to an (imperfect) English translation of the Tagespost article in Catholic Conclave, but either didn’t read it or chose to live with cognitive dissonance ringing in their ears.

Chances, choice and the Pit of Despair

© 1987 20th Century Fox.

So ... anything happen while I was out of my mind?

About two or three weeks ago, I fell into an emotional pit. Without going into too many details: I've been at the job pond for awhile, and my résumé has gotten several nibbles; however, I’ve had some difficulty getting the hook to catch so I can land the fish. Moreover, developments in the family situation have arisen (I’m sorry, I can’t be more specific than that; some details aren’t mine to divulge), the long-term consequences of which aren’t all clear ... but of which one is that I’ll probably have to move to a different place in the next year or so. To go back to the fishing metaphor: I don’t have all day to catch my dinner.

Some people live all their lives under the illusion that they have complete charge. If anything bad happens to them, it’s because they zigged when they should have zagged, either ten minutes ago or thirty-five years ago. Certainly, I hold that a lot of what happens to us are consequences of decisions we make ... or don’t make; like Geddy Lee sings, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Having majored in sociology, as well as completing some hours in psychology, political science, and economics, I’m more skeptical than I was before about the degree to which determinism is supposed to explain human behavior. It’s a presumption not fully validated by the available evidence. Moreover, some degree of free will is a necessary precondition to the validity of reason. So yes, we make choices, and our choices have consequences; we have no business laying off on God, Satan, society, or bad luck every rotten thing that happens to us.

Having said that ....

Contraception: Who's conning who?

Last February, Austin Ruse wrote a wrote a cautionary piece in Crisis, "Is Contraception the Hill We Want to Die On?", which was concerned with an attack on a Catholic politician's request that the federal government permit the sale of oral contraceptives without a prescription. Ruse is a thoughtful, lucid commentator; so, of course, he made some very good points. 

Nevertheless, I responded in Catholic Stand with "Contraception: A Hill Worth Dying On!" (you have to do ugly things to titles to boost your search-engine visibility, I've learned), arguing that there were several reasons the fight against abortion requires taking on contraceptives. Eleven months later, that conviction is still strong.

As usual, I posted the first few paragraphs on this site, with a link to the full CS article. Forty-seven weeks later, I finally get a comment in that combox, from Juliana@birthcontrol: "I am a catholic but I'm not sure I will be joining you on this one any time soon." 

I suppose I understand. Who wants to stop taking a Class I carcinogen that increases risks of weight gain, breast cancer, depression, blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes? Who wouldn't want to take a pill that interferes with your ability to select compatible mates, decreases your desirability, facilitates poor sexual choices, and encourages sexploitation? After all, it frees you from your biology ... assuming you don't still end up at Planned Parenthood wondering how those two gametes managed to get together despite all the roadblocks you put up.

So when Joanna Moorhead, writing in The Guardian, asks the Catholic Church to "drop the contraception con", my first reaction is to ask, "Who's conning who?"

Eve Ensler’s 20-year reign coming to a silly end?

Back in August, I wrote a piece for Catholic Stand titled “The Identity of a Woman”, the springboard of which was an article in New Yorker concerning the growing struggle between feminists and the transgendered. Allow me the egotistical courtesy of quoting myself at length:

The problem for radical feminists is that men who claim to be women, even those who undergo “gender-reassignment surgery”, aren’t really women.

Not because the transgendered don’t have the right parts, or because the parts have been artificially implanted; oh no, that would simply be common sense, and who wants that?(“Common sense,” Stuart Chase once sniffed, “is that which tells us the earth is flat.”) No, the radical feminist objection is that the transgendered haven’t been raised with the suffering and victimization inherent in a paternalist society, and that transgenderism represents a kind of male-imperialist encroachment on uniquely female territory.

To make matters worse (?), radical feminists seem to be losing the fight. The universities and PACs, which once hosted — or at least suffered — their message of male oppression, are now starting to push back wherever that message conflicts with transgender rights. Says Rachel Ivey, “If I were to say in a typical women’s-studies class today, ‘Female people are oppressed on the basis of reproduction,’ I would get called out.” Other students, she adds, would ask, “What about women who are male?”

Well, now the inner logic of “inclusiveness” — if we can call it that with a straight face — has created a new casualty of this internecine shindy: Mount Holyoke, a women’s college in Massachusetts, has cancelled its annual production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because it lacks transgender roles.

The thundering Islamic silence

Photo source: cctv-america.com.

People call the cartoons Charlie Hebdo printed "satire". Occasionally the label fit. Other times, a better label would have been "sophomoric nastiness". Because they held nothing sacred for themselves, they had no qualms about stepping on the sensitivities of others.

I say this, of course, because some of the cartoons "Charbo" (editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier, one of Wednesday's victims) drew for the magazine went beyond disrespect for Catholic leaders into childish blasphemy, such as the one that had Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in a gay ménage à trois. Doubtless he thought there was a point to be made by such a representation, and that it would feed into the magazine's article about same-sex marriage. From my experience, though, when you deliberately set out to offend someone, you've reduced to almost 0% your chances of bringing that person to agreement. 

So yeah, I'm not about to paint the people of Charlie Hebdo as Catholic heroes. But the people who tore their offices apart with AK-47s didn't walk out saying, "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritu Sancti," either. 

Whatever else was true about the staff of Charlie Hebdo, they were close to unique among Western anti-religious in their criticism of Islam and willingness to satirize Mohammed. They were equal-opportunity offenders. Other groups pick only on Christians, because Christians don't form terrorist cells to strike back.

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.