February 19 - Mini round-up

(Archbishop Paglia; CNS photo/Paul Haring)

Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Council on the Family, gave an address on 2/15 to an audience at the United Nations (if I'm reading the very brief news summary correctly), in which he reiterated the importance of intact, traditional families and a minimal burden of government for economic development (full text):

Particularly during times of high unemployment, the actions of government as they affect families must be examined carefully. The welfare state is characterized by family assistance programs principally intended to address situations where the family is broken, unstable or lacking in internal resources. In these cases the state attempts in effect to be a substitute for the family, or at least for some missing element of the family.

But by substituting itself for the family, the welfare state produces a kind of vicious circle where instead of strengthening family relationships, it weakens them even further, and thus creates increased need for government assistance. Increased need leads to crisis, however, because it gives rise to expectations that the government cannot hope to meet, firstly because financial resources are never unlimited, but more importantly because government cannot itself function as a family, only as an agency. It thus becomes clear how important it is for government programs not only to promote family “mainstreaming” but more importantly for the government to have a correct understanding of the family when formulating public policy and to respect subsidiarity, which should be a guiding principle in any governmental action.

(Archbishop Lori)

 

Archbishop Lori of Baltimore has written an excellent and compelling letter to all the members of Congress, regarding two points in an appropriations bill relevant to the HHS Mandate (full text at link):

It can hardly be said that all these Presidents and Congresses, of both parties, had been waging a war on women. I have seen no evidence that such laws, showing respect for Americans’ conscientious beliefs, have done any harm to women or to their advancement in society. What seems to be at issue instead is a new, more grudging attitude in recent years toward citizens whose faith or moral principles are not in accord with the views of the current governing power. And while the mandate for coverage of abortion-causing drugs, contraceptives and sterilization is hailed by some as a victory for women’s freedom, it permits no free choice by a female employee to decline such coverage for herself or her minor children, even if it violates her moral and religious convictions.

It is most discouraging that this coercive element remains unchanged in the new notice of proposed rulemaking the Obama administration issued this month in response to widespread criticism of its original mandate. 

Finally, in news unrelated to archbishops, we have heavy snow in the forecast for both Thursday and Monday...

(Next Tuesday's mushing to school and work... source)

Cultural Hypocrisy

President Obama's speech from Sandy Hook on Sunday night exposes the fundamental hypocrisy of our culture.  Here's a salient quote:

It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize, no matter how much you love these kids, you can’t do it by yourself.  That this job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.  And in that way, we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.  This is our first task — caring for our children.  It’s our first job.  If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right.  That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.  And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we are meeting our obligations?  Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children — all of them — safe from harm? [emphasis added]


This is, of course, a fundamental truth.  The whole point of "culture" is to raise children into virtuous, competent adults, and to reinforce by the continuous formation of adults the same virtues being passed on, in a manner consistent enough across time and space to be a shared and unifying vision of the Good.  Successful cultures are successful, stable, and enduring exactly in these terms.  People come to share this commitment to the Good that is envisioned, because it is demonstrably a Good, and because it tests positively against human experience.

But in this speech, Obama moves too easily from truth to truism, and thence to misdirection.

The truism is that threats of violence against our children come from outside, from disordered elements of the culture (like mental illness, or the apparent randomness of many forms of violence):

We gather here in memory of twenty beautiful children and six remarkable adults.  They lost their lives in a school that could have been any school; in a quiet town full of good and decent people that could be any town in America....  As these difficult days have unfolded, you’ve also inspired us with stories of strength and resolve and sacrifice.  We know that when danger arrived in the halls of Sandy Hook Elementary, the school’s staff did not flinch, they did not hesitate....

This dichotomy is partly true, at the level of personal experience, and yet wholly false, morally.  Obama alludes to this falsity when he says:

[T]his job of keeping our children safe, and teaching them well, is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community, and the help of a nation.  And in that way, we come to realize that we bear a responsibility for every child because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours; that we’re all parents; that they’re all our children.

But if that's true, then there's not an "us" who try to protect children from violence and raise them in virtue, and a "them" who try the opposite.  Those who harm our more vulnerable members are also "us."  But from  the ambiguity of the superficial truism, the speech is able to misdirect:

In the coming weeks, I will use whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens — from law enforcement to mental health professionals to parents and educators — in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this.  Because what choice do we have?  We can’t accept events like this as routine.  Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard?  Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?

The misdirection here is actually three-fold.

First, there is the straw man of opposing "freedom" with "preventing more tragedies like this."  Politically, this is a false dichotomy because freedom - true freedom, virtuous freedom, not license (as "freedom" is often cast) - is what makes a culture strong and resilient.  Only a society characterized by humility, fortitude, and prudence is capable of reining in the impulses to violent brutality, without resorting to strict tyranny.  Morally, this is a straw man because moral freedom is essential to love, and to the meaningfulness.  Without moral freedom, life just is; neither good nor evil, but simply to be endured.

Second, there is the implied "big government" thinking, that only (or perhaps, best) the federal government is equipped to deal effectively with this problem.  This is typical of this president's work (bailouts, Obamacare, etc).  This is misdirection in this context to the extent that it belies the need for vigorous subsidiarity in making and enforcing good laws, and so forth.  (The whole question of proper care for the mentally ill can be hooked onto this point.)

Third, and most blatantly, there is the elephant in the room of abortion, and indeed of the whole contraceptive mentality of behavior without natural consequence.  Mr. Obama said, "Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children — all of them — safe from harm?"  Abortion is the most grievous form of violence visited upon our children - in scale (roughly 3000 children murdered daily), in social damage (emotional consequences, lives and relationships gravely harmed, etc), and in moral damage (abortion justifies other grave evils, because if this person's humanity can be denied, then so too can this one's).  Abortion is a fatal cancer at the heart of our culture.

A society that teaches people that actions don't have natural consequences is doomed.  Likewise, a society that teaches that some people aren't really human.  A healthy society, by contrast, teaches natural virtue, respect for human dignity regardless of "utility" or circumstances, and the truth that love requires self-sacrifice.  A society that doesn't "accept events like this as routine" is one that also condemns abortion, adultery, promiscuity, infidelity; that also upholds chastity, the sanctity of marriage, and the high dignity of the vocation to parenthood.  Hence my opening comment about fundamental hypocrisy.  It is viciously hypocritical to condemn violence against children in a school, and to propose sweeping societal changes to counter it, while also promoting systematic, devastating violence against children in the womb, and resisting efforts to counter it.

Round up: recent readings of interest - updated 9/19

Deacons are for proclaiming the Word of God, in word and in deed.  But we don't do that on our own, like liturgical Lone Rangers; we proclaim only in communion with our shepherd, apart from communion with whom we have no ministry, no mission.

Here's Pope Benedict proclaiming the Gospel during his recent apostolic visit to Lebanon. Text of all twelve of his addresses from this journey are at the link.

(Pope Benedict and Patriarch Gregorios III of Antioch in the Basilica of St. Paul, Harissa; Reuters photo, from the link above)

Here's Archbishop Chaput proclaiming the Gospel in a more quotidian but still compelling fashion:
     Selfishness dressed up as individual freedom has always been part of American life.  But now it infects the whole fabric of consumer society.  American life is becoming a cycle of manufactured appetites, illusions and licenses that turns people in on themselves and away from each other. As communities of common belief and action dissolve, the state fills in the void they leave.  And that suits a lot of us just fine, because if the government takes responsibility for the poor, we don’t have to. 
     I’m using a broad brush here, obviously.  In Catholic social thought, government has a legitimate role – sometimes a really crucial role -- in addressing social problems that are too big and too serious to be handled by anyone else.  But Jesus didn’t bless higher taxes, deficit spending and more food stamps, any more than he endorsed the free market.
     The way we lead our public lives needs to embody what the Catholic faith teaches -- not what our personalized edition of Christianity feels comfortable with, but the real thing; the full package; what the Church actually holds to be true.  In other words, we need to be Catholics first and political creatures second. (emphasis in original)


Here's an interesting reflection from Anthony Esolen on subsidiarity and the way it's being consistently misrepresented in politics:
     The welfare state is a soft prison, a system of induced incapacity, to the benefit of the wardens.  It works in concert with public schools, another vast network of compulsions, whose existence is predicated on the assumption that learning, in children, is unnatural, so that only “experts” can fathom the mystery, and so that “good” parents will act as trusties, submitting to the authority and enforcing its often ridiculous and pernicious commands.  The next network of control is an infantilizing media, persuading people that they are stupid or fat or ugly, that they live in a shack, that they wear rags, that they need what the hawkers provide.  The last element is a diseased and counterfeit individualism: the promotion of selfishness and of vices that make true self-reliance, and therefore true community, impossible.

And, tangentially, here's part I of a very interesting apologetic piece on the Deuterocanon (the books of the Bible Catholics keep and Protestants reject).

Update, 9/19 - Here's Part II of the same apologetic piece.

And, even more tangentially, for a bonus, here's the free on-line quarterly journal, "Church Life," from the Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame - where, for the moment, a significant portion of the University's Catholicity is being consistently expressed (link to Vol 3, vols 1 and 2 available there also).