Ten years ago, I believed a myth. In the beginning, there was Vatican II. It was good but messy, and the Bad Catholics hijacked it to undermine doctrine. They took over seminaries and turned them into cesspools where heresy was mandatory and depravity rampant. Then Pope John Paul II came along. He drove out the Bad Catholics and cleaned up the seminaries. Too late! The Bad Catholics had already committed terrible crimes, which were covered up without the pope’s awareness. In 2002, their abuses exploded into public view, and the JPII Catholics got blamed for crimes committed by a dying generation of clerics. The JPII bishops took it on the chin, but they fixed the problem with the Dallas Charter. Then Benedict XVI, the great theologian, appointed orthodox bishops who would carry forward the renewal. The horrors of the Scandal were behind us. The two primordial forces of the postconciliar church, orthodoxy and heresy, had fought a great battle, and orthodoxy had been vindicated.

[…]

Twin Cities Catholics like me came face-to-face with an unpleasant fact: the orthodox Good Clerics hadn’t taken over from the Bad “Spirit of Vatican II” Clerics and cleaned house. The Good Clerics were buddies with the Bad Clerics. They did everything in their power to protect the Bad Clerics—even violating moral, civil, and canon law on their behalf. We’d believed there were two sides in the Church: orthodoxy and heresy. We often cheered for the clerics on our “team” and booed the other guys. But we were wrong. Everyone in the chancery was working together…against us.

My thanks to Commonweal for running what I think is an important piece.

When I was studying in Rome, I attended Mass at the great basilica of St. Mary Major, one of the leading churches of Rome (which has no shortage of important churches!). It was a beautiful Mass with an enormous, elaborate entrance procession. The parish’s “arch-priest” was saying Mass that day and came in decked out in serious-business garments with a serious-business entourage. I don’t remember the details, but I remember being impressed.

It took me a few minutes to realize that this impressive arch-priest was Cardinal Bernard Law, the quintessential devil of the American sex abuse cases, best known today as the (absolutely deserved) villain of Spotlight. Not a pedophile cleric himself, Law nevertheless worked for decades to protect them. I had always believed he had been exiled from the United States and sent to a monastery to live out his days in sackcloth and ashes.

One of the clearest memories of my entire life as a Catholic is the sick, furious horror I felt at that moment, when I realized Law had not been punished, but promoted. That he was sitting here in a fancy-pants cathedral in rich garments at the pinnacle of the Roman Church while his victims languished in Boston, still suffering the lifelong wounds of child sexual abuse. The rage I felt in that moment–at Law, at St. John Paul II, at the entire institutional Church–has never, ever subsided. On the contrary, subsequent years have justified my anger, again and again. My aphorism, “Never trust a bishop,” started there, in October 2009. I suppose I am grateful to Law and JP2 for so flagrantly flaunting justice that even I couldn’t help but see it. I believe Rod Dreher erred intellectually when he converted to Orthodoxy, for I still believe Catholicism is true… yet Dreher’s famous apologia captures well the emotions I feel toward the institutions and leaders of the Catholic Church today.

And that’s my eulogy for Cardinal Bernard Law, who died today. I will pray for the repose of his soul, and, in the spirit of “love thine enemies,” I encourage you to do the same. May he rest in the same peace of Christ he worked so hard to deny to his flock. And may the Roman Curia, which plans to give Law a cardinal’s funeral with full honors while (still) neglecting the abuse scandal, be utterly destroyed, so that no stone be left upon another stone, amen.

(I suppose this post takes me out of the running at the next conclave.)

One of the things I hear a lot from committed #NeverTrumpers is something like, “I won’t vote for Trump, but, if you decide to, that is okay.”  This has always made sense to me, even though I’m not committed to #NeverTrump.

However, I recently realized that, to those on the #TrumpTrain, it looks like madness at best, moral relativism at worst.  As one of my favorite Facebook friends put it last night:

“It is curious to me when people say ‘I think it is wrong for ME to vote for Trump, but not for others.’ [T]o suggest… that there is no right or wrong choice seems wrong to me. And not to engage that question in a community where we are all struggling to do what we can to stem the tsunami of destructive consequences for this great nation also seems somewhat irresponsible to me.”

In other words, there must be an objectively correct choice among the awful choices we have.  As moral voters, we have an objective duty to discern the correct choice and act accordingly.  Avoiding the question, or answering it indefinitely, is thus a form of moral cowardice.

Fair enough.

I agree with my friend. I think there is an objectively right or wrong choice in this election. God can see the possible world that unfolds if I vote for Trump (and encourage others to do so), and He can see the world that unfolds if I do not vote for Trump (and discourage others from doing so). One of those worlds is objectively better than the other. The choice that leads to that world is therefore objectively the right choice.*

So I agree that there is an objectively best choice. However, I do not know what it is. I am not God. I cannot see both possible future worlds. I have to guess at the future, based on my prudential judgment.

In a typical American election, there’s not a lot of space for prudential judgments. If the Republican candidate is anti-abortion and the Democratic candidate pro-abortion rights, that is typically enough to determine the objectively correct moral choice with a very high degree of confidence.  The evil of legal abortion† is vastly disproportionate to all other issues. Affairs like health care and taxes and religious freedom and even poverty and war are nearly moot in the face of a million babies (babies! killed at a rate faster than Auschwitz!) torn limb from limb for money every year. A voter who does not become (in effect) a single-issue voter in the face of this evil is not acting rationally or charitably. Because legal abortion is very vulnerable in the United States (it is sustained, since 2006, almost exclusively by just five Supreme Court justices, one of them wishy-washy about it), and because creating legal barriers to abortion (including prohibition) is the most effective policy measure for reducing the number of abortions, honest, informed, moral prudence can reach only one conclusion: it would be best to elect the Republican.

Moreover — and I think people miss this too often — the very fact that the pro-abortion candidate is pro-abortion renders the candidate fundamentally unfit to hold authority over anyone. Abortion-rights supporters find their judgement and values fatally undermined on every issue by their willingness to sacrifice an entire class of human beings to Moloch.

(This is but a brief sketch of an argument my father has made more diplomatically and more effectively elsewhere.)

Finally, in a typical election, a vote is unlikely to have repercussions beyond the election.  Your vote for John McCain simply expresses a preference for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama; the vote carries few practical consequences beyond that, and is not widely understood to signify much else.  This closes off one of the few practical avenues of escape for the voter who would rather vote for the abortion-rights candidate with a clean conscience.

I think the argument for voting pro-life in a normal election is so obvious and so overwhelming that doing so is morally compulsory, and that those who support pro-choice candidates will be called to account . I mention this to show, beyond a doubt, that I completely reject moral relativism at the ballot box. I do not treat the phrase “prudential judgement” as an infinitely malleable excuse for any old evil I want to promote; I treat it as a serious burden that must be convincingly answered — and, in most elections, I think there’s only one convincing answer available.

But this election is different in important ways.

Having studied Mr. Trump closely for the past year, I think he is pro-choice. I think he is a liar. I think the odds that he actually appoints good justices to the Supreme Court are around 50/50. I would not be even the tiniest bit surprised to see him get elected on the backs of social conservatives’ votes, then turn around and appoint Peter Thiel to the Court. I think there is strong evidence for all these contentions. Trump has STILL never renounced his support for unrestricted abortion-on-demand throughout the first trimester, which is, y’know, basically indistinguishable from Harry Reid’s position. This casts large chunks of the standard argument for voting Republican into grave doubt.

People of good conscience may disagree about the evidence (though, to be sure, plenty of Trump people are plainly arguing in bad conscience on this), but it must be conceded that, if one judges Trump to be lying through his teeth about the whole abortion-and-religious-freedom thing, it must follow that the clear-cut prudential judgment that obtains in normal elections suddenly becomes really cloudy.

But it gets worse for Mr. Trump. In this election, with the future of the imploding Republican party quite clearly on the November ballot, my vote is going to have consequences beyond the election itself, breaking another of the supports that sustains the clear-cut argument for Republicans in normal elections. By voting for Trump, I appear to validate the new shape of the Republican Party. What long-term effects does this have? How does it shape our politics in 2020 and beyond — particularly if I go ahead and validate TrumpGOP but he still loses (as he very probably will)?

Relatedly, as Rachel Lu often asks, what does this do to the credibility of our movement long-run? Let’s imagine:

I cast my vote for Trump. Months later, I’m at a campus protest, trying to convince a college pro-choicer that I and the rest of the pro-life movement really do care about women. She asks whether I voted for Trump… and stops listening when I honestly admit I did. And I can’t even blame her, because I did actually vote for a candidate who manifestly believes women are objects for his personal use. (This goes double if Trump loses, as he very probably will even with my help.) Multiply by 50,000,000, rinse, and repeat. Was it worth it, casting a vote that might, with considerable luck, elect a man who might, with considerable luck, do what is necessary to reverse Roe vs. Wade?

Maybe so! People can reach different conclusions about this in good conscience. It’s impossibly difficult to predict the future, especially in the middle of a party realignment like the current one. It’s credible for someone to think we can all vote for Trump and everything will work out just peachy. But it’s also credible for someone to think that our personal and collective support for Trump will do more harm than good. Since we’re not God, and can’t look into the worlds where we made different choices to compare them, this is ultimately unprovable and unknowable; we have to take the evidence available and go with our best guess.

In short, this election is full of prudential judgments that are an order of magnitude more difficult than the ones we’re used to dealing with in elections. It is therefore entirely possible for one voter to make one prudential judgment (Trump is a good, honest man who will appoint good judges and not discredit our movement) and for another voter, who shares the exact same principles and has seen the exact same evidence, to make another prudential judgment (Trump is a liar who will appoint Hillary-esque judges and all we’ll have gained by voting for him is deeply undermining ourselves), and thus draw absolutely different conclusions about this election. Each voter must do what he thinks is right, but, since the underlying propositions involve predictions about the future and are thus by their nature unprovable, what is morally right for one voter might not be morally right for another voter.

Thus, a #NeverTrump voter can quite reasonably say, “I think voting for Trump is wrong, but you might reach a different conclusion, and that’s okay.” It’s not moral relativism or cowardice. It is appropriate humility in the face of a bewilderingly cloudy future.

The one good thing about this election is that we’re all going to get a bunch of great papers published on voting ethics in the next two years.

*I think this is an oversimplified model of voting morality, because it reduces voting to an absolutely utilitarian act, and stark utility is almost never the sole measure of morality… but this utilitarian model is how most people think about voting, it’s at least close to how I think about voting, and it will do for our purposes in this post.

† Those who are not regular readers of De Civitate should be aware that “unborn child = person” and “abortion = murder” are generally taken for granted around here. If you disagree, you may reach very very different conclusions about moral voting behavior. Fair enough! Frankly, while I think your pro-abortion position is clearly incorrect, I think your arguments are much stronger than the absurd position I’m arguing against here: that abortion is murder and should be outlawed but it’s still okay to vote for people who support keeping abortion-murder legal.

UPDATE: My Facebook friend — whom I may now reveal as the learned Doctor (and national treasure) Janet E. Smith — has replied to me here.  Take a look!  Weigh the arguments!

Chris Christie’s kitchen-sink approach to undercutting Senator Marco Rubio took an unexpected turn on Thursday: He portrayed Mr. Rubio’s opposition to abortion as too extreme for New Hampshire Republicans.

But in the process, it appears Mr. Christie misrepresented Mr. Rubio’s current views.

“He’s made it very clear that — on the issue of pro-life, Marco Rubio is not for an exception for rape, incest or life of the mother,” Mr. Christie said. “Now, you know, I think that’s the kind of position that New Hampshire voters would be really concerned about.”

In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, Mr. Christie added, “I am pro-life, but I believe that rape, incest and life of the mother, as Ronald Reagan did, should be exceptions to that rule.”

Mr. Rubio is emphatically opposed to abortion in almost all cases. But contrary to Mr. Christie’s claim, he does support an exception for cases in which a mother’s life is in danger.

Now, one could say a great deal about this, from a political perspective.  One could say, for example, that it’s a despicable, false attack that betrays the shallowness of Christie’s so-called candidacy, his desperation to win (even at the cost of feeding free attack ads to the Clinton campaign), and perhaps the moral bankruptcy of the GOP establishment itself.  But I don’t wish to focus on the impact Mr. Christie’s comments will have on the horse race, nor on the inherent cruelty (and incoherence) of Christie’s position.  Others, I’m sure, are way ahead of me on that.

Instead, I’d like to focus on a subject of much more narrow interest: what this public statement means for Christie’s relationship with the Catholic Church, the church he is baptized in and continues to profess belief in.  Those of you who aren’t Catholic can tune out now, unless you’re really into Church sanctions.

Christie is hardly the first Republican presidential candidate to support rape and incest exceptions to a general prohibition of abortion.  Presidents Reagan and Bush both supported similar exceptions.  Jeb!Bush, who is also Catholic, has stated that he supports exceptions for rape and incest, though his reasoning is not clear.  In 2012, Mitt Romney took out advertisements specifically to clarify that he supports killing kids whose dads are rapists — though he didn’t put it quite like that.  (It was his only ad on abortion in the 2012 campaign.)

However, it is very rare for a Republican candidate to say that these exceptions are positively necessary and good, as Christie does here. Often, support for these exceptions is couched in language about the fact that the exceptions are politically necessary to get pro-life legislation passed.  One does not often say, as Christie does, that these exceptions “should be” there as a matter of moral fact.  (Romney paid dearly for doing so.) Moreover, to my knowledge, Christie is the first candidate this cycle — and the first Catholic candidate in Republican history — to actually attack another candidate for being more pro-life than he is.

The problem for Christie is that his Church condemns all direct abortions, without exception, in the strongest possible terms, and — significantly — positively requires that lawmakers prohibit them:

Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.  “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you…” (Jer 1:5)

Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law…

Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae,” “by the very commission of the offense,” and subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law. The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.

The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation:

“The inalienable rights of the person must be recognized and respected by civil society and the political authority. These human rights depend neither on single individuals nor on parents; nor do they represent a concession made by society and the state; they belong to human nature and are inherent in the person by virtue of the creative act from which the person took his origin. Among such fundamental rights one should mention in this regard every human being’s right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death.”

“The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined. . . . As a consequence of the respect and protection which must be ensured for the unborn child from the moment of conception, the law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of the child’s rights.”

-Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2270-2273

A Catholic legislator who publicly rejects this position and promotes laws to the contrary, even just for some unborn babies (“rights for some, death for others!”), commits a grave sin in the eyes of the Church.  For this reason, Gov. Christie must not present himself for communion:

Can.  916 A person who is conscious of grave sin is not to celebrate Mass or receive the body of the Lord without previous sacramental confession unless there is agrave reason and there is no opportunity to confess. -Code of Canon Law

For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgment to himself, not discerning the body of the Lord.  -1 Cor 11:29

Canon 916, sadly, is frequently disobeyed, even by politicians. Foreseeing this, the Church includes additional safeguard against sacrilege and scandal in the form of Canon 915:

Can.  915 Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.

When a sin is both manifest (that is, public and notorious), grave (and supporting abortion rights is certainly grave, as established above) and obstinate (Christie has passively held this position for years, but today’s comments mark an important shift toward actively promoting it), then Canon 915 demands that those responsible for distributing Holy Communion (that is, the bishops, as well as the priests and ministers who operate under them) positively refuse the sinner admission to Holy Communion, until the sin is repented.  This is not a mere enforcement option; the bishops do not enjoy a vague discretion about whether to apply it or not.  It is a positive duty to deny Chris Christie communion.  Canonist Ed Peters writes extensively on these very subjects, in very similar cases, in two articles I recommend: “Fencing the Altar” and “Denial of the Eucharist to Pro-Abortion Catholic Politicians.”  (Hopefully, the very sober Mr. Peters agrees with my application of these principles in the Christie case!)

This has come up occasionally in political contexts before.  Several bishops refused communion to John Kerry in 2004, because Kerry was both Catholic and a major supporter of abortion rights.  Kathleen Sebelius has been denied communion for more nearly a decade now, for similar reasons.  Nancy Pelosi faced similar scrutiny in… well, every year since I’ve been politically conscious, actually, though her local bishop has failed to carry out his duty in her case.  In each case, Democrats cried out that this was a partisan political persecution — that conservative bishops were opportunistically attacking Democrats in order to improve Republicans’ standing in the eyes of the faithful.

Well, here’s a Republican, a nationally prominent, somewhat popular one who is currently running for president, and he is now in violation of Canon 915 just as much as those other guys.  It is time for him to face the appropriate sanctions. Archbishop Myers of Newark should condemn Christie’s comments and instruct him to refrain from communion for as long as he obstinately holds this destructive position on human life.  I know they’re friends, and they can certainly continue to be, but Gov. Christie must not continue to receive communion.  This isn’t about partisan politics; it’s about the protection of the faithful, not to mention the Sacrament.

I single out Gov. Christie because he so clearly violates Catholic teaching here.  He does not just endorse a gravely sinful position, but openly attacks another Catholic for refusing to follow him down that road to Hell. Some of the other Republican Catholic candidates might arguably be seen as violating canon 915, but this is not clear-cut to me. Mr. Bush’s support for rape and incest exceptions may just be a political compromise rather than a moral position, and, even if it isn’t, it isn’t clear to me that he holds it “obstinately”. Mr. Rubio’s support for a “life of the mother” exception may actually be 100% compatible in sync with Catholic teaching, depending on the details, since Catholicism permits so-called “indirect abortions” in cases where necessary to save the mother’s life, under the principle of double effect.  (This is mentioned obliquely in the Catechism passage quoted above, but I’ve written more about it here.)  The three other Catholic Republican candidates (Jindal, Pataki, and Santorum) have all dropped out, so I’ll leave them out of this. This lack of clarity matters a great deal: according to Canon 18, we must follow a “strict interpretation” of Canon 915, which means the individual gets the benefit of every reasonable doubt.  Christie’s case is unique because, as of at least this morning, there can be no reasonable doubt that he is on the wrong side of Canon 915.

As a president, Chris Christie is, in my mind, a better option than Hillary Clinton.  He may be an evil, but the lesser of two evils can be an acceptable option for Catholics under certain circumstances, at least when it comes to the right not to be murdered. Sadly, that’s an option we’ve had to exercise many, many times before. I would likely vote for Christie in a general election.  Heck, if my only choices in the primary were Trump and Christie, I’d probably vote Christie there, too.  However, in a Republican primary that still features a number of other genuinely pro-life candidates, I do believe this should disqualify Gov. Christie in the eyes of Catholic voters.  (In lieu of an argument, I’ll link that article again.)  But that’s just politics.

As a Catholic, Gov. Christie’s soul is imperiled by his refusal to accept the teaching of Jesus Christ through the Church on an issue affecting tens of thousands of undefended human lives. Worse, his decision, as a prominent Catholic, to promote those gravely evil views, to even attack another man for being more virtuous than he, is a national scandal that imperils many other souls as well. It is the responsibility of his bishop to sternly admonish this crime against unborn children and against the body of Christ, and, furthermore, to enforce the prescribed canonical penalties against him until such time as Gov. Christie repents.

The 2015 Ordinary Synod on the Family has today reached an “Extraordinary” compromise between “liberal” and “conservative” factions, De Civitate has learned. Speaking under condition of anonymity, Fr. Xavier Rynne of Boston confirmed that Catholics who have divorced, remarried, and remain sexually involved – thereby committing themselves, according to the constant teaching of the Church, to a life of unrepentant adultery – will be allowed to receive the Eucharist, a major victory for a faction led by Cardinal Walter Kasper, which has emphasized the importance of “mercy” over “legalism” and “the Gospel of Jesus Christ”.

However, in order to win support from reactionary bishops whose obsession with obeying Jesus borders on the Pharisaical, the enlightened Franco-Kasper faction was forced to make major concessions to conservatives. Although not all agree: “I prefer to see this not as a concession,” said Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, “but as a wonderful opportunity for irregular couples to learn a new language!”

Under the apostolic constitution ratified Tuesday morning, remarried Catholics may present themselves for communion at Holy Mass only if the Mass is said entirely in the Latin language, with the priest facing away from the people, using the medieval Tridentine Rite. They must receive the Body and Blood of Christ on the tongue, while kneeling, at an altar rail, may only receive if they have also received the Sacrament of Reconciliation within the past forty-eight hours, and will be strongly discouraged (like most followers of the “extraordinary form”) from receiving every week, or even every month.

Immediate reactions are mixed. “Two steps forward, one step back is better than no steps forward,” wrote Michael Sean Winters of the National Catholic Reporter. “It’s past time progressive-minded Catholics started paying attention to the burgeoning Traditional Latin Mass movement, and this gives us a great opportunity to start looking at ways to support that movement. After all, if the TLM is exploding in membership and interest despite the huge demands it places on its supporters, then how much more would it grow if we got some Marty Haugen tunes into the TLM hymnals?”

Reached for comment at his confessional, Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, resplendent in camel-hair vestments, remarked, “Repent! For the day is at hand!” ate a locust, and then asked this reporter, “Seriously, are you here for confession or what? And how can you even tell what I’m wearing from behind the screen?”

The Society of St. Pius X has issued a vigorous condemnation, but, Superior General Bishop Bernard Fellay noted in his statement, “To be fair, we were going to issue a vigorous condemnation no matter what.”

Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, cancelled plans to release a statement of her own, saying, “Bishop Fellay pretty much covered it.”

Q: Genesis shows us that creation is a process.  Everything takes place step by step.  “It is not good”, God saw in the course of this process, “that man should be alone.  I will make him a helpmate for a partner.”  So next God made from the earth all the different animals of the field and all the birds of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.  A good opportunity, actually, to talk about animals, our closest companions.  Adam gave each of them a name.  Are we allowed to make use of animals, even to eat them?

A: That is a very serious question.  At any rate, we can see that they are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them.  Animals, too, are God’s creatures, and even if they do not have the same direct relation to God that man has, they are still creatures of his will, creatures we must respect as companions in creation and as important elements in the creation.

As far as whether we are allowed to kill and to eat animals, there is a remarkable ordering of matters in Holy Scripture.  We can read how, at first, only plants are mentioned as providing food for man.  Only after the flood, that is to say, after a new breach has opened between God and man, are we told that man eats flesh.  That is to say, a secondary way of ordering life is introduced, and it comes in second place in the story as we are told it.  Nonetheless, and even if someone feels hurt by our using animals in this way, we should not process from this to a kind of sectarian cult of animals.

For this, too, is permitted to man. He should always maintain his respect for these creatures, but he knows at the same time that he is not forbidden to take food from them. Certainly, a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.

Q: Certainly, the animal world itself presents a strikingly brutal aspect of creation.  We all know how dear little kittens may, from one moment to the next, hunt down, torment, and kill others of their own kind.  The one that survives is the one that obviously has the greatest capability of destroying others.

A: It is in fact one of the great riddles of creation that there seems to be a law of brutality. The Catholic writer Reinhold Schneider, who himself was inclined to suffer from depression, exposed all the horrific elements in nature and in the animal world with the truly microscopic vision of someone who suffers himself. He let himself be brought by this to the point of despairing of God and of creation.

In her faith the Church has always seen it in this way: that the destructive effect of the Fall works itself out in the whole of creation. Creation no longer simply reflects the will of God; the whole thing is somehow distorted. We are confronted there by riddles. The dangers to which man is exposed are already made visible in the animal world.

 

I think that the majority of living Catholics have become very used to living with popes who have earned the cognomen “the Great,” and it is pretty shocking for us young’uns to realize that — except for times of great grace — the pope is pretty much just a bishop with a bigger audience.

I think that we learn whom to love as often by whom are enemies hate as whom our friends love. When our enemies fall in love with someone, it is not easy to regard the object of their affections without profound suspicion. This does not reflect well on us, however.

I think sometimes people fall in love despite the fact that it makes no sense at all. This can be at the prompting of grace. It is confusing for everyone — the lover, the loved, and everybody looking on. The lover, in particular, tries to explain the origins of her love in terms that make sense to herself, even though those terms are clearly and completely inapplicable. And those of us on the sidelines see those terms — nonsense terms like, “Finally, a pope who loves women!” “Thanks for being pro-choice, Pope Francis!” — and can’t understand why they didn’t love the theologically similar Pope Benedict the way we do. 

(But, then, I’m not certain I can explain quite why I love Papa Benny the way I do.)

I think churchmen should not, as a rule, speak extemporaneously urbi et orbi. EOTT, as always, says it best. We learned this in the aftermath of Vatican II; I would prefer not to have to learn it again.

I think we are at war not with the culture, but with the devil, who has many unwitting pawns at his disposal. It is worth trying to lure them away to our side with the right kinds of words, rather than trying to conquer them with unyielding arguments. It is worth remembering that Lucifer is smarter than all of us; we cannot out-argue the Enemy. The only thing we can do is out-love him. It will be interesting to see whether this newest effort bears any real fruit. Pope Francis is a better person than I am; he might just be on to something.

I think those who would destroy the Church have spent many years attacking it by opposing it, and they have noticed that this stopped working a couple decades ago. Realizing that Catholicism is resurgent everywhere, I think they are trying a new tactic: destroying the Church by enthusiastically misinterpreting it. (Or is that really a new tactic? It was the dominant Enemy strategy from the Council to Humanae Vitae.)

I think Pope Francis hails from a very different world than the Euro-American universe of encroaching secularism and weak-kneed pastoral leadership, and that, at least partly as a result, he misunderstands his flock as much as his flock misunderstands him. I hope that this is all straightened out soon, and (perhaps?) that the Pope Emeritus — probably the most broadly and deeply European pope in centuries — will have a few words of advice for the Pope when next they meet.

I think there’s much reason to be anxious, but little reason to be disappointed — and several reasons to be very happy.

This is not a place I thought that I would ever be. I am a big fan of St. Thomas More, and I have seen, many times, Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons. Bolt’s play shows us what happens as Henry VIII continues to insist that Sir Thomas swear fealty to him, Henry, as head of the new Church of England. To do so would, of course, violate More’s religious freedom and his conscience, and so More  refuses. When Thomas’ friends express fear that he will be harmed, perhaps even executed, for refusing to violate his conscience, this line keeps coming up:  “oh for God’s sake; this isn’t Spain. This is England.” I always used to sigh when hearing that line, struck by the naivete of those Brits who did not see what was coming, who did not see where they stood. Thomas would be executed for refusing to violate his conscience, for refusing to violate the religious freedom that England’s Rule of Law guaranteed.

Here we stand. I never thought I would be here. Yet here we are.

As I stand here, I am thinking, strangely enough, of yet another story. You all know the story of Cinderella. The Grimm Brothers’ version is far gorier and more disturbing than the sanitized Disney version. In the Grimm Brothers’ telling, when the Prince shows up at the home of Cinderella to see whether anyone living there has a foot that fits the shoe that he has brought with him, the Stepmother demands that her daughters do whatever it takes to fit their feet into that shoe. In my illustrated copy of the story, there were depictions of sawing and cutting of heels and toes, blood spurting everywhere. Quentin Tarantino has nothing on the Brothers Grimm!

Hmmm,  let’s see. An evil stepmother tells the women in her life to manipulate, mangle and harm their own bodies so that they can fit into a man’s world. That used to be called a fairy tale. Now it is called Healthcare. The radically feminist Catholic Church says no, that isn’t healthcare. That’s an agenda.

There is something fundamentally twisted about a culture that medicates an entire generation of women who are not sick—fertility is not a disease. It is a woman’s way of being in the world. The issue before us today is not the morality of artificial contraception; the issue before us today is our right at American citizens to practice our Faith without interference from the government. However, when the current administration ruled that ‘contraception’ is ‘healthcare,’ the current administration made the issue of contraception a part of this battle.

Yes, the Catholic Church opposes artificial contraception. She does so because she sees artificial contraception as something that harms women physically (all those hormones) and psychologically (women are told to accept the necessity that we chemically or surgically alter our bodies so we can be more available for sex, much of it non-committed sex).

The natural law, which the Church teaches can be understood by human reason, tells us that human fertility is not a disease. A woman’s reproductive system is a complex and beautiful dimension of who she is; when society insists that she treat her body as an opponent to be ‘handled,’ or ‘dominated,’ nothing good can result.

By mandating contraceptive coverage for virtually all Catholic institutions, the Obama administration is ordering Catholics to turn from the teaching of their Faith and rely instead on their faith in—what? Obama? Government? The Church has been ordered to comply with what the government has determined to be healthcare, when what is being demanded is neither healthy nor caring for women. Bulletin: women are sick of being told that we need to throw  chemicals, jellies, foam, springs, you name it, into our bodies so that we can be ready for sex on demand. Another Bulletin: for all too much of human history, women have been treated shabbily by their culture and their doctors. Women are tired of a culture that defines healthcare as “Take a pill and shut up.” I am here to tell you that the young women in my life will not shut up. The young women in my life see the wisdom of a Church that tells them they are healthy and beautiful just as God created them. The young women in my life want their Church to have the religious freedom upon which their nation was founded. Here’s an odd picture, but perhaps it makes the point: let’s go back to that story of Cinderella, but mix it up a bit. In this odd version of the tale, the Prince comes to Cinderella’s house to find the stepmother who is Catholic. The Prince orders the Catholic stepmother to saw off the heels and toes of her daughters because fitting the shoe means that they are healthy. The Catholic stepmother refuses to do this deed, and the Prince says, “You have three months to figure out how to do this job.” “But you cannot come into my home and force me to do something so heinous, so much in violation of my most basic conscience,” says the Catholic stepmother. The Prince says, “yes, I can.  Luckily, I am a prince and not bound by any rule of law. Saw away.”

So who are we as a nation? Do we still operate under a rule of law? We are citizens of the United States of America. What does that mean? Do we have our religious freedom? I hope so. With all my heart, I hope so.

“Because of its special importance, the Sunday celebration gives way only to solemnities or feasts of the Lord.”

—General Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar, Chapter 1, Title I, Section II, Item 5

The Sunday feast takes precedence over ALL liturgical events save solemnities and even more major feasts.

You would be surprised by how long I have been looking for the legal basis for the Catholic practice of suspending any fast (including the Lenten fast) when it falls on a Sunday. I posted this on Facebook last night and realized that I may not be the only one who wondered about it. There’s the norm, in black and white, for the Google robots to find. Hope it helps somebody else out there clear it up.

There may be other Church law on this subject, and I would welcome anyone in the comments telling me where I can find it.