Category Archives: Ethics

Sex after the revolution

A very insightful article by Anthony Esolen about the untold, yet undeniable consequences of the sexual revolution:

One thing that defenders of the sexual revolution will not understand is that, although the act of intercourse is private (or better be), everything else about sex is public.  I don’t simply mean that people will know that John and Mary are in a “relationship,” horrid denatured word, or that sexual intercourse results in those visible creatures known as children.  It is that our customs and moral directives regarding the sexes and their union determine what kind of people we will be.  They are the language we all must speak.  There is no such thing as a private language. Read more…

Marriage revisited

I had someone contact me after reading my recent post on ‘saint-making marriage,’ and ask me this question: ‘So, after your friend shared with you his understanding of marriage as saint-making, what again was the exact insight you came to understand?’

Great question. Here is a knee-jerk stab at it that has all the romance of a theology book.

Two Insights

I shared with this inquirer in reply that there were two things in particular I have come to appreciate from his comment as our marital years have evolved: (1) marriage lived as a sacrament is about walking the ‘narrow way’ to holiness and (2) the ‘personal fulfillment’ to be had in marriage is not primarily me-centered but thee-centered.

The sacramental theology of the Catholic tradition says that the grace of the sacrament of marriage is effected not by the ordained minister witnessing the exchange of promises, but by the couple in their free consent to enter into a lifelong, till-death covenant. Their consent allows them to participate in God’s unbreakable covenant of love for humanity that was ratified and consummated in Christ. This means that the spouses are themselves sources of sacramental grace, and as with all sacraments what is received and given in the sacrament of marriage is Christ’s self-giving dying and rising.

This means that by freely accepting the sacrament of marriage in the exchange of promises, the couple accepts into their relationship, like holy Communion received in the hand, the substantial fire of Christ’s self-sacrificing love. By accepting this holy sacrament at the moment they say ‘I do,’ husband and wife pledge to live out that sacramental dying-rising love together every moment of every day, till death rends their one-flesh union.

And as we know what nuptial love looks like in Christ, we know it ain’t pretty. But it is beautiful.

My Good is Your Good

This marital covenant fidelity, cemented by the couple’s free pledge of undying and self-giving love, is a very costly love that is the soul of marital holiness. Nuptial holiness involves daily acts of hidden heroism as each spouse chooses again and again to love the other, with relentless resolve, and each chooses to place the other first.

As a married man, my definition of personal fulfillment always includes my wife and the children that God has created from the clay of our one-flesh union. Spouses, in effect, say to one another every day: ‘my happiness includes your happiness; my fulfillment includes your fulfillment.’ Not in a dysfunctional co-dependent way, where my happiness is wrongly dependent on your happiness, but rather in a healthy interpersonal way, where I include you as my quest for happiness by choosing at all times what is in our best interest.

Original Sinners

What makes this shared quest for marital fulfillment really challenging is that both spouses are broken sinners, imperfect lovers, and so their mutual love has to also be a redemptive love willing to bear the other’s burdens. Spouses help lead each other, from the midst of their grace-soaked marital union, from brokenness into wholeness. And just as Christ loved his sinful Bride even unto death at her own hands, so the couple must suffer together a certain arduous toil in loving their flawed beloved, and flawed children, from sin into grace. Seen thus, spouses faults aren’t the unfortunate obstacles to each other’s happiness, but opportunities for heroic love.

This vision of marriage as a vocation of redemptive love is what makes it a form of lived martyrdom, of dying to self for the sake of the beloved. And to succeed fully as a recipe for marital success, both spouses have to own this vision.

This ‘redemptive’ character of spousal love is what medieval theologians believed to be one of the primary ends of marriage – remedium concupiscentiae, ‘the remedy of concupiscence.’ Concupiscence, which is the way theology describes the moral dysfunction of sinful humanity (sexual and otherwise), finds in marriage a powerful salve, a healing grace that allows God to untie the knot of our twisted desires and teach us to love aright. And how perfect that he accomplishes this healing in the heart of the very relationship from which all sin first sprang. O happy fault, as Adam and Eve gave me the chance to love my bride with a costly love!

Marriage is Beyond Me

In marriage, you also enter into something much greater than yourself, and the whole of marriage is greater than the sum of the two parts. In marriage, you consent to cooperate with Christ in healing the broken human race, beginning with yourselves, and in opening humanity to a most intimate share in the divine life/love poured out out for us in Christ. In this sense, one might say the future of humanity, its very salvation, depends on fidelity to the gift of marriage entrusted to humanity by God from the very beginning, and on the gift of sacramental marriage entrusted to the Church by Christ.

In addition, our children are constant visible reminders of our self-transcending commitment. They are living, breathing, walking signs of our choice to remain for the long haul and be for them God’s earthly home.

Tough love

In a culture that tends to define happiness in terms of the autonomous and self-sufficient individual, whose ‘pursuit of happiness’ is perceived to be in competition with other individuals’ self-interests, this approach to marital bliss is hard to digest without creating ethical heartburn.  The fact is, having a ‘good marriage’ is really hard work. But it’s love alone that makes all hard work seem easy.

Christ-less = Crisis

But we are Christians, and so it’s not all about hard work and effective strategies. First an foremost it’s about hard prayer and effective cooperation with God’s manifold grace. Marriage is what God has joined, not about what we have joined. Which means that living a sacramental marriage of necessity requires explicit and sustained intimacy with Christ, the giver and content of the sacrament. It’s Christ whom I am loving in my wife, and it’s Christ who empowers me to love her worthily and forgives me for not.

In fact, to attempt to live a sacramental marriage without Christ is like a priest trying to confect the Eucharist without Christ — it’s an empty gesture devoid of power.

A Revolution

A last point. When I worked at the Missionaries of Charity Gift of Peace hospice in 1991-92, I was lovingly confronted one day by the superior of the house, Sr. Manorama, after she listened to me bitterly complain about the hardships of serving a difficult patient I was caring for. His name was Robert.

After hearing me out for nearly an hour, she simply said, “Tom, it’s not about you. It’s about Robert. And inasmuch as it’s about Robert, it’s about Jesus. And that’s why we’re here. It’s just not about you.”

It’s never about me, but always about thee and we and the thrice-holy Three, that life-creating, lovely and undivided Trinity.

And that insight is for me the utterly and absolutely revolutionary key to marital and parenting success.

Proposing a Cultural Revolution

I am following the Synod in Rome closely, and the texts coming out of it are rich fare.  Here is an intervention by Archbishop Rino Fisichella that especially caught my eye for its eloquent articulation of the evangelical power of selfless love:

At the Lord’s word, we have learnt to insist upon that which the world rejects, which it considers useless or largely inefficient. The person who is chronically ill, the dying, the marginalised, the disabled and many others who, in the eyes of the world, express the lack of a future and lack of hope, find in the Christian one who is committed to them. We have many examples which recall in a powerful way the sanctity of men and women who have made of this programme the concrete proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and, with that, the beginning of an authentic cultural revolution. In the face of this holiness, every possibility of excuse collapses; incredulity gives way to credibility and the passion for truth and liberty finds a synthesis in the love which is offered without asking anything in return. From this perspective, too, the sign of voluntary work finds its place as a truly Christian proclamation on the part of those who are able to relativise every absolute which does not take the dignity of the person into serious consideration. In an age where everything seems to be possible just because it can be bought, we must increase the signs by which it can be shown that love and solidarity have no other price than commitment and personal sacrifice. This witness demonstrates that personal life comes to its full realisation only when it is placed in the perspective of gratuitousness.

The culture of death will not be overcome primarily by means of litigious craft, angry editorializing or political savvy, but by selfless saints who proffer a new culture rising out of a new humanity flowing from wounded Body of the Risen Christ, who alone ‘makes all things new.’

Just do it: no one’s looking…

I watched a 9/11 documentary a while ago, and one of the lines really grabbed my attention. A Chief from one of the fire stations said, in describing his men, “They got character. And I’ll tell ya what character is; character’s what made these guys go up the stairs of the World Trade Center. While everybody else was goin’ down, they were goin’ up. These guys are heroes.”

Character is the amalgam of all our choices, our unbreakable steel core forged by virtuous acts carried out repeatedly in the face of adversity, hardship, struggle, suffering. Character is the rudder that steers us aright in the stormy seas and keeps our boat from turning awry and capsizing, the ballast that keeps us steady in an unsteady world.

Character’s what you do when no one’s looking.

Pope Benedict once said we should live in constant rehearsal for martyrdom by our costly witness of Faith and our daily sacrifices of Love. If you choose every small goodness with a martyr’s love, if/when the great trials come you will naturally choose to ‘go up’ and not ‘run down.’

Thingification of women

The other day, a friend sent me an article that contained a video on what I call the thingification, or objectification, of women.

At the end of the video, the long-time feminist activist, Jean Kilbourne, proposes that the answer to this cultural disease is ‘education and awareness.’

Image not Centerfold

Well taken, but the million dollar question is — education-in/awareness-of what?

David Bentley Hart to the rescue. In a 2005 article called The Anti-Theology of the Body, Hart argues that the unique conception of human dignity that arose in the West, rooted in the belief that human persons are created in the image of God and bear infinite value, “has a history.”  That history, Hart contends, is the history of Judaism and Christianity, and any attempt to salvage such an exalted view of human dignity apart from its Judeo-Christian tradition’s theological foundations is fraught with peril.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, God made flesh,  has the power to rewrite our culturally diseased script, to replace the pornographic view of the human person with an iconographic one; to exalt (in this case) the woman from servant of the thing to daughter of the King.

If it is true, as Pope Benedict said in his inaugural homily, that ‘each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary,’  then it is true that any reduction of the irreducible richness of the person is an affront to the Word who authored the script.

“There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel,” Benedict continued. To be surprised by the beauty of the God-stamped, embodied soul is to be surprised by the beauty of Christ.

This is the core message my wife and I hope to bequeath to our sons and daughters: nothing more beautiful.

Dad to Dad

A final word. I’d like to say to any man who has a daughter, who is also a father and not just a progenitor: You should, upon even the most fleeting reflection, be utterly incapable of viewing pornography. How unspeakably vile to consume images that reduce other fathers’ daughters to objects bound in servitude to savage humanity’s basest, most putrid quest for pleasure?

No true father ever would, ever could.

Here’s Hart’s article, and here’s the video:

Forty-seven minutes

“The world needs the witness of your faith” — Pope Benedict XVI

Regina and Kenny Heine of Metairie first got the news that something might be wrong with their unborn child during a prenatal exam. Because Regina was approaching her mid-30s, doctors recommended that she be screened by a perinatologist, who is well versed in the associated risk factors with what is termed “advanced maternal age.” Read more…

Sign of Contra-diction

Bishop Fulton Sheen was famed for saying,

There are not over 100 people who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church.

Messaging

A self-evident truth: one of the great challenges facing the U.S. Catholic Church is effectively communicating a persuasive, attractive, coherent, truthful and unified Catholic vision of sexuality that is accessible and can compete, in the imagination of the faithful, with the highly evangelical Cosmopolitan model of sex that has long held sway in popular culture.

In response to this challenge, especially in the last 20 years, lots of new and culturally savvy programs have been developed, books and articles written, conferences held, talks given, retreats offered, CDs, DVDs and MP3s sold — but according to a recent study done on Catholic women, it’s the Sunday homily that stands out as the master medium, the prime-time spot for infusing the moral imagination of Catholic Americans with chastity’s fresh, life-giving and vibrant colors.

In a recent study that I include below, the researchers conclude that ‘the weekly Mass homily seems to represent a lost opportunity when it comes to conscience formation on the contraception issue.’

The silence can be deafening.

Preach it!

Such a homily, though, requires great prudence, real-life experience and keen wisdom.  I have personally heard homilies on contraception, or sexual ethics in general, that were oppressive, unappealing and yukky; and others that were powerful, beautiful and convicting. Merely presenting the truth in content-accurate verbiage is not enough, since preaching does not work transformation inexorably, ex opere operato.

I recall one time about 12 years ago at a Saturday evening Vigil Mass when the presider, a new priest in the parish, began the Penitential Act by asking a packed congregation of mostly retired-aged folks, ‘Let us begin by acknowledging our sins of masturbation, fornication and adultery.’ The gasps were audible!

Preaching’s effectiveness always relies on suffered and prayed for grace, extensive preparation, good rhetorical skills, engaging analogies, real world examples, attentiveness to the particular needs of the audience, awareness of human frailty, clear interrelating of the day’s Biblical texts with the homily-thesis, and a heartfelt delivery.

Every good chastity homily I’ve heard over the years has been characterized by five basic qualities: (1) Centered on Christ and his life-empowering grace, (2) Well organized and well thought out ahead of time, (3) Attuned to the audience, (4) Persuasively proposes, not imposes, the Catholic vision, (5) Concludes with practical steps and promised support needed to translate faith’s ideality into life’s reality.

Good homilists are good artists, capable of unveiling the seductive beauty of goodness and the compelling splendor of truth. And we who sit as beneficiaries of their preaching must pray for them far more than we criticize them!

The Study

Here’s the article:

Back in February this year, when the battle between religious leaders and the Obama administration over the latter’s contraceptive mandate reached a new pitch of intensity, the White House defended its policy by alleging that 98 per cent of Catholic women had used contraception. If that was the case, we were meant to ask, what on earth were the Catholic bishops, for one, making a song and dance about? Hadn’t their own female constituency effectively deserted them on this issue? Read more…

 

Good for All

A friend of mine shared a passage from Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes #69 that knocked my socks off, which I will share below.

Reading it prayerfully the other morning gave me new material for the Sacrament of Penance this coming Saturday.

What are the laity to do?

This conciliar Constitution was Pope John Paul II’s favorite conciliar document, as it offered (among other things) a model and impetus for the New Evangelization’s imperative to bear witness to the Gospel’s social, cultural, political, and economic implications in every circumstance of life.  In this sense, Gaudium et Spes offers a prophetic template for living out the lay vocation, which means first and foremost governing the temporal order according the God’s will as it has been made known through the natural law and in Christ.

Again, the lay vocation is in essence not churchy, but secular, i.e. laity don’t become saints primarily by being involved in the parish, but by being involved in the world of family, business, culture, politics. The parish exists to foster and serve this secular form of lay sanctity, just as the holy Mass culminates with the imperative verb, Ite! Go!

One could say, and I steal this phrasing from Dr. Jim Keating, the Church’s social teaching is the theology of the laity as it offers to the lay faithful the content for living out their secular vocation. This is why I am convinced that every Catholic should have next to their Bible and Catechism a copy of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church; or at least a link to it’s online version. It summarizes in an authoritative way the Catholic approach to a not-of-the-world life in the world.

The Quote

There was a particular insight I received from my friend as we meandered toward this quote that really gripped me: a casual reading of the Gospels would make you conclude that we are saved by giving alms. Wow! I then recalled an article I had read on this a couple years ago, which he said he knew well. I highly recommend it to you.

Then he shared with me this conciliar quote…

Aside from the particular policy forms this vision has/can/will take (the devil’s in the details), the principles embedded in this quote — drawn especially from the Hebrew Prophets and Jesus himself –should stand always as a blazing sun illumining the dark corners that ever-threaten the success of the Christian experiment:

God intended the earth with everything contained in it for the use of all human beings and peoples. Thus, under the leadership of justice and in the company of charity, created goods should be in abundance for all in like manner. Whatever the forms of property may be, as adapted to the legitimate institutions of peoples, according to diverse and changeable circumstances, attention must always be paid to this universal destination of earthly goods. In using them, therefore, man should regard the external things that he legitimately possesses not only as his own but also as common in the sense that they should be able to benefit not only him but also others. On the other hand, the right of having a share of earthly goods sufficient for oneself and one’s family belongs to everyone. The Fathers and Doctors of the Church held this opinion, teaching that men are obliged to come to the relief of the poor and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods. If one is in extreme necessity, he has the right to procure for himself what he needs out of the riches of others. Since there are so many people prostrate with hunger in the world, this sacred council urges all, both individuals and governments, to remember the aphorism of the Fathers, “Feed the man dying of hunger, because if you have not fed him, you have killed him,” and really to share and employ their earthly goods, according to the ability of each, especially by supporting individuals or peoples with the aid by which they may be able to help and develop themselves.

Religion-free Zone

The following reflection came as a result of a question my wife asked me the other day about the Democrats’ debate over the words ‘God-given.’. I had taken a few moments to email her my response, but since then I have been thinking more and more about what’s at stake in this debate. My thoughts are a bit tangled and dense and partial, but it seems worthwhile to toss in my 2 cents as it becomes increasingly important to shed more light than heat in these pre-election days.

DNC and Secularism

The vigorous debate during the Democratic National Convention over whether or not to remove ‘God’ from its platform is related to the Party’s more general adoption of a certain conception of what role religion should/should not play in a secular State. Their position, regardless of one’s  judgment on it’s viability, is an attempt to intelligently respond to an unavoidable and irreducibly complex question: How does a religiously diverse/pluralistic democracy negotiate difference while preserving unity?

In short, the logic of the liberal democratic view contends that religious pluralism requires that faith-based reasoning (i.e. arguments drawn from the sacred texts/worldview of a religious tradition) be considered a non-public form of reason, i.e. a form of reasoning that cannot serve as the basis for the laws that govern public life.  In this view, faith-based arguments are disqualified from possessing any publicly binding force by the very fact that they arise from a distinctive theological tradition within in a pluralistic society; which would allow the part to determine the whole.

This premise, carried to its logical conclusion, leads to a progressive excision within the socio-political order of all obvious (or latent) forms of ‘religious reasoning.’  What replaces such religious reasoning?  A secular form of reason (here ‘secular’ is defined as the world understood as devoid of any transcendent or theological meaning) that construct theories of justice, of human flourishing, etc. based on a ‘reasonable consensus;’ theories that are then invested by their purveyors with the binding force of ‘public reason,’ that nebulous consensus arrived at by secularized, reasonable people.

It is this last claim that really becomes for secularists the sticky wicket, as it begs the million dollar question (as Alasdair McIntyre phrased it), ‘Whose justice, Which rationality?’  How does one argue for the truth of one’s claims, and how does the newly conceived justice/rationality get to ‘win’ a dominant position?

Naked Zone

This version of the secular State attempts to solve the challenges found in a religiously pluralistic democracy by ‘cleansing the temple’ of public life from all vestiges of religious reasoning and rhetoric, putting in religion’s place an alternative ideology that, it is argued, is capable of bearing a sufficient ‘neutrality’ to allow for peaceful coexistence.  Such secularists argue that their approach is capable of justly negotiating the seemingly irreconcilable differences among religious traditions by leaving, as the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus called it, a Naked Public Square where all are welcome without distinction or judgment.  In the religion-free zone, religious people can be themselves in the privacy of their own heart.

In its ‘softer’ forms, this alternative ideology promotes a public tolerance of religious traditions’ non-public beliefs and practices, while in its ‘harder’ forms (as in France) it aggressively sidelines, and seeks to digest, religious traditions as a way to reduce/eliminate the necessary, messy tensions that flow from cohabitating in a religiously pluralistic society.

Imposing Faith?

In either version of this secularism, the social-psychological effects tend toward the radical privitization of religion, i.e. it cultivates a mindset among religious practitioners that views religiously-based language and worldviews as strictly personal (defined here as private), and pressures anyone who attempts to share their faith to see such an act as ‘imposing’ the private on the public. Evangelization becomes proselytizing.  Moral arguments become mere private opinions. In some ways, this effect is far more important to the progressive elimination of religion from public life than is the high profile political-legal fight to elminate religion from public life.

Cultural shifts precede political-legal revolutions.

It’s About Morality

In particular, it is the ethical dimension of religious traditions that comes to the fore — e.g. abortion, marriage, sexuality — and serves as the prime target of secular reasoning’s critique of non-public religious worldviews.  As so much of the history of the grounding and force of the arguments for the inalienable dignity of unborn human life, or of the definition of marriage as heterosexual, indissoluble and monogamous, appeals to some conception of a God who created humanity with a wise and provident design, anyone who wishes to deconstruct these ethical arguments must contend with their theological rationale.  And though the Catholic tradition would assert that these arguments could be persuasively made apart from theology (i.e. natural law theories), the fact is few people make such fine distinctions and it is usually quite easy to make the Slam Dunk, guilt-by-association argument (i.e. anti-abortionists are religious fanatics trying to impose their parochial fundamentalisms on our diverse society) and simply bring a speedy end to the hegemony of Christian morality in America.

So, we return to the DNC vote — to remove, or at least domesticate, God is the necessary next step in the progressive elimination of religion’s non-public role from public life. In its place is the ideological complex that is seeking to deify free-floating (i.e. detached from any conception of objective, self-evident, binding truth) human choice as the source and summit of law and culture, though the definition(s) of what is choice-worthy rests on the portion of the population that has the power to impose  arguments of justice/rationality on the rest of us.

{This somehow reminds me of a funny comment an elder priest once made to me — ‘A Catholic parent recently pleaded with me to speak to her back-from-college son about his new-found atheism, and my first question to him was, “What’s the name of the girl you’re sleeping with?” ‘In my experience,’ he said, ‘rejection of “organized” religion, or the idea of God, is often arrived at through the back door of a morally dissonant life — my lifestyle is presently incompatible with my faith, so I can either repent of my sin, or rework/reject the faith.’}

Further Reading

Though I will not propose the Catholic alternative to this vision, I will propose to those really interested in delving deeper: buy Cardinal George’s The Difference God Makes.  In it he argues for a unique, ‘simply Catholic’ alternative that still preserves what is good in the secularist experiment.  It’s excellent.

John Allen, whom I find to be a purveyor of intelligent analysis in the Church, also has some intriguing things to say on this.

Also excellent, but working from a very different angle, is David Hart’s Atheist Delusions, where he argues that the highest ethical ideals of the anti-religion secularists are actually disingenuously masked versions of a distinctively Christian worldview.  All the benefits of Christianity without Christ. He also makes these same arguments in a highly entertaining radio debate with an atheist-secularist.

I will end my analysis with a quote from the CDF in Rome that weighs in on this debate with some keen insights:

In democratic societies, all proposals are freely discussed and examined. Those who, on the basis of respect for individual conscience, would view the moral duty of Christians to act according to their conscience as something that disqualifies them from political life, denying the legitimacy of their political involvement following from their convictions about the common good, would be guilty of a form of intolerant secularism. Such a position would seek to deny not only any engagement of Christianity in public or political life, but even the possibility of natural ethics itself. Were this the case, the road would be open to moral anarchy, which would be anything but legitimate pluralism. The oppression of the weak by the strong would be the obvious consequence. The marginalization of Christianity, moreover, would not bode well for the future of society or for consensus among peoples; indeed, it would threaten the very spiritual and cultural foundations of civilization.

My Bride

To bring this story full circle, I was able to bring to my wife this final product of my musings. She is my editor, and a brilliant one at that who puts right all my misplaced modifiers. But, as I am certain you can imagine if you have heroically endured this tangle of ideas to the end, my tome brought about an effect in her consonant with my other identity: Inventor of the mind-numbing NealQuil®.

If you have insomnia, let me know – I will write you my thoughts on it, and cure it.