Ethics, Culture, & Policy

Fr. Barron comments on the HHS contraception mandate

2012-01-31T09:57:00.000-05:00

Generation JPII - Raising Our Parents Catholic

2012-01-30T18:47:00.001-05:00

Michelangelo in Rome - Cornelius Sullivan

2012-01-30T15:28:00.000-05:00

Michelangelo in Rome

Pieta, marble, 1499, Rome.

Cornelius Sullivan-Rome

There is one place on earth where you can be within a few steps of the ultimate masterpieces in sculpture, painting, and architecture done by the same artist. You would be standing under the dome of Peters Basilica in Rome close to a marble Pieta and adjacent to the Sistine Chapel fresco paintings. Michelangelo Buonarroti achieved unequaled excellence in all three mediums.

He signed his letters “Michelangelo, Sculptor”. His way of seeing and uncovering form in a Neo Platonic way in a block of marble enabled him to paint figures that are three dimensional and to design architecture that commands space. He spent most of his life in Rome but considered himself a Florentine. After his death his Florentine followers were able to sneak his body out of Rome so that he could be buried at home. His tomb is in the neighborhood church of his youth, Santa Croce.

The young sculptor came to Rome inauspiciously with the proceeds from the sale of a marble cupid that he carved, aged by burying, and then passed off as an antique. It was bought by Cardinal Riario. The cardinal did not like being duped but nevertheless provided the young sculptor with a large weathered block of marble. The young man carved a larger than life size Bacchus. In a very short time the sculpture that Michelangelo did in Rome rivaled the great works from antiquity.

Art Historian William Wallace names four Michelangelo works as cultural icons; The Rome Pieta, the Sistine Fresco Paintings, Moses, and David. The David is in Florence, the others are in Rome. Michelangelo has architecture all around the city. The Moses sculpture is part of the tomb of Pope Julius II at the church of Saint Peter in Chains near the Coliseum. His Risen Christ marble is in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva by the Parthenon. All are accessible, only the Sistine Chapel requires an admission fee. We can look more closely at the three works at the

Vatican

Saint Peters Basilica, view from the rear.

Michelangelo’s dome is the grandchild of the Parthenon dome. The Renaissance began in 1402 with the competition for the sculpture for the bronze doors of the Baptistry in Florence. Lorenzo Ghiberti bested Fillipo Bruneleschi for the commission which he would work on for the rest of his life. Michelangelo called the doors “The Gates of Paradise”. Disappointed, Bruneleschi left the city and went to Rome. He studied the Parthenon and understood how the great dome was built. That knowledge had not been passed down, it was lost, and needed to be rediscovered by intense looking. Back in Florence, the confidence of the Renaissance impelled the citizens to build the largest church in the world. They began to build the Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, even though they did not know how to build a dome to cap it. The plan was to build the dome over a dirt support and then take the dirt out in wheelbarrows. They would find a way to do it.

Brunelecschi returned and said, never mind the dirt, “I think I know how to do it.” He did. Michelangelo said that he was privileged to grow up under the shadow of the magnificent dome. His dome for Saint Peters was based upon Bruneleschi’s dome.

As an old man he volunteered to be the architect for Saint Peters Basilica for “the glory of God”, serving without pay until his death. He saw the drum for the dome before he died but not the dome itself. He took away fussy crenellations from previous architects and clarified and kept Bramante’s Greek cross design. The central pilasters became massive supports for the great dome.

This photograph shows the dome from the back and it also shows the muscularity of Michelangelo’s architecture. I call attention to it because he was a sculptor of muscular bodies first and foremost and that informed his work in all mediums. After his death the basilica became a Latin cross design with the long nave to accommodate more pilgrims. Some lament the fact that, as you approach the church, the dome is obscured by the massive façade. From any where else in the city, the dome dominates the skyline.

Sistine Chapel Fresco Paintings

There is no need for me to describe the fresco paintings because they are so well known. I can repeat what I have often told my students. The sculptor did not want to do the commission. There was some intrigue. Bramante, the architect for the basilica at the time, had the ear of Pope Julius. He said get Michelangelo to do the ceiling of that chapel, that odd shaped impossible space, (so that my home town boy, Raphael, can have the good job painting in your palace). To get out of the bad job the sculptor claimed to not know fresco. The shrewd pope said, oh no, we know you apprenticed with Gerlandaio in Florence, climb that scaffolding.

Michelangelo began painting the twelve apostles. It was not going well. The good thing was he could be out of there in six months. But he could not do something not worthy of his great gifts. He destroyed what was done and ran off to the marble quarries in the mountains of Carrara to think. He came back and told Julius that he would paint all of Genesis on the ceiling. Many years later it ended up being more than three hundred figures, figures painted as never before. It remains a case of making something good out of a bad job. We and history are the beneficiaries. If the sculptor had his way there would have been a few more marble figures.

The Rome Pieta

Michelangelo was twenty five when he finished carving his Pieta. The Sistine frescoes were from his middle years. Four years for the ceiling, and then many popes later he did the Last Judgement.

The Pieta is something good from a good job. The contract for the young man with the French Cardinal guarantied that it would be the best marble in Rome. It still is. The photograph above shows what it may have looked like in the French chapel at the back of the old basilica. It would have been on a low base. The subject was the dead Christ. The sculptor was able to do what he wanted to do, carve a perfect nude male figure. Elevated as it is now, above eyelevel, the subject has become more about the face of the Virgin. Pope Benedict on the Pieta concept: "The languages into which the Gospel entered when it came to the pagan world did not have such modes of expression. But the image of the pieta, the Mother grieving for her son, became the vivid translation of this word. In her, God's maternal affliction is open to view. In her we can behold it and touch it. She is the compasio of God, displayed in a human being who has let herself be drawn wholly into God's mystery".-Mary, 1997, page 78.

Low or high the sculpture is good from any angle and people still gasp when they first see it, even from far away behind bullet proof glass.

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Politics of the '60s Lives On--As the Pro-Life Movement

2012-01-29T21:41:00.002-05:00

With its vibrancy, its youth, and its moral seriousness, the March for Life 2012 reminds us once again of the point made by that prominent participant in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, who marched arm in arm with that other abortion opponent, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King.

Whatever else it is, the pro-life movement of the last thirty-plus years is one of the most massive and sustained expressions of citizen participation in the history of the United States.

So wrote the late Richard John Neuhaus in an article, "The Pro-Life Movement as the Politics of the 1960s," published in First Things in 2009, discussing a book by political scientist Jon Shields, The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.

In his 1969 work The End of Liberalism, Theodore Lowi wrote of a politics deprived of conflict over great moral principles. As Lowi saw it, American politics was dominated by opaque interest-group bargaining, which left the public paralyzed by a “nightmare of administrative boredom.” We have already mentioned the Port Huron Statement [of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962], which began with the declaration: “Making values explicit—an initial task in establishing alternatives—is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted.” Shields puts the matter nicely: “One might suppose that present-day conservatives would have declared war on a political system that was largely engineered by 1960s liberals. Yet it is liberals who are mounting a counterattack against this liberal revolution. What is more, their arguments often have a surprisingly conservative ring to them. For example, those who hope to enlist centrist voters against divisive moralists sound much more like Richard Nixon than Tom Hayden. In a strange political turn, they have embraced what Nixon called ‘the silent majority’ as the source of their salvation from 1960s liberalism.”

Or this:

The pro-life movement is a movement for change, indeed for what some view as the radical change of eliminating the unlimited abortion license. “Meanwhile,” writes Shields, “the pro-choice movement is a conservative movement defending the status quo.

The way in which the pro-life movement of today embodies the best of the politics of the 1960s is evident in this clip of the March for Life 2012:

Fr. Robert Barron on St. Thomas Aquinas (feast day January 28)

2012-01-27T19:41:00.001-05:00

January 28 is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274. Priest and doctor of the Church, patron of all universities and of students, theologian and philosopher, the Angelic Doctor was one of the greatest minds of any time or tradition.

Don't miss G.K. Chesterton's biography, St. Thomas Aquinas: "The Dumb Ox".

For further reading, here is a link to Father Barron's article entitled, America Needs You, Thomas Aquinas, and his book,

Robert Barron. Thomas Aquinas, Spiritual Master (New York: Crossroads Publishing Company, 1996).

Posted: 1/28/2011 6:00:00 AM on and by Word On Fire |Retrieved and posted here January 27, 2012 from http://www.wordonfire.org/WoF-Blog/WoF-Blog/January-2011/Spirituality-Feast-of-St-Thomas-Aquinas.aspx

Promoting social justice

2012-01-27T15:46:00.003-05:00

Paul Adams

Trying to navigate the conceptual fog that envelops the concept of social justice, I just came across an interesting article, "Social Justice, Institutions, and Communities," posted today on the Witherspoon Institute blog, Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good by Adam J. MacLeod. It concludes like this:

The job of the individual in promoting social justice is to act in concert with others in his or her community to serve real needs, both within the community and in other communities. The job of the state is to support and enable free institutions—the church, the family, property ownership, charitable organizations, for-profit businesses, trade groups—to do their good work. This perhaps is not all that social justice requires, but it is a good place to start.

This is close to Michael Novak's definition of social justice in his superb study of Catholic social teaching, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. There he takes up Hayek's challenge that the concept of social justice is a mirage, incoherently combining two incompatible understandings of the term: 1) social justice as a principle of state regulation, a regulatory principle or ideal of social order; 2) social justice as a virtue.

Novak sees the first sense of the term as problematic. Characterizing no existing society, it seems like an ideal against which actual institutions are judged. Behind this lies a view of the authority of the state and its responsibility and capacity that has origins in Aristotle and Aquinas, but which modern developments--precisely the profound social changes and dislocations that popes Leo XIII and Pius XI addressed through their 1891 and 1931 encyclicals--have made untenable. They and subsequent popes, most fully John Paul in Centesimus Annus (1991) tried to navigate a path through the conceptual fog of 'social justice', in the process denouncing socialism precisely for its suppression or domination of the social space between state and individual. The social teaching of these encyclicals also rejected a market-oriented dichotomy between state and individual that discounted the "mediating structures" which Berger and Neuhaus emphasized in their monograph, "To Empower People" (1976; reissued with a collection of essays, edited by Berger, Neuhaus, & Novak in 1996). In seeking to renew civil society (reform institutions and correct morals, as Pius XI put it), they sought a way beyond the individualist-collectivist, state-individual paradigm that still bedevils much discussion of social policy, as well as recent political controversies about conscience and religious freedom (see Vischer, 2009).

In much discussion of Catholic social teaching, though, as well as secular and social work discussions of social justice, the state's responsibility for the common good is taken to require direct state control of the economy (a statist tendency common to nearly all communist, socialist, and social-democratic perspectives as well as fascism) and extensive state provision or funding of social welfare. It is true that Leo XIII and Pius XI both condemn economic liberalism as individualistic and materialistic, acknowledging the state's responsibility for the common good and for workers and the poor in particular. But both explicitly condemn statism and emphasize the importance of institutions and associations of civil society, not least free trade unions.

The experience of the last century, with its hypertrophy of the state, the rise and collapse of utopian ideologies that looked to direction of society and economy by bureaucratic elites and experts, urges caution. We cannot but question an interpretation of the concept of social justice that points to ever-expanding state control and diminution of civil society. Seeing the solution to social problems in terms of expanding state control over economy and civil society attributes to the modern state both a capacity to ensure the common good and the moral integrity and disinterestedness that has to ignore a mass of counter-evidence. Developing Hayek's challenge before taking it up, Novak notes:

...free modern societies are so complex that no one authority can can possibly control their manifold outcomes, whether regarding supply and demand, or prices, or the distribution of income. The failures of socialism (so visible after 1989) make all this plain. To attribute all social outcomes to someone's personal intention or capacity to control is, therefore, far too simple. Consequently, say Hayek and other objectors, to claim to be speaking for social justice can only be to advance one's own abstract preferences. Those who claim to speak for social justice prejudice arguments concerning means and ends by defining their opponents as "unjust." In brief, use of the term social justice is moral imperialism by the imposition of abstraction.

The term social justice, used like this as it usually is in social work (which defines it as a "core social work value") is a conversation-stopper. In Catholic social discourse, the Church's "preferential option for the poor" is often taken to imply a preference for government programs, an expansion of the state rather than a renewal of civil society.

Is there a way to recover a use of the term that addresses both the need for social reorganization (with special reference to the needs of the poor and oppressed) and at the same time--acknowledging that justice is one of the four cardinal virtues--situates the concept of social justice within the philosophical and theological frame of virtue ethics? That is, can Hayek's challenge about the incompatible social and personal aspects of social justice, be met? Or must one aspect of social justice, the virtue (or value) aspect, be abandoned in favor of a conversation-stopping rhetorical move to promote a political program while condemning anyone who disagrees as unjust. Such a move is unhelpful, not least because it prevents examination of alternative means, for example to reduce poverty and inequality.

Novak answers the challenge with the following definition:

Social justice is a specific modern form of the ancient virtue of justice (pp.77-78).

He continues:

Men and women exercise this specific social habit when they (a) join with others (b) to change the institutions of society. The practice of social justice means activism; it means organizing; it means trying to make the system better (p. 78).

This approach is congruent with the way the NASW Code of Ethics translates the core value of social justice into an ethical principle calling for activism:

Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people. Social workers’ social change efforts are focused primarily on issues of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice.

Here, however, the Code is addressing the responsibility of social workers as professionals to act in certain ways with and on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Novak is talking of a key virtue of individuals in a free society, a moral virtue that social policy and professional practice may encourage, suppress, or undermine. Continuing his definition in a way compatible with empowerment, asset-based, family- and community-strengthening approaches to social work and social policy, but (except as a last resort) not to top-down interventions that seek to rescue individuals from their families, communities, churches, or other non-state associations.

[The practice of social justice] does not necessarily mean enlarging the state; on the contrary, it means enlarging civil society (p. 78).

In this definition, personal virtue and political aim are not separated, as if they related respectively to micro and macro levels of practice. As a virtue, social justice remains a conscious habit, a dispositional tendency of individuals' behavior and character. But like other virtues, it applies to all levels of practice and to all individuals, whether professionals, clients, or citizens. It sees the common good as a shared responsibility of society, not solely the business of the state. Social justice rests on the habit of association so important to a free society and so threatening to totalitarian states, but it is not reducible to it.

The habit of social justice has as its aim the improvement of some feature of the common good--possibly of the social system in whole or in part (the welfare system, say), but possibly as well of some nonofficial feature (putting up a statue in a public park, organizing a dramatic society in a college, etc.). To tutor a disadvantaged person in the inner city could be a work of social justice; to organize to protect workers' rights; to organize a referendum to prevent the building of a nightclub on a residential street might be another. To build a factory in a poor area; to organize a pro life or prochoice group--all these and other analogous activities are prima facie instances of the exercise of social justice (p. 79).

The example of a prochoice group reminds one of what Novak immediately acknowledges, that "[n]ot all those who claim to be acting for social justice may actually be furthering the work of justice."

In order to be just, an act must be correct in every aspect--manner, timing, motive, accuracy of perception, and all the other qualities of action; otherwise it is defective. Thus, to show someone that what he or she claims to be a virtue falls short of either some or all of the demands of virtue is to affirm the ideal of social justice as a standard of moral judgment" (p.79).

To claim to give priority to the interests of the poor as a matter of social justice--as liberation theology did--does not exempt one from criticism on the grounds that one has a false analysis of reality or of the dynamics of social change, lacks practical judgment (prudence, phronesis) in assessing the likely outcomes of one's activity. The virtues are interdependent and "talk to each other" as Deirdre McCloskey puts it. "One need not accept uncritically [liberation theology's - or any other] claim to be practicing social justice" (Novak, p. 79).

Social justice in this definition does not stop conversation or assume a particular political program. It is a moral virtue but not a regulatory principle of the state or its bureaucratic-professional agents. It is nevertheless clearly visible in its absence, say in a low-income disorganized neighborhood; or a southern Italian community where no-one trusts anyone beyond the family or takes any civic responsibility or initiative; or a communist or fascist state where non-state associations are tightly controlled or suppressed by the state. The key strategy of East European democratic reformers like the Civic Forum in Czechoslavakia, was precisely the reawakening of civil society. The movement, which led to the collapse of the Communist regime in 1989, was for the freedom and social space to exercise the virtue of social justice.

The most serious threat to religious liberty

2012-01-25T19:40:00.007-05:00

The January 20 final rule from Kathleen Sebelius and DHHS is the most stunning attack on the First Amendment, religious liberty, and conscience rights in America in our time.

There is something perversely Orwellian about the whole thing--forcing people to purchase directly services they abhor in violation of their conscience; defining contraception, including abortifacients, as preventive health care--is pregnancy now a disease?--requiring people to collude in the killing of babies in their mother's womb--calling a woman's right what is literally and on a vast scale the slaughter of innocents while making no exemption for those millions who, as a matter of deep religious conviction, see it as murder.

If the Obama administration carries through on this threat and if and to the extent that Catholic schools, hospitals, charities, universities and colleges, including agencies that serve the poorest and most vulnerable, remain faithful to the Church and their own consciences, there will be a huge decline in services and programs as these institutions close down. (We have already seen Catholic Charities forced out of all adoption services in some states where they were required to place children with homosexual couples, so reducing services to all children. This ruling is incomparably more coercive and on a much vaster scale.) And why? It is not as if contraceptives were not already widely available on the market for those who want to purchase them.

On the face of it, picking a fight like this makes no sense for an administration that claims to care about access to health care, education, and services to the poor. Already they have alienated many Catholics who found it in their consciences to support Obama in 2008. In order not to alienate secular-liberal feminists who give them enormous sums of money but have nowhere else to go politically? Or is the point to get the Supreme Court to do the dirty work of standing up to the anti-Catholic, secularist, and/or feminist opponents of religious freedom for the administration--which then can mobilize its supporters with the haunting specter of another appointment to the Court of a justice not given to trampling the First Amendment or inventing constitutional rights out of thin air?

Obama's strategy all along has been to isolate faithful Catholics and split off the Catholics in Name Only, the CINOs who populate the Democratic Party leadership (and sadly, much of its base), the tendency represented by the National 'Catholic' Reporter. The strategy worked well and the administration found some prominent Catholic supporters, like Doug Kmiec and even the Catholic Health Association, to provide cover for a national health care program that would fund abortions. But this time Obama, Sebelius, and Pelosi may have gone too far, losing support among its own erstwhile supporters.

If it is a miscalculation, part of the reason must be the failure of imagination of secular and religious liberals alike--the supporters of Planned Parenthood, abortion, and contraception. They simply cannot understand how anyone could think differently from them on the issues of life and death, sex and marriage. Hence the immediate resort to words like extremist, weird, fundamentalist, fanatical, etc., to characterize the mainstream, vanilla, faithful adherents of the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition that has no hold on them and which they can no longer even understand.

Here is a recent statement of the US bishops in the context of the National March for Life:

Bishops Decry HHS Rule, Urge Catholics To Stand Up For Religious Liberty And Conscience Rights In Homilies At Vigil For Life

January 23, 2012

WASHINGTON—Both the president of the U.S. bishops and the bishops’ Pro-Life chairman called on the thousands of Catholics gathered for the National Prayer Vigil for Life to speak out for the protection of conscience rights and religious liberty.

“From a human point of view, we may be tempted to surrender, when our government places conception, pregnancy and birth under the ‘center for disease control,’ when chemically blocking conception or aborting the baby in the womb is considered a ‘right’ to be subsidized by others who abhor it,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) at the vigil’s closing Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on January 23.

His words referred to the January 20 announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that nearly all employers will be forced to cover drugs and procedures that violate their conscience in their health insurance plans.

“When the ability of feeding, housing, and healing the struggling of the world is curtailed and impeded if one does not also help women abort their babies, one can hardly be faulted for being tempted to the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ and just consider all as lost,” Cardinal-designate Dolan said.

Addressing the opening Mass the previous evening, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, archbishop of Galveston-Houston and chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, excoriated the HHS rule.

“Never before in our US History has the Federal Government forced citizens to directly purchase what violates our beliefs. At issue here as our President of the Conference stated it this past Friday, is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for conscience and religious liberty,” said Cardinal DiNardo.

He cited the January 19 address of Pope Benedict XVI to U.S. bishops visiting Rome, in which the pope said, “it is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres. The seriousness of these threats needs to be appreciated at every level of ecclesial life.”

Cardinal DiNardo said that the pope had “nailed” the issue in light of the HHS announcement and tied the issue directly to the March for Life. “His calls for courage to counter a reductive secularism which would delegitimize the Church’s participation in public life and debate have targeted the issues we face in our pro-life efforts, to defend those who defend human life and to defend their religious liberty!”

The full text of both homilies is available online: www.usccb.org/about/media-relations/resources/2012-national-prayer-vigil-for-life-homilies.cfm
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And here are some links on this issue:

USCCB statetment on HHS Rule: http://www.usccb.org/news/2012/12-012.cfm

Video of Cardinal-Designate Dolan, President of the USCCB, speaking about HHS rule: http://www.usccb.org/news/2012/12-013.cfm

Catholic Relief Services' statement on HHS rule: http://newswire.crs.org/crs-objects-to-obama-administration-decision-to-require-catholic-institutions-to-offer-birth-control-to-employees/

Catholic Charities USA's statement on HHS rule: http://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/page.aspx?pid=2516

Michael Sean Winter's Distinctly Catholic blog commenting on HHS Rule: http://ncronline.org/blogs/distinctly-catholic/jaccuse

Washington Post editorial on HHS rule: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/respecting-religious-exemptions/2012/01/22/gIQA0ZESJQ_story.html?hpid=z3

USCCB Comments filed on proposed HHS rule issued in August 2011: http://www.usccb.org/about/general-counsel/rulemaking/comments-proposed-hhs-regs-neonates-research-2001-08.cfm

Good article from Acton Institute: http://www.acton.org/pub/commentary/2012/01/25/unconscionable-threat-conscience

USCCB fact sheet on HHS rule: Click here

Caravaggio Is the Antidote to Conceptual Art - Cornelius Sullivan

2012-01-24T08:50:00.001-05:00

Caravaggio and the aesthetics of meaning

Canestra di frutta, Still Life, 1599, Ambrosian Library, Milan.

Cornelius Sullivan-Rome

Why do Caravaggio paintings have such a profound influence on us? His greatness comes from two interdependent things. First, his paint is gorgeous, and secondly, he is a master storyteller using posed figures and objects bathed in his made up light. He helps us to believe what is hard to believe. Francine Prose calls him, "Painter of Miracles".

I recall a lecture by the art historian John Spike, who lives in Florence and teaches in Rome, where he said that Art History is the study of "style" and the study of Christian Art History involves the study of "meaning".

The depth and sense of truth in a Caravaggio fictional visual narrative separate him from his many followers and so many conventional painters. The meaning in one of his paintings comes from his showing us the way that things are in nature and his revelations of the way that humans act.

Don’t believe any art historian that tries to tell you that the Still Life above is photo realistic or that it is about life and death with some leaves vital and others sagging in death. It is about the way things are where the painter shows us how a vine knots, what it feels like. He tells us about gravity. He describes value and color that define geometric form and melds that color with local color. And like all the great painters he gives us a sense that this illusion is made out of paint. Caravaggio is like an early Modern artist because we marvel at what he has created with paint. Form and content are transparent and content remains representational but we are aware of the paint. There is never any thought that this is a photograph, the paint on canvas is part of the subject of the work. I like to contemplate that yellow white opaque background. It is an invention of art like a Van Gogh sky made from swirling globs of paint. The globs are not disguised as anything other than paint and yet we accept that they are also sky. That is the magic.

Even in complex compositions with figures and a story Caravaggio’s paint is tangible.

Abraham and Isaac, Ufizzi Gallery, Florence.

In telling how humans act, Caravaggio tells us more than other artists do. Remember all the depictions you have seen of Abraham and Isaac. Wooden gestures, maybe poses derived from Classical sculpture, are clear, readable, and balanced. On the other hand, imagine Caravaggio saying to the model, "No, put your thumb on his face and press, use some force to hold him down." And "Little Isaac, don’t look so relaxed, he’s going to cut your throat, look at the knife." And, "Abraham, look puzzled, OK, don’t move." He gives us all that information in paint and the story becomes real.

Something special happens to viewers in front of a Caravaggio painting. Prose describes a tour guide explaining to studentsThe Calling of Saint Matthew in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. "There is nothing she is telling them that they absolutely need to hear, and the power of the paintings is drowning out her voice." And, "… it is possible to understand this painting without knowing much about art history, or Caravaggio, or even, perhaps, about the New Testament."

As a former guide I know that experience and so I learned to talk and explain before hand. Recently, in Galleria Borghese I saw a ten year old boy and a seven year old girl stuck in front of David and Goliath. Their parents wanted to move on but the kids kept saying "Just another minute, please."

David and Goliath, Galleria Borghese, Rome

Again remember the paintings or sculptures that you have seen of this story. Often Goliath’s head is a massive inert object while David poses triumphantly. Caravaggio creates a boy who looks at a loss to understand what has happened. He is not without sympathy. Goliath is also puzzled and his suffering and death are there to see. Goliath is a self portrait of the artist not so long before he died.

In July I wrote an article called "Rome’s Extravagant Celebration of Caravaggio" initiated because of the number of events, guided tours, books, articles, and exhibits about Caravaggio that I saw in the streets of Rome. Only now have I discovered Michael Kimmelman’s article in the New York Times of March 10, 2010 with a similar theme. He notes that Caravaggio has eclipsed Michelangelo Bounarroti as the most written about artist based on the charts of a Toronto based art historian.

Kimmelman correctly attributes Caravaggio’s popularity to the fact that he "… exemplifies the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible" and that he is one who has "wrestled art back to the ground, distilled scenes into a theatrical instant at which time suddenly stopped". I am not sure that the establishment art critic fully grasps the counter culturalism of Caravaggio. He says, "Out to ‘destroy painting,’ as Nicolas Poussin, the most high-minded of all French artists, saw it, Caravaggio connected with ordinary people, the ones who themselves arrived barefoot and filthy as pilgrims in Rome".

Caravaggio was the artist in time, and place, and spirit that reflected the new classless faith lived by Saint Phillip Neri in the streets of Rome. This new spirit confirmed that the Church is indeed for sinners. And Caravaggio, never afflicted with any self righteousness, was able to understand that faith.

As one who knows art, Kimmelman, in his videos about art, describes the necessary elitism of the art world and has said that there are no fixed standards in art. "Only experts are allowed to tell you what is art or not." And "We want to be told what we are supposed to think." And he says that "All art is conceptual." He says that White on White, the all white Minimalist painting by Robert Ryman from the sixties, is about a "conversation within art" that "pushes the conversation forward". This conversation is a private conversation reserved for the cognoscenti whereas the almost universal appreciation of a Caravaggio painting is for everyone.

Modernist abstraction, a reflection of subjective reality (everyone is an artist), where everything looks equal (don’t worry we’ll tell you what’s good), was bound to lead inevitably to the dead end that is Conceptual Art, art that is only an idea. The cellar of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is full of large abstract paintings that no one wants to look at. Maybe the conversation about art continues down there. To admit that they are worthless would topple the large financial structure that authenticates them.

Modern Art is based on the idea that all aesthetics are subjective. This comes from the Critique of Judgment of philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant arrives at this disembodiment because he starts on shaky ground with the dualism of Descartes, where body and spirit are separated. The attack on the body and on matter comes from the will to power. Conceptual Art has succeeded in eliminating matter from art. Caravaggio is the antidote to Conceptual Art.

Caravaggio painted a unity of body with soul. Since the study of Christian Art is about the study of meaning, there is no such thing as Christian abstract art. Art Historian Rudolf Wittkower in Art and Architecture of Italy uses a nuanced Italian adjective to describe Caravaggio’s paintings, "tenebroso". It means dark, but it also means mysterious. Caravaggio created an aesthetics of meaning, explaining the inexplicable and giving form to the mysterious.

Posted here with permission. Originally posted at http://www.sullivanart.com/caravaggio_and_the_aesthetics_of.htm

The Unbearable Wrongness of Roe

2012-01-22T21:05:00.001-05:00

The Unbearable Wrongness of Roe

by Michael Stokes Paulsen

from Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Good

January 23, 2012

39 years ago, the Supreme Court delivered a radical, legally untenable, immoral decision. It has forfeited its entitlement to have its decisions respected, and followed, by the other branches of government, by the states, and by the people.

Today, thousands of people at the March for Life in Washington, D.C., are commemorating the thirty-ninth anniversary of a legal and moral monstrosity, Roe v. Wade, and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton. The two cases, in combination, created an essentially unqualified constitutional right of pregnant women to abortion—the right to kill their children, gestating in their wombs, up to the point of birth. After nearly four decades, Roe’s human death toll stands at nearly sixty million human lives, a total exceeding the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Pol Pot’s killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined. Over the past forty years, one-sixth of the American population has been killed by abortion. One in four African-Americans is killed before birth. Abortion is the leading cause of (unnatural) death in America.

It is almost too much to contemplate: the prospect that we are living in the midst of, and accepting (to various degrees) one of the greatest human holocausts in history. And so we don’t contemplate it. Instead, we look for ways to deny this grim reality, minimize it, or explain away our complacency—or complicity.

The Adjustment Bureau: Bad Theology AND Bad History

2012-01-22T11:19:00.006-05:00

Retrieved January 22, 2012 from http://bit.ly/xIXR0h

Fr. Barron's commentary offers a lucid discussion of how bad--and widespread--the theology of the movie, The Adjustment Bureau is. In a pervasive tendency from the nominalism of William of Ockham through the Enlightenment to modernist , especially protestant, theology, God's will is in competition with the free will of human beings. Barron shows, using the analogy of the piano teacher who takes her student from the discipline of scales and prescribed practice to the level of freedom where the student is able to express herself through her playing and even compose her own music, that this is a false understanding of God's will and its relation to ours. God is not in competition with us.

What struck me, having just watched the movie, is how the bad theology is accompanied by a distorted history of similar provenance. One of the 'angels' or 'case officers' whose job it is to keep humans on track with the Plan, explains that the Chairman (God) tried free will at various periods in history, saw what a mess humans made of things, and decided to intervene again to put things back on track. He then periodizes history according to the modernist, Enlightenment, Protestant-atheist convention which sees nothing but darkness between the end of the Roman Empire and the Enlightenment. It is always ceases to amaze me (a line I recall from Kinky Friedman concerts back in the day) how this narrative persists in face of all scholarship to the contrary not only in Hollywood and in popular prejudice, but even in supposedly serious and well regarded works like Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (see Fr. Barron's excellent commentaries here and here).

Incidentally, Joseph Pearce links us via the blog at St. Austin Review to an interesting account (from Perth, Western Australia) of JRR Tolkien and his teenage love in terms remarkably similar to the story of The Adjustment Bureau--with a priest playing the role of the 'angel' with a plan. Love is to be sacrificed to career, a plan that the young people contest and change. Tolkien married the teenage love of his life, Edith Bratt, had a great career anyway and the couple had a son, Christopher, who went on to become my Old English tutor at Oxford. You can see a bibliography reflecting Christopher Tolkien's own distinguished career here.

The culture of death and rights of those with mental illness

2012-01-22T09:01:00.002-05:00

9:23:15 PM

Massachusetts judge ordered forced abortion and sterilization of mentally ill woman

by Michael Cook | 21 Jan 2012 |

It is difficult to imagine a case better scripted for a discussion of informed consent than Mary Moe’s Massachusetts abortion.
When Mary Moe, a pseudonym for a 32-year-old woman with schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder, visited a hospital emergency room in October, it was discovered that she was pregnant. This meant that she could not take her psychiatric medication as it would harm the foetus. So the state Department of Mental Health applied to have the woman’s parents named as guardians so they could give consent for an abortion.

However, Mary did not want to have an abortion. Although she was not completely coherent, she insisted that she was “very Catholic” and would never do such a thing. She knew what abortions were, as her first pregnancy had been aborted. (She subsequently gave birth to a son, whom her parents are caring for.)

The case went before Judge Christina Harms, a Harvard Law School graduate and a former lawyer in the State’s welfare services. Judge Harms ordered Mary Moe to have an abortion. If she were intransigent, she could be “coaxed, bribed, or even enticed’’ into the hospital. Furthermore, the judge wanted to put an end to these distressing pregnancies. She ordered Mary More to be sterilized “to avoid this painful situation from recurring in the future.’’ Harms reasoned that Mary Moe was not competent to make a decision about an abortion, because of her “substantial delusional beliefs.” But if she were competent, she would choose to abort the child.

In the event, Judge Harms was overruled. “The personal decision whether to bear or beget a child is a right so fundamental that it must be extended to all persons, including those who are incompetent,’’ said the state appeals court. As for the sterilization, said one of the appeals judges, “The judge appears to have simply produced the requirement out of thin air.”

The publicity given to this unusual case has led mental health advocates to wonder how often women are forcibly aborted and sterilised. “I didn’t realize that forced sterilizations were going on anywhere,” said Howard Trachtman of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Massachusetts, told the Boston Globe. “If a precedent were set for that, then you could see a whole slew of people filing for it, or trying to get judges to order it.” “Simply having a diagnosis of schizophrenia or any other mental illness is not a basis for sterilization in and of itself. It’s just sheer prejudice,” Elyn Saks, of the University of Southern California, told the Boston Herald. ~ Boston Globe, Jan 18

Dorothyann Sarsok· 19 hours ago

I am the oldest daughter of 5 children born to a mother diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. So this issue is a very personal one for me ... and as such ... here is what I have to say on the matter. In spite of the suffering, and yes abuse and neglect, which I and my 4 other siblings suffered at the hands of a schizophrenic mother, I for one, am still thankful for my LIFE, which with the grace of God, I have grown to be a wife, mother and grandmother, who is very active in the pro-life movement. The abuse we suffered was not because we were born of a mentally handicapped woman, but because of others who did not assist our mother in caring for us .. and that's the way I see it. I am GLAD TO BE ALIVE!

Report

1 reply · active 15 hours ago

marilyn matthews· 15 hours ago

thank you dorothyann for speaking out ...your mother didn't ask to be a paranoid schizophrenic and I know you know that..unfortunately not everybody else knows that or maybe just don't CARE..and the lack of help for your mom is global...its just so much easier to write off everyone who doesn't "fit the NORM" in this selfish world ...thank GOD for people like you that know that a mother will NEVER be perfect...

Retrieved January 22, 2012 from http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/9899#comments

Fr. Barron's additional comments on "Why I Hate Religion"

2012-01-18T22:58:00.002-05:00

Excellent further analysis on that video and the tendency to uproot Jesus from his Jewish roots, from the concrete historical embodiment of Christ in his mystical body, the Church--the beauty, truth and goodness which Fr. Barron himself presents so compellingly in his "Catholicism" series. In a sense, the "Catholicism" series as a whole is the best answer to the "Hate Religion" video.

I'm reminded of Fr. Barron's brilliant commentary on Anne Rice, who made a similar move to distance herself from the real religious Jesus and the religion he founded, with all its sacraments, worship, and institutional expression, a move to turn Jesus into her own private lover.

As Fr. Barron points out, this is a widespread tendency to create one's own deracinated, dejudaized, ahistorical, individualized Jesus free from the mess of the institution--inconveniently human as well as divine--that Jesus established on earth. It is not a new tendency. It arises not only in Protestantism but has precursors in the early years of the Church, in the Marcionite and Gnostic heresies. It is a powerful temptation in all ages

Fr. Barron comments on the hate-religion-love-Jesus video

2012-01-18T16:15:00.003-05:00

My initial reaction to the video Fr. Barron discusses here was like his. It is so crude and contradictory in its theology of Jesus and his Church, so muddled and naive in the way it counterposes Jesus and religion, that I could not understand its appeal. Yet it has gone viral on YouTube, with ever-growing millions of hits. It is is necessary but not sufficient to show that it is wrong, incoherent, and contradicts Scripture and everything we know of Jesus's life and mission. It is also necessary to understand the video as a cultural phenomenon, one related both to New Age (spirituality yes, religion no) ideology and the Protestant roots of American individualism. That is what Fr. Barron attempts.

Martin Luther King sculpture - Another monumental travesty

2012-01-16T21:48:00.001-05:00

Martin Luther King Jr. as Mao Zedong

Cornelius Edmund Sullivan- Washington DC

Images do have meaning. Martin Luther King had a dream. Forty three years after his death he has a grand monument on the Washington Mall. It was just dedicated with the first Black President of the United States present. It is fitting in location and in monumental scale. It is a wonderful appropriate gesture of tribute for such a great man. But the art is not right. Many say that the portrait of Reverend King is more like a nightmare because it doesn’t look like him. Isn’t there in the concept of “portrait” something that should include visual information about the individual. He was never standing still, he was always marching. He redefined the word ‘to march”. He was a visionary, a preacher, he was inspired. He was not fat and bloated like a dough boy or inflatable character. He was a small quick man. We have a wealth of photographs and videos of his impassioned speech and intense striving.

The sculptor of the King sculpture is Chinese. There is no problem with his being Chinese, there is a problem with the kind of art that he has made. It is specific and has a particular meaning that does not fit with Dr. King. He has made sculptures of the dictator Mao. The answer given to the critics is that he was the best sculptor. It is a monumental figure coming out of the massive block. Wouldn’t it have been wise to choose an artist who can do portraits?

It has a look of Socialist Realism. Denver-based artist Ed Dwight, who was on an early planning team for the memorial, told USA Today, “Dr. King would be turning over in his grave if he knew the sculptor was from a communist country”. Is this just an unreasonable prejudice? Maybe it is not, if you look at the result, and realize that it may be a product of the aesthetic formation of the sculptor molded by the countless images of Chairman Mao Zedong that he made projecting dictatorial authority.

This may sound like a familiar refrain from me because of an article I wrote about the new sculpture of Pope John Paul II in front of the train station in Rome.-Papa Wojtyla as Capeman. The Vatican disliked the bronze because it did not look like the pope who was seen and recognized in person by more people than anyone else in history. Romans thought the statue looked like Mussolini. It is an inane pose, the pope holding out his cape to envelope all. A literature professor friend said, “It’s Marxist, turning the individual into the collective.”

The crossed arms of the pose of Dr. King speak more about repose than about the true gestures of the crusader, martyr, spiritual civil rights leader who was beaten, jailed and finally assassinated. He was a visionary. Do you remember his determined walk as he crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Montgomery Alabama? I remember his face and the way he leaned forward and looked out to the distance giving the speech at the Lincoln Memorial, the “I have a dream speech”.

Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Chester French, Washington, DC

Portraiture has a base in proportion. If each feature is correct in size and shape you can have a “likeness”. Sometimes by magic or accident, after working for a likeness, an artist can capture something of the essence, or the soul, of the individual. The greatness of many important artists has been based upon their desire and ability to do portraits. These include Titian, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, along with the American sculptors Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint Gaudens.

Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, Augustus Saint Guadens, Boston

One of the greatest public sculptures in the United States is the Shaw Memorial by Saint Gaudens, opposite the State House in Boston. It is a civil rights memorial of the Civil War Massachusetts 54^th Regiment, the all black unit led by the young white Colonel Robert Gould Shaw from Boston. The portrait of Shaw is extraordinary and you are able to know the man. The soldiers are portraits done from life and they are individuals.

Shaw lived across the street on Beacon Hill and he was chosen by the Governor to lead this regiment because his parents were devoted abolitionists who had fought to end slavery for many years.

The King Monument does not look like Dr. King. The pose is passive, he is back on his heels. It signifies rest, the job is done. King never rested, the struggle went on. As with so many prophets and martyrs, he knew his own death was imminent. His eyes swelled up in his other unforgettable speech just before he was shot, when he said, “I might not get there with you.”

With Reverend Martin Luther King, President John F. Kennedy, and Pope John Paul II the record of photographs and movies is vast and rich with information about the appearance and movements of the person. That is why it is such a travesty to have a sculpture of John Paul in Rome and a sculpture of Reverend King in DC that do not look like the men that we came to know.

Professor Isabel MacIlvain from Boston University has created a memorable portrait of JFK. It is right across the street from the Shaw Memorial outside the Massachusetts State House. Her likeness of his face is perfect and she has captured his characteristic stride. She told me she wished that she could have sculpted him in a toga so there would be more ample curves and shapes to mold. She had his actual suit and she said that the family was nervous to get it back from her. The family was involved. She is one of many excellent known American sculptors who would have done justice to a King memorial.

It’s too late now. The process was flawed. There are sculptors who can do portraits. Why didn’t someone say in the beginning, “No, that’s a bad idea, Martin never posed like a dictator.”

home

Copyright (c) 2012 Cornelius Sullivan
Retrieved January 16, 2012 from http://www.sullivanart.com/martin_luther_king_jr.html

The Global War Against Baby Girls - Nicholas Eberstadt

2012-01-16T17:07:00.001-05:00

Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.

READ MORE of this sober(ing) scientific article from the New Atlantis, Fall 2011. A stunning article on the huge sex ratio imbalances in many countries, not just the extreme case of China, arising from what the very secular-liberal Economist magazine called "gendercide"--using prenatal sex determination technology to implement sex-selective abortion--with historically unprecedented demographic consequences.

Fr. Barron on Dr. King: Non-Violence, Religion in the Public Square, Use of Language

2012-01-16T15:48:00.000-05:00

Religious Freedom Day! Proclaimed by Obama!!!!!

2012-01-16T15:27:00.001-05:00

Religious freedom at risk in same-sex marriage push

Carolyn Moynihan | 16 Jan 2012 |

January 16 is Religious Freedom Day in the United States, affirmed by President Barack Obama in the customary proclamation last Friday.

However, not everyone in the US is as sure as the President that his administration “continues to stand with all who are denied the ability to choose, express, or live their faith freely”. Just the day before, an open letter signed by leaders of some of the largest religious communities in the country voiced their concern that religious freedom is at risk in America because of the campaign to change the definition and meaning of marriage.

The letter warns that there is more at stake than clergymen possibly being forced to perform same-sex “weddings”:

Some posit that the principal threat to religious freedom posed by same-sex "marriage" is the possibility of government's forcing religious ministers to preside over such "weddings," on pain of civil or criminal liability. While we cannot rule out this possibility entirely, we believe that the First Amendment creates a very high bar to such attempts.

Instead, we believe the most urgent peril is this: forcing or pressuring both individuals and religious organizations—throughout their operations, well beyond religious ceremonies—to treat same-sex sexual conduct as the moral equivalent of marital sexual conduct. There is no doubt that the many people and groups whose moral and religious convictions forbid same-sex sexual conduct will resist the compulsion of the law, and church-state conflicts will result.

The effects would be very far-reaching -- with religious people and groups facing civil penalties for resisting new laws. And there are already examples of how existing faith-based services would be affected:

For example, in New Jersey, the state cancelled the tax-exempt status of a Methodist-run boardwalk pavilion used for religious services because the religious organization would not host a same-sex "wedding" there. San Francisco dropped its $3.5 million in social service contracts with the Salvation Army because it refused to recognize same-sex "domestic partnerships" in its employee benefits policies. Similarly, Portland, Maine, required Catholic Charities to extend spousal employee benefits to same-sex "domestic partners" as a condition of receiving city housing and community development funds.

The religious leaders conclude:

Therefore, we encourage all people of good will to protect marriage as the union between one man and one woman, and to consider carefully the far-reaching consequences for the religious freedom of all Americans if marriage is redefined. We especially urge those entrusted with the public good to support laws that uphold the time-honored definition of marriage, and so avoid threatening the religious freedom of countless institutions and citizens in this country. Marriage and religious freedom are both deeply woven into the fabric of this nation.

May we all work together to strengthen and preserve the unique meaning of marriage and the precious gift of religious freedom.

Finally, there was a very positive signal from the US Supreme Court on religious freedom last week. In a unanimous decision on the Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission case, the court ruled that churches and other religious groups must be free to choose and dismiss their leaders without government interference. Watch for more about this decision in MercatorNet.

Retrieved January 16, 2012 (Religious Freedom Day) from http://bit.ly/AeMWCM

A Moral Enterprise: America and the Irrelevance of the Tea Party

2012-01-16T14:59:00.004-05:00

Paul Adams

I recently attended a presentation by a local Tea Party leader about the relevance of his movement. It’s a good question, given the rapid collapse of TP’s influence, as far as can be discerned from the GOP primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The TP is a kind of mirror image of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Each draws support from its wing of the elite media. Both tap into resentments about crony capitalism (including “vulture capitalists,” in Rick Perry’s memorable expression) and government bailouts. Both produced a lot of steam for a time, but lacked a piston box and piston that could channel the steam into an engine that goes somewhere. Despite its using the term “party,” the TP lacked organization and leadership so could only trail along behind those who had it or dissipate into the atmosphere. Neither had demands, policies, or strategies that were clear and credible. Both tended to the quixotic and silly as well as, in my limited acquaintance, to crackpot conspiracy theories--all of which suggests the persistence on left and right of the ‘paranoid style in American politics’ and an innocence about real political and social forces.

The presentation was lamentable. A rant against the Supreme Court, it largely ignored the issues that must concern anyone who cares about the common good--like why inequality is increasing rapidly and how this relates to the growing social divide in the U.S. For the less affluent and less highly educated this gulf finds expression in communities where marriage is disintegrating, children are growing up without at least one of their parents, abortion is rampant, divorce and cohabitation are norms. The evidence overwhelmingly supports the arguments of social conservatives like Rick Santorum, while liberals who claim to speak for the poor and downtrodden celebrate these developments as expressions of family diversity (not breakdown), of individual choice and freedom (for adults anyway).

On these issues Tea Partiers have little or nothing to say. They resemble liberals who see moral questions like same-sex marriage only in terms of individual rights. They are bound to a kind of individualism that sees nothing but aggregations of individual choices in the structures that mediate between individual and state. These are the associations or institutions celebrated by successive popes as well as Tocqueville and the American republican liberal tradition of the framers of the Constitution (which, curiously, our Tea Party spokesman, like a biblical literalist, treated as Holy Writ in no need of interpretation). Rather, in their view, it is all a matter of individual choice as against the collectivist state. In Margaret Thatcher’s most memorable quote, which could be endorsed--but for its author--by the advocates of same-sex marriage or the ‘right to choose’ as much as by libertarians, “There is no such thing as society.”

In the republican theory of Aristotle and the Founding Fathers, as well as modern communitarians like Michael Sandel, liberty depends on sharing in self-governance, which in turn “means deliberating with fellow citizens about the common good and helping to shape the destiny of the political community.” The habits of the heart required for and developed by self-governing members of a particular family, community, and nation are those of a situated, encumbered self. In this narrative conception of personhood, we develop in “reciprocal indebtedness” (MacIntyre, 1999), from total dependence to a degree of autonomy through ties to family and community, culture and tradition.

In contrast, the liberalism of recent years conceives persons as free and independent selves, unencumbered by moral or civic ties they have not chosen. This conception of rights and individual autonomy assumes that freedom consists in the capacity of persons to choose their values and ends. One key practical expression of this shift in liberalism is the subordination of the rights and needs of children to the freedoms of adults. (On the extensiveness and significance of this shift, see Elizabeth Marquardt’s The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs.)

All of this comes to mind again in light of the Wall Street Journal’s relentless libertarianism, which the editor of First Things magazine, R.R. Reno, takes to task today. The WSJ had criticized Rick Santorum in these terms:

Most disappointing is the Pennsylvanian’s proposal to triple the tax credit for children (today $1,000), which is a hobby horse of the Christian right. This is social policy masquerading as economics. Unlike a cut in marginal tax rates, a larger tax credit does little for growth because it doesn’t change incentives to save, work or invest. It merely rewards taxpayers who have children over those who don’t.

“This extraordinary paragraph,” notes Reno, “echoes an earlier column by Wall Street Journal regular, Kimberley Strassel, who also attacked Santorum’s call for a larger child tax credit, 'which benefits only Americans fortunate enough to have a child,' and thus, Strassel suggests, is unfair to those who do not.”

The underlying view of the human person in relation to society that leads to these conclusions fits with postmodern relativism, which says that we are motivated by a will-to-power or sexual desire (the two main options in postmodern theory), but not in accord with an essential human nature, and not toward any normative end. By this way of thinking there is no human nature, no natural as opposed to unnatural way to live. Society constructs norms (social engineering), and individuals do this or that in accord with their own personal wishes and desires (lifestyle choices).

Take will-to-power and domesticate it as economic self-interest, and you pretty much have the political and social vision of free-market libertarianism. I see little future for what is today a very modern social philosophy in American conservatism. Yes we’d like to be richer, but that’s not all we want. We want to live in accord with our nature as human beings, and that includes contributing to and enjoying the primitive community of the family. If free market libertarians can’t get their minds around that fact—and the fact that as we make personal choices about marriage and children we’re influenced by a manifold of social and economic incentives—then I can’t see how they will be able to formulate a governing consensus. Over the long haul people won’t vote for politicians who won’t work to implement policies that help them live the kinds of lives their nature desires.

The fact is that states cannot be neutral about social issues like marriage, divorce, cohabitation, abortion, or children and families--treating them purely as matters of lifestyle and individual choice--any more than it could have been about the institution of slavery. Even the strong libertarian (and radical feminist) position of privatizing or abolishing marriage altogether as a public institution--as if the state had no responsibility for the common good or the common good did not extend to such matters as optimal circumstances for having and rearing children--is a political choice (to destroy marriage).

Tax policies that reflect a growing tendency in family law thinking and increasingly in practice, to break down the legal distinction between marriage and cohabitation, are sometimes promoted in name of individual rights, non-discrimination, and elimination of stigma. As such, they are not alternatives to social policy or expressions of state neutrality and deference to individual understandings of the “sweet mystery of life.” They themselves are social policies, just as much as any marriage and family policy. They just happen to be policies that undermine marriage, our most important pro-child institution.

As Reno says, “Over the long haul people won’t vote for politicians who won’t work to implement policies that help them live the kinds of lives their nature desires.” Sadly, events may prove him over-optimistic in this opinion.

Five Myths About the Persecution of Christians

2012-01-14T07:12:00.002-05:00

John L. Allen, the one and only bright spot at the wretched National "Catholic" Reporter, has an excellent piece about the NCR's and the American left's great blind spot, the persecution of Christians, who constitute 75% of all those killed because of their faith. He exposes and debunks five prevalent myths about the topic, myths that enable the blind not to see.

Myth No. 1: Christians are vulnerable only where they’re a minority

Myth No. 2: It’s all about Islam

Myth No. 3: No one saw it coming

Myth No. 4: It’s only persecution if the motives are religious

Myth No. 5: Anti-Christian persecution is a right-wing issue

Anyone who cares about religious freedom, even for Christians, about persecution, violence, and human rights should check out Allen's piece HERE.

Right of Religious Autonomy (aka Ministerial Exception): SCOTUS Gets It Right

2012-01-13T15:30:00.003-05:00

Law professor Michael Stokes Paulsen has an excellent Public Discourse essay—“Hosanna in the Highest!”—on the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in Hosanna-Tabor.

Hosanna in the Highest!

by Michael Stokes Paulsen

January 13, 2012

In a recent decision, the Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment provides additional and independent rights to religious organizations, beyond those to which non-religious groups are entitled.

Every now and then, the Supreme Court surprises its critics by getting something absolutely, completely right: Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, decided on Wednesday, is just such a case. The Court held that the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment—both the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause—prohibit any government interference with the employment relationship between a religious body and those it in good faith (so to speak) considers its “ministers”: those leaders, teachers, and others who, in the words of the Court, “personify” the beliefs of the religious community. The decision embraced, in broad language, the constitutional right of religious groups to autonomy in matters of their own “internal governance” and to the freedom to exercise “control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.” It specifically affirmed “a religious group’s right to shape its own faith and mission through its appointments.” And it grounded its holding in the proposition that “the text of the First Amendment itself . . . gives special solicitude to the rights of religious organizations.”

The decision was, strikingly, unanimous: no one disagreed with Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion for the Court. The only separate opinions were concurring ones, suggesting further extensions or specific applications of the Court’s reasoning. On a Court that has often been bitterly divided, this expression of unanimity is truly remarkable.

The decision in Hosanna-Tabor is an occasion for celebration, for dancing in the streets (or, for some Baptists, simply praising the Lord). Essentially everything the Court said was right. And every right thing it said is important—a point brought home by considering the consequences if the Court had ruled the opposite way, as the Obama administration had urged and as many feared possible.

Look Out, Nuns! Ideology Trumps Science and Logic at the Lancet - Again

2012-01-12T08:58:00.002-05:00

As Hanley shows below, the British medical journal, the Lancet, has published another article that is so intent on its ideological agenda that it seems unaware of its internal contradictions and the sheer irresponsibility of its recommendations.

Look Out, Nuns!

By Matthew Hanley

The highly prestigious medical journal the Lancet recently published an article encouraging some women to take steps to address the “hazards of their nulliparity” – that is to say, of their never having children, which is a risk factor for several cancers, particularly of the breast.

You might be thinking: we just went through the annual pink ribbon exercise in breast cancer awareness, yet we never heard about the hazards of never having children. Or beginning to have them later in life. Or that bearing several children, beginning at an early age, and breastfeeding them all is quite protective against breast and other cancers.

I suppose it’s not a recommendation that sells, either literally (at the cash register) or figuratively (as is evident by astoundingly low fertility rates).

So has the Lancet finally repudiated its descent into the kind of politically correct obfuscation that would have once been recognized as an unconscionable abdication of the very scientific integrity from which medical journals derive their credibility?

Unfortunately they have done nothing that constructive.

The upshot of their article is that nuns, who “pay a terrible price for their chastity,” should get on the birth control pill; all distinction between chastity and nulliparity (the subject they are examining) escapes the two Australian authors’ attention. A woman with eight children, for example, can lead a perfectly chaste life.

The pill seems a curious remedy to propose, even if it can lower the risk of some relatively rare cancers, since it causes other and more common cancers, and has a litany of other serious side effects.

Supposing for a moment that all nuns began taking the pill religiously and a modest number of ovarian and uterine cancers – already quite rare among nuns – were averted as a result, we would also see a considerable increase in cancers of the breast, liver and cervix.

The pill would also double a nun’s risk of stroke – and increase her likelihood of blood clots and heart attack. It could also adversely affect her mood, her weight, her blood pressure, and so forth.

The authors base their argument upon the dubious claim that the pill lowers the overall mortality rate, citing a study that has been convincingly refuted by a veteran authority on the matter.

Their own data also show that nuns, prior to age 70, actually have a lower risk of ovarian and uterine cancers, though after age 80, nuns do have higher mortality rate from these cancers. Breast cancer is generally more prevalent among nuns, but the authors brazenly claim that the pill does not increase the risk of breast cancer.

There is compelling evidence that the pill is linked with the sharp increase in breast cancer in recent decades, and the reasons why the pill, as well as induced (though not spontaneous) abortion increase breast cancer risk are not beyond the reach of the layperson to understand.

The authors make haste to remind us that the Catholic moral tradition allows an action (i.e. artificial contraception) to be taken in some circumstances for therapeutic reasons when it would not otherwise be permissible. But they are on very shaky ground in pressing for indiscriminate contraceptive use for preventiverather than selectively therapeutic purposes – not because they appeal to Catholic moral reasoning, but because the medical evidence, of which they are custodians, indicates this would not be very wise.

But no matter: headlines around the world conveyed the impression that contraceptives are on balance a lifesaver – a multi-purpose health booster. Proselytizing comes first, and there will be more rejoicing at the Lancet over the one who comes to believe in the wisdom of contraception than the ninety-nine who already so fervently believe.

The Lancet may have also left some with the impression that it is nobly riding to the defense of selfless women who might be laboring in the Lord’s vineyard, but nonetheless remain, unlike the liberated masses, oppressed by the very Church they naïvely serve.

No stranger to promoting bad science in the service of a predetermined ideology, the Lancet in 2004 published a seriously contorted meta-analysis conducted by Oxford scientists intent on denying the link between induced abortion and breast cancer. This has allowed everyone – from governmental health bodies (such as the National Cancer Institute) to breast cancer advocacy groups – to cite that Lancet study and safely hide behind a false veneer of scientific credibility.

A new study conducted in Armenia by an international team of researchers (including members from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins) published in October found that abortion basically triples (2.86) the risk of developing breast cancer. It also found that each year of delay in giving birth increased risk of breast cancer, and any birth to be protective. These findings are generally consistent with the preponderance of evidence going back decades, which the Lancet, through its 2004 “study,” still gets away with denying.

One wonders if the authors of the Armenian study, sitting on eye-popping findings of such great public health import, wished to have them published in theLancet or another big name medical journal, but concluded that a submission with such unwanted findings, though worthy of global headlines, would simply be rejected. We should be grateful that they saw the light of day at all.

Coming from a journal bent on keeping everyone in the dark about the link between breast cancer and elective abortion – chosen by more than a million women a year in the United States alone – professing the desire merely “to give nuns’ plight the recognition it deserves” seems a touch disingenuous.

Were they actually faced with the prospect of social or legal rebuke, such disregard for the truth would take real chutzpah.

Matthew Hanley is, with Jokin de Irala, M.D., the author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, which recently won a best-book award from the Catholic Press Association. His latest report, The Catholic Church & The Global AIDS Crisis is now available from the Catholic Truth Society, publisher to the Holy See in the U.K.

© 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org

The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Retrieved January 12, 2012 from http://ht.ly/1gFH3p

A Persecuted Church and Its Heroes

2012-01-11T15:40:00.000-05:00

Christians are Real Victims of Persecution

2012-01-10T13:55:00.000-05:00

Fr. Robert Barron on how Christianity is the world's fastest-growing religion and its adherents by far the most persecuted.

Christians are Real Victims of Persecution

Presidential Politics, Media Confusion, and Bad Law

2012-01-10T09:26:00.001-05:00

4:41:31 PM

Social moral issues in presidential politics

by Sheila Liaugminas | 10 Jan 2012 |

The media don’t quite know how to handle this.

GOP presidential candidates are talking, and more boldly, about the sanctity of life, the definition of marriage, human dignity and ‘rights endowed by the Creator’, especially in their debates. Partially because they’re being prodded by media moderators.

Shortly after last weekend’s ABC debate, some top stories on my news aggregator recounted a particularly odd and persistent exchange between questioner George Stephanopoulos and candidate Mitt Romney. That story disappeared quickly and was replaced by boilerplate rundowns of the debate and especially from the angle of who was attacking whom on stage over political and business track records. Where did that story go?

It turned up here, which is pretty thorough in describing the snip and then publishing the video and transcript.

During Saturday’s Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire, hosted by ABC, co-moderator George Stephanopoulos bizarrely pressed candidate Mitt Romney on whether the former Massachusetts governor believes the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn a 1965 ruling that a constitutional right to privacy bars states from banning contraception.

And that’s the key to what should be the focus whenever this topic is raised. Whether it’s intended as a ‘gotcha’ question or whatever. NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez brings clarity to the media distortions and confusion.

The problem with the headlines is that they are untrue.

What Santorum has said is that the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision inGriswold v. Connecticut — which dealt with a case that was a Planned Parenthood official’s stunt — was a bad precedent and bad law. It created a constitutional right for married persons to use contraceptives. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas declared that ”specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance,” and that “various [of these] guarantees create zones of privacy.” That would be the basis for theRoe decision eight years later, which relied on a similar constitutional stretch.

All of which provides another opportunity to point to this critical understanding of Roe as bad law and wrongly-decided law. Let’s just look at the first three ‘pro-choice scholars’ quoted here:

Laurence Tribe — Harvard Law School. Lawyer for Al Gore in 2000.
“One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.”
“The Supreme Court, 1972 Term—Foreword: Toward a Model of Roles in the Due Process of Life and Law,” 87 Harvard Law Review 1, 7 (1973).

Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
“Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the court. … Heavy-handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict.”
North Carolina Law Review, 1985

Edward Lazarus — Former clerk to Harry Blackmun.
“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather.” ….

“What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent – at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed.”

Let’s have this debate. But let it be honest, respectful, and open to core beliefs and truths.

Retrieved January 10, 2012 from http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/10157

A Hateful Outrage: Media Assault on the Santorum Family

2012-01-09T08:52:00.001-05:00

A Hateful Outrage

By Robert Royal
MONDAY, 09 JANUARY 2012

Electoral politics is dirty business. Most decent people would have nothing to do with it – if there were any other reasonable way to select leaders in modern democracies. But even in popular election campaigns, there are limits. And last week those limits were crossed in unbelievably crass ways out of ideological hatred towards presidential candidate Rick Santorum.

Even some of the media figures who defended him, like Ross Douthat in the New York Times, have been so sucked into the bad habits of the neighborhood that Douthat concludes Santorum shouldn’t complain: “In a culture as divided about fundamental issues as our own, the kind of weird attacks that Rick Santorum is enduring come with the vocation he has chosen.”

Weird is putting it mildly. For once, Douthat’s colleague at the Times, Maureen Dowd, was comparatively modest, just mocking Santorum for his “antediluvian abrasiveness” on moral questions like homosexuality. For La Dowd, the moral sentiments of the whole human race in virtually every age and culture until quite recently – that homosexuality is a moral aberration – is merely some collective delusion, now remedied by the superior moral delicacy of our day. And the opinions of teenagers in New Hampshire campaign events prove it.

The really weird stuff came out last week beginning with Alan Colmes(who later apologized) and Eugene Robinson (who didn’t really – and you can see on the Internet by Googling him how slander spreads beyond anyone’s ability to recall). They weren’t content with criticizing Santorum’s traditional Catholic morals and conservative economics and politics. That’s too much like regular campaign commentary.

After Iowa, Santorum had to be destroyed. They attacked the Santorum family’s bringing home the body of their child, who died shortly after birth, as something incomparably bizarre, like the Mexican cult of death.

Actually, I think both commentators, politically correct liberals, would have commended a brief visit with a dead child as a humane alternative to the American bourgeoisie’s denial of death – if it had been practiced in another, non-American culture.

Instead, despite the fact, as was later reported, that several American medical groups recommend such closure, some of our most prestigious media figures felt they were authorized to wade into this sad story because it confirmed just how weird those traditional Catholics and their cult of the fetus really are – and the voting public ought to know it.

And then there was the story put out by several pro-abortion groups that the Santorums chose to abort the child when Mrs. Santorum had complications during the pregnancy. The implication, of course, is that they’re hypocrites, like all pro-lifers, and jettison their principles when it’s convenient.

The truth, however, was that the pregnancy was one of those hard cases anticipated by and quite well thought through in Catholic medical ethics. Both mother and child were going to die if an infection was not treated with antibiotics, which had the potential to induce labor.

Closure and memorial: Victorian kids photographed with a dead sibling

The political perspective on these sorts of situations is quite crude. We hear about the need for abortion exceptions in cases of “rape, incest, and life of the mother.” But these are not at all the same thing morally. Rape and incest are sexual crimes, but a child conceived as a result does not merit destruction in the womb.

Questions of “life of the mother” are more complicated. Some abortion advocates think the phrase means everything from a pregnancy that will kill the woman to missing a semester abroad during college.

In more serious analysis, where a mother’s life really is threatened by a problem pregnancy, it’s morally licit in certain circumstances to save her life and, indirectly, cause the death of the fetus. In the ethical literature, this is called the principle of double effect – a situation will produce two undesired outcomes, so you choose one good goal accepting, but not intending, the unfortunate secondary effect that will follow.

Many people don’t understand this especially as applied to problem pregnancies. A doctor, a former president of the St. Luke’s Physician Guild in Washington, told me years ago that his colleagues at a local hospital would mock him for performing “abortions” in such cases, even though he was a vocal opponent of abortion.

No amount of explanation on his part had any effect on the other doctors. They have been brainwashed to think that abortion is just a certain medical procedure. It’s all the same, medically, whatever motives or rationalizations you attach to the brute fact.

Politicians are even more obtuse about such things. We might have expected that Nancy Pelosi, former speaker of the House, and Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, both of whom attended Catholic schools – and Trinity College in Washington – would have heard something about double effect. But both seem instead to have heard only about female autonomy – i.e., the right to choose to kill babies – during their Catholic educations. Sebelius recently spoke to a NARAL Pro-Choice fundraiser about “the war” they are in – together. And Pelosi has argued that repealing Obamacare’s abortion provisions may kill women.

It’s not surprising that wild charges such as that the Santorums are “weird” and had an “abortion” are plausible to some very ignorant people. But those who put in motion such vicious and patently false attacks on a campaigning politician bear grave moral responsibilities.

There’s plenty to debate about Santorum’s record and vision (He made a troubling mistake in supporting pro-abortion Senator Arlen Specter a few years ago to preserve the Republican majority). But you can oppose someone’s politics without hateful smears.

Further, Santorum’s socially conservative views – coupled, be it said, with some real compassion for the unfortunate, which have been criticized by some conservatives as “big government conservatism” – were popular in Iowa and also resonate with tens of millions of Catholic, evangelical, Orthodox Jewish, and Muslim voters.

Painting those views, once the standard throughout the entire country, as somehow “weird” divides the American populace unnecessarily in hatred, and we will not be easily healed.

Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, now available in paperback from Encounter Books.

© 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org

Retrieved January 9, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Media Anti-Catholic Bias in Covering Primaries

2012-01-08T15:15:00.002-05:00

Catholic Charities in the presidential debate

by Sheila Liaugminas | 8 Jan 2012 |

Three days ahead of the New Hampshire primary, ABC moderated yet another debate Saturday night among the GOP candidates. Questioners asked about the economy and foreign policy. But they provoked candidates pointedly on social moral issues. In response, they got an earful.

Especially from Newt Gingrich.

He seized the opportunity to blast the media for anti-Christian bias. Which moderators teed up with their pointed questions.

New Hampshire TV’s anchor Josh McElveen first posed the question to former Pennsylvania Senator Rick

Santorum:

“Your position on same-sex adoption, obviously, you are in favor of traditional families, but are you going to tell someone they belong in — as a ward of the state or in foster care, rather than have two parents who want them?”

Mr Santorum answered, “My — my feeling is that this is an issue that should be — I believe the issue of marriage itself is a federal issue, that we can’t have different laws with respect to marriage. We have to have one law. Marriage is, as Newt said, a foundation institution of our country, and we have to have a singular law with respect to that. We can’t have somebody married in one state and not married in another.”

“Once we — if we were successful in establishing that, then this issue becomes moot…

Speaker Gingrich, however, answered the question another way asking the media:

“I just want to raise — since we’ve spent this much time on these issues — I just want to raise a point about the news media bias. You don’t hear the opposite question asked. Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won’t accept gay couples, which is exactly what the state has done? Should the Catholic Church be driven out of providing charitable services in the District of Columbia because it won’t give in to secular bigotry?”

He went further:

“Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and the bigotry of the administration?

“The bigotry question goes both ways. And there’s a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concerning the other side. And none of it gets covered by the news media.”

Mitt Romney noted that Massachusetts Catholic Charities was out of the adoption business because of the Church’s fundamental beliefs. Rick Perry jumped in and criticized the Obama administration for stigmatizing Catholic Charities because of its principles on marriage and abortion, driving them out of important social services.

At the end of the debate, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Diana Sawyer turned to a panel of pundits in their studios for analysis. She addressed one of them saying ‘You’ve spent a lot of time covering these charac….’ and then caught herself and adjusted her comments and said ‘covering these candidates’…and proceeded to ask the question.

The candidates debate again on NBC Sunday morning.

Retrieved January 8, 2012 from http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/10142

Same-sex marriage and religious liberty

2012-01-08T14:36:00.002-05:00

Thomas C. Berg Guest

Posted Tue, August 16th, 2011 9:08 am

Same-sex marriage and religious liberty

The following piece for our same-sex marriage symposium is written by Thomas C. Berg, James L. Oberstar Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota). He has written numerous articles on religion, law, and constitutional law; four books, including Religion and the Constitution (Aspen, with McConnell and Garvey) and The State and Religion in a Nutshell (ThomsonReuters); and many briefs in the Supreme Court and appellate courts.

——

Civil recognition of same-sex marriage is spreading. Four state legislatures, plus the District of Columbia, and one state court have successfully taken the step, with more likely to follow. Arguments against gay marriage have declined in public appeal in recent years; warnings that it will undermine marriage seem abstract to more and more people in the face of same-sex couples pursuing committed relationships and raising children.

The question in Perry v. Schwarzenegger and Windsor v. United States is whether this emerging situation should lead the courts "“ ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court "“ to declare opposite-sex-only marriage unconstitutional. To say that same-sex civil marriage should be recognized does not mean, of course, that judges should require it under the Constitution.

In making that distinction, one could raise arguments about proper methods of constitutional interpretation, or warn about political blowback that aggressive judicial decisions can trigger (as even some pro-choice observers have remarked about Roe v. Wade). I focus, however, on a different reason for the Court to tread gently in Perry: the religious liberty of traditionalist objectors to gay marriage, and how legislative recognition of marriage may be a better vehicle than judicial rulings for balancing religious liberty and gay rights. (I belong to a group of scholars, including symposium participant Robin Wilson, who have proposedmodel religious- accommodation provisions to legislatures considering same-sex marriage; my opinions here should not be attributed to those colleagues.)

For all of Judge Walker's lengthy fact-finding in Perry, he utterly fails to take religious-liberty issues seriously. He notes that "[p]rior to Proposition 8, no religious group was required to recognize marriage for same-sex couples." That is true about the church wedding, but there are many other potential conflicts (detailed, for example, here). Antidiscrimination and public-accommodation laws in California and other states could force many religious non-profits to give direct assistance to marriages or ceremonies that violate their tenets. Catholic Charities ceased providing adoptions in Massachusetts and, to a large extent, San Francisco because it faced being compelled to place children in same-sex households. A religious college that provides married-student housing might violate state law if it refused to house same-sex married couples. These groups can face civil liability or the loss of generally available government benefits such as tax exemptions or licenses.

Marriage ceremonies also affect small businesses "“ wedding planners, caterers "“ in which individuals directly lend their personal skills to facilitate marriages. An Albuquerque, New Mexico, wedding photographer had to pay more than $6600 in legal fees for declining to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony. In short, religious liberty is a context where gay marriage may affect others directly.

The adoption and photographer cases arose before same-sex marriage, under preexisting laws against sexual-orientation discrimination. (As Judge Walker notes, California already recognizes domestic partnerships and prohibits discrimination against them.) But recognizing same-sex marriage without significant religious accommodations will multiply the conflicts, since some traditionalists have particular objections to marriages because of the term's religious significance. Affirmative recognition of marriage, without accommodation, may also intensify the idea that opposition to homosexuality is so far beyond the pale that it deserves almost no accommodation. Consider the race context: in Bob Jones University (1983) the Supreme Court held that the long list of laws against race discrimination, covering mainstream education and employment markets, showed the existence of a "firm national policy" that justified extending penalties against an insular fundamentalist college that surely had no effect in such markets. There is plenty of reason to think that religious dissenters, organizations, and individuals will more frequently face the Hobson’s choice between directly facilitating same-sex marriages and giving up their charitable activities or livelihoods.

It is possible to minimize these conflicts: to protect religious liberty for many traditionalist dissenters while ensuring that gay couples have full ability in practice to marry and build families. The Albuquerque couple presented no evidence they incurred costs in finding another wedding photographer in the phone book. In Massachusetts, as Dale Carpenter has noted, "[g]ay couples could still adopt through dozens of other private agencies or through the state child-welfare services department itself."

As Robin Wilson's symposium contribution will detail, state legislatures that have enacted gay marriage have all acknowledged and accommodated religious-liberty concerns to some extent. Some states have protected religious organizations beyond the immediate context of celebrating or hosting a marriage ceremony. Others have protected fraternal societies, like the Knights of Columbus, that might object to hosting a wedding or reception. New York protected, among other things, against depriving an organization of generally available government benefits such as tax exemptions or licenses.

Although some of these accommodations could have gone further, they still serve the purpose of reducing social conflict by letting both sides in the culture war "live and let live." But before I turn to the relative roles of legislatures and courts in striking such balances, let me briefly add why recognizing gay marriage with significant religious-liberty protections is not just politically expedient but morally principled. Even though gay marriage and religious liberty clash in particular disputes, the arguments for the two have important common features. As I've argued elsewhere, the strongest arguments for recognizing same-sex civil marriage also support giving significant protection to religious dissenters.

Among the parallels, both same-sex couples and religious believers claim that their conduct stems from commitments central to their identity: love and fidelity to a life partner, faithfulness to the moral norms of God. Gay couples claim that it is insensitive, even cruel, to tell them their conduct is separate from their orientation "“ but so too, religious believers claim it is insensitive to tell them they can keep their beliefs but can't act on them. Both groups also claim that they should be able to live their commitments in a public way, touching all aspects of their lives. Gay couples claim a right beyond private behavior "“ participation in the social institution of civil marriage "“ but so too do religious believers who seek to follow their faith not just in houses of worship, but in charitable efforts and in their daily work lives.

These arguments suggest that religious accommodation ought to protect not just churches and clergy, but also religious nonprofit organizations like Catholic Charities, in contexts beyond the ceremony itself such as adoption or marriage counseling. Accommodation in the commercial sphere is typically more limited, but it can extend to small, personal businesses like the wedding photographer, with an exception in cases "“ for example, small rural markets "“ where one religious objector’s refusal of services would cause a concrete hardship on the ability of the same-sex couple to marry.

Unfortunately, courts that have found a constitutional right to same-sex marriage have been blind to the range of religious-liberty issues. Like Judge Walker, the California Supreme Court in In re Marriage Cases (2008) found that same-sex civil marriage "will not impinge upon the religious freedom of" anyone, for two reasons: "no religion will be required to change its religious policies or practices with regard to same-sex couples, and no religious officiant will be required to solemnize a marriage in contravention of his or her religious beliefs." The first reason overlooks the reach of antidiscrimination and public-accommodations laws; the second indefensibly limits religious-freedom concerns to the church ceremony and the clergyperson.

It's understandable that judges ruling on gay marriage would avoid opining on the whole range of possible conflicts with religious liberty. Courts by nature discuss only the precise issues before them. But the narrow judicial references also reflect that constitutional doctrine on the free exercise of religion has become quite weak. Both the U.S. Supreme Court, in Employment Division v. Smith (1990), and the California Supreme Court, under the state constitution, have held that courts should not order an accommodation from "laws of general applicability" that are formally neutral toward religion. Presumably, this includes laws prohibiting discrimination against same-sex couples.

Therefore, once the California Supreme Court ordered same-sex marriage, voters could understandably lack any confidence that religious-liberty concerns would ultimately be addressed and given weight. In that context, I believe, voters had a rational basis for rejecting same-sex marriage. As the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty argued in an amicus brief in Perry, "Since the California Supreme Court left Californians with an all-or-nothing choice between same-sex marriage and full protection for the rights of conscience, Proposition 8 was an entirely rational response to the threat to religious liberty." Concern for religious liberty in no way amounts to irrational bigotry or prejudice; it stems from a fundamental value in our constitutional and political system. That courts are unwilling to protect religious exercise vigorously in constitutional cases is a reason for "“ not against "“ protection of that right through political decisions (the U.S. Supreme Court in Smith expressly invited the political branches to accommodate religion).

Although I think Proposition 8 was therefore rational, it would be fairer to all to recognize gay marriage and accommodate religious liberty. The record shows that legislatures have done better than courts in striking this balance. That makes sense for institutional reasons: while a court focuses on the case before it, a legislature can take evidence on the range of situations that might be affected by its action. One by one in recent years, legislatures have acted as "laboratories of experimentation" and provided data, however imperfect, on how best to balance religious liberty with access to marriage. I believe that legislative superiority in striking such balances is one reason why legislation recognizing same-sex marriage is preferable to constitutional decision-making "“ preferable especially to a single decision by the U.S. Supreme Court requiring equal marriage in all fifty states.

If courts declare gay-marriage rights, however "“ whether state courts or the U.S. Supreme Court "“ they must do a better job on religious liberty than they have so far. They should expressly acknowledge the broad range of potential conflicts. And if they are not going to order religious accommodations as constitutional mandates, they should expressly encourage state legislatures to consider them as wise policy.

Posted in Featured, Same-Sex Marriage

Recommended Citation: Thomas C. Berg, Same-sex marriage and religious liberty, SCOTUSblog (Aug. 16, 2011, 9:08 AM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2011/08/same-sex-marriage-and-religious-liberty/

posted here under Creative Commons license http://bit.ly/18QrC6

PA: Many proponents of SSM deny that legal recognition has implications for the rest of society. "If you don't like SSM, don't get married to another person of the same sex"--a familiar argument heard in abortion discussions or at least seen on pro-abortion bumper stickers. It is easy enough to refute the point in the case of abortion, which always takes the life of an innocent human being and so violates a basic duty of the state to protect innocent life. It is also clear from actions of professional bodies like American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare)'s funding of abortion and rules mandating insurance coverage of abortions and abortifacient drugs, that such assurances are worthless. In the case of SSM, as the above essay from the SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] blog argues, many recent court actions show the increasing readiness of courts to override conscience protections and concerns.

Liberalism, Marriage, and the New Intolerance

2012-01-06T17:25:00.003-05:00

Taking Rites Seriously: Political Liberalism and the Problem of Marriage

By Francis J. Beckwith

FRIDAY, 06 JANUARY 2012

Political Liberalism, as we know it today, is not even three decades old. It began to develop in the early 1980s in the writings of several well-known philosophers that included Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, and John Rawls. The purpose of their project was to offer the political culture an intellectually respectable way to sequester the policy goals of the fledgling movement of religious conservatives while at the same time claiming that their project is consistent with an older liberalism that allows for full political participation by all citizens.

The Political Liberal correctly observes that the differences between citizens on the culture-owar issues – e.g., abortion, marriage, euthanasia – stem from their contrary, though reasonable, worldviews or comprehensive doctrines (as Rawls would put it). Rawls concedes that his understanding of “reasonable” is “deliberately loose.”

“We avoid excluding doctrines as unreasonable,” writes Rawls, “without strong grounds based on clear aspects of the reasonable itself. Otherwise our account runs the danger of being arbitrary and exclusive.Political liberalism counts many familiar and traditional doctrines – religious, philosophical, and moral – as reasonable, even though we could not seriously entertain them for ourselves. . . .” (Emphasis added)

So, for example, the prolifer opposes abortion because he believes that all human beings, including the unborn, are by nature persons and thus have intrinsic dignity regardless of their size, level of development, environment, or degree of dependency.

The typical prochoicer, on the other hand, maintains that not all human beings are persons, because a person is a being who has the present capacity to exercise certain person-making functions like self-consciousness, rationality, the ability to communicate and have desires, and so forth. Because the fetus for most of its gestation lacks these functions, it is not a person and thus it is permissible to abort it.

Both positions, according to the Political Liberal, are reasonable, for they are derived from reasonable comprehensive doctrines and neither is unassailable. Thus, it would be as equally unjust for the government to coerce a prochoice citizen to carry a pregnancy to term as it would be for it to coerce a prolife citizen to procure an abortion. This is because a citizen cannot be coerced on a matter of fundamental rights based on reasons he is reasonable to reject.

Political Liberalism’s sole purpose, we are told, is to accommodate citizen diversity on these contested questions while nurturing a political culture of respect and tolerance, the latter of which would be reflected in the government’s restraint in coercing and marginalizing citizens based on where they stand on these contested questions.

The question lurking in the debate over whether or not marriage law should recognize same-sex couples seems almost like a paradigm case of the sort of dispute for which Political Liberalism was invented: what is the proper function of our sexual powers and its relationship to the nature of marriage?

How one answers this question is inexorably tied to what one understands to be true about the nature of men and women, the conjugal act, and the permanence of the marital bond. Such understandings, to conscript Rawls, are informed by those “many familiar and traditional doctrines – religious, philosophical, and moral” that Political Liberalism counts “as reasonable.”

Thus, it would seem to be inconsistent with Political Liberalism to allow any government coercion and marginalization of citizens who, as a matter of conscience (often grounded in religious conviction), cannot acquiesce to the legitimacy of same-sex marriage.

Consider just one example. In Massachusetts, soon after the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2003 required that the state issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Catholic Charities, which was at the time in the child adoption business, was told by the state that it could no longer exclude same-sex couples as adoptive parents, even though the Catholic Church maintains that same-sex unions are deeply disordered and sinful. Because it could not as a matter of conscience compromise its moral theology, Catholic Charities ceased putting children up for adoption.

Catholic Charities believes that its mission is to find for each child under its care an adequate replacement for her mother and father. This is grounded in the belief that a human child is the sort of being that has by nature a mother and a father, just as it is the sort of being that has the essential property to exercise rational thought (even if it never acquires the ability to exercise it).

Thus, if we have an obligation not to interrupt a child’s ability to exercise rational thought, we also have an obligation not to deny unjustly a child her mother and father. Because Catholic Charities believes it is morally required to treat all children with equal dignity and respect, this means that no child should be denied a mother and a father or a replacement for each if it is in fact possible to do so.

Including same-sex couples as adoptive parents, according to Catholic Charities, violates the equal dignity and respect of the children who have been placed in its care. Although everyone does not share this perspective, it is certainly just the sort of reasonable comprehensive doctrine that Political Liberalism is supposed to protect.

But as we have seen since 2003, everything from public education, to rental law, to employment law, to family law, to government funding and to the tax-exempt status of religious academic institutions falls within the orbit of a state’s interest in making sure that same-sex marriage dissenters are coerced, punished, or marginalized if they refuse to treat same-sex marriage as licit as male-female marriage.

Thus, the Political Liberal, if he wants to remain consistent, should stand in solidarity with those who dissent from same-sex marriage.

Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He is one of four primary contributors to the forthcoming Journeys of Faith: Evangelicalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Anglicanism (Zondervan, 2012).

© 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

Retrieved January 6, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/?task=view

Media Bias and Falsely Accused Priests

2012-01-05T10:03:00.001-05:00

Today at Catholic World Report, Dave Pierre discusses his work exposing anti-Catholic bias in media coverage of the sexual abuse of minors, which often treats accused priests as “guilty until proven innocent” and distorts public perception of where exactly children today are in most danger of abuse.

In an exclusive interview with CWR, Pierre—a contributor to the media-watchdog blog NewsBusters.org and author of several books—argues: “We must continue to demand justice and compassion to victims of clergy abuse. This is not optional. However, the demand for honesty, fairness, and perspective in the reporting of the Catholic Church abuse narrative is a separate matter.”

Pierre points to the fact that while major media outlets frequently down-play or ignore accusations of child abuse occurring in public schools, a 2004 report from the US Department of Education found that “nearly 9.6 percent of [public school] students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career.”

“Another section of that report chronicled an early 1990s study that revealed that zero of 225 cases of teacher sex abuse in New York were reported to police,” says Pierre. “Two hundred and twenty-five abusers. None of them reported to police. By all measures, this would be defined as a cover-up. Yet the media has never seemed too motivated to follow up on this.”

Click here to read all of CWR’s interview with Dave Pierre, “The Truth About Falsely Accused Priests.”

We Are Catholic

2012-01-03T19:49:00.003-05:00

Thank you, Fr. Henry, for this link to the Diocese of Lancaster in England. (Lancashire was the heart of English recusancy--loyalty to the Old Faith in face of Protestant persecution over centuries.) Rant alert!--After the past 40 years in the wilderness, years following Vatican II when the dominant trend was one of liberal-secular accommodationism; of a 'beige Catholicism,' as Fr. Barron calls it; the lost generation of uncatechized Catholics abandoned by clergy who seemed embarrassed by their faith and its visible signs, who treated the Church's teaching on faith and morals as optional or obsolete; who brought scandal on the Church by their own immorality; who wrought destruction through translations of the Missal and Bible that stripped the sacred language of its poetry and substituted the language of the instruction manual (talk about a dead language!); stripped the altars; discouraged the devotional practices of the faithful; produced travesties of church architecture, liturgy, and music...

--after all that, what a joy it is to see the resurgence of a Faith that is strong and confident, priests and nuns who are not afraid to look like men and women dedicated to God and his Church and accessible to those who need them. In England, my home country where Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular are generally regarded with indifference or hostility, where persecution and prejudice against the Church are deep-rooted and flourished for centuries even before their current militant-atheist form, it is wonderful to see the Diocese of Lancaster stand strong and proud for the Faith of our fathers, holy faith.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.

January 3rd, 2012Confident Presentation Of The FaithBY FR. SIMON HENRY

http://www.youtube.com/embed/wk4OCzre_IY

I can't recall when I last - if ever - went to an English diocesan website and thought, "Wow, that's really good!" But if you go the the Diocese of Lancaster site the home page greets you with this video unashamedly announcing who and what the Catholic Faith is. Words and claims for the Church not seen in ages are boldly announced:

We are sacred
We are obedience
We are joy
We are tradition
We are happy
We are Papists
We are universal
We are strong
We are sacred
We are courageous
We are defenders of the Faith

... to name but a few.

The accompanying music is full-on modern and upbeat. All the images are not afraid of showing Catholics acting and dressed as Catholics - nuns, priests, marked with the Lenten ashes, Pro-Life - all positive and highlighting the vigour, youth, tradition, beauty, grandeur and struggle of the Church.

This is the sort of publicity we should be focusing on, a confident, joyful message embracing ALL of the Church's Tradition. If only we could have more like this instead of the mediocre, insipid and lowest common denominator offerings usually served up. Who knows, perhaps this sort of presentation might actually attract people to the Faith.

Confidence in the Faith and its message is something that I think has been lacking in recent times. After the turmoil induced in the years following the Second Vatican Council the great hopes the modernisers held out for did not materialise - quite the opposite. The secular media is always ready to bash the Church on premises that are occasionally real but usually false or exaggerated. Many Catholics hardly seem to know what we are for and so no wonder we have trouble telling others why they should join up - why it might be imperative that they join up. Bishops, priests and laity, certainly in the Western world, seem to have lost confidence in the power of the message and so the temptation has been t0 compromise it and fit in - in how we look, in how we think, in how we act, even in how we worship. It's only now with a new generation is more confident - not disappointed by the lack of "success" after the Second Vatican Council because they never experienced the let down feeling - only saw their elders rather tired and a bit lost for words - or at least words that meant anything. Confidence doesn't have to mean Triumphalism - it can just mean confidence that the Church really is guided by the Holy Spirit. It is now and it always has been - even before Vatican II and even (if not especially!) in the election of Pope Benedict!

Well done Lancaster Diocese!

Retrieved from http://www.staustinreview.com/ink_desk/archives/confident_presentation_of_the_faith/

Another View of Christopher Hitchens

2012-01-03T08:54:00.002-05:00

Good points, but perhaps Hitch is too "freshly dead" himself for this kind of critique. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. For a more charitable view, see Fr. Barron's commentary on his Word on Fire site and below.

Fine wit in the service of plain hatred
by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza
Christopher Hitchens is dead. By his own lights, he is utterly defunct, decomposing more rapidly than yesterday’s newspaper. I take a different view, and do sincerely pray for a merciful judgment. In the mean time, I trust that his soul, even now, is chagrined with the extravagant evasions that marked his death. My colleagues were enthusiastic contributors. Our editorial board praised his “courage” as a journalist and deemed him the “greatest columnist and essayist in the English-speaking world.” The estimable David Frum wrote that, “If moral clarity means hating cruelty and oppression, then Christopher Hitchens was above all things a man of moral clarity.”

Clarity he had. But hating cruelty? He was himself both hateful and cruel. Upon Bob Hope’s death, Hitchens wrote that he was a “fool, and nearly a clown.” When Ronald Reagan died, Hitchens called him a “stupid lizard,” “dumb as a stump” and “an obvious phony and loon.” On Mother Teresa: “The woman was a fanatic and a fundamentalist and a fraud, and millions of people are much worse off because of her life, and it’s a shame there is no hell for your bitch to go to.”

The sadness is that there is a hell for Hitch to go to. He was granted a long farewell, with the opportunity for reconsiderations and reconciliations with those he hated and those he hurt. He declined to take advantage of it. Mother Teresa is fine, and no doubt prays for her enemies, including that Hitchens would be delivered both from hell and the nihilistic oblivion, which he thought awaited him.

“He was a virtuoso hater and his hatreds were redeemed, when they had to be, by the sheer relish with which they were expressed,” wrote Michael Ignatieff upon his death.

For many of Hitchens’ fellow journalists, the virtuosity of his brilliant writing and bracing conversation earned him a pass on the hatred. But hatred it remained. His commercial genius was to harbour hatreds sufficiently vast and varied that a lucrative constituency could be found to relish all of them.

In the first of his elegant essays about the ravages of his terminal cancer, he wrote about the consequences of his abbreviated future: “Will I really not live to see my children married? To read — if not indeed write — the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?” The Scriptures in which Hitchens did not believe say that love is stronger than death. Maybe he thought hatred was, too.

He desired to live that he might trash the freshly dead.

Monumental Kitsch: Cornelius Sullivan on the Statue of JP II in Front of Rome Train Station

2011-12-29T20:20:00.001-05:00

Blessed Papa Wojtyla as Capeman

June 30, 2011

The statue of Pope John Paul II stands in front of Termini Station.

By CORNELIUS SULLIVAN

ROME -- The Statue of Pope John Paul II in front of the train station in Rome does not represent the man we came to know so intimately. It is an unrecognizable man with a cape, it is monumental kitsch art. I will explain why. Pope John Paul II was seen and recognized by more people than any other person in history. For a sculpture of him to not bear his likeness is bizarre like a bad joke.

I did not read the article right away with the headline “Sculpture of Pope John Paul II Slammed” because I thought it was just about another blasphemous piece in a museum like the one of the pope crushed by a meteorite. At least I don’t have to go to that particular museum to be insulted by it but I will go by the train station many times and will be forced to see Man with Cape.

Maybe the pope as a pin head with the gesture of a flasher was not meant to be blasphemous, but most viewers agree it is ugly. When I say this I don’t want to be disrespectful to the pope. It is just that images and gestures do have meanings independent of intentions. If we are not cognizant of what they are, we can be duped.

The Associated Press article of a month ago told of the Vatican’s dislike of the statue because it did not resemble the pope and how many citizens said it looked more like Mussolini.

Let’s analyze what the sculptor tried to do. The best that one can say about the work is that it bears a superficial resemblance to Early Modern Italian sculpture and for example, the work of Giocomo Manzu known for his Doors of Death across the river at Saint Peter’s Basilica. Manzu successfully abstracted figures but he retained their humanity and he could draw.

Because he could draw, his figures have truth and his portraits of Pope John XXIII are recognizable and give us the man. Manzu and his colleagues of the time, like Marino Marrini and others, were so excited to wield form in a free way and reveal properties of the material, the flow of clay, and the reflective sheen of bronze. But they retained the classical discipline of drawing.

It is not as if Blessed John Paul did not give us a super abundance of gestures, gestures from the trained and always appropriate actor. There were so many gestures of blessing, so many gestures of caring and listening. He showed to countless people, and they have testified, that he thought they were all that mattered to him at that moment.

The extended cape to enclose the faithful is dreadful because it means nothing even though it has an anecdotal base. I was once asked to make a sculpture of the Blessed Virgin with children of all different races and colors under her mantle. I said I would not do that. It is not good art because it has no human meaning. A political ideology can never translate so directly into sculptural form. Kitsch hits you over the head with an inane idea. It lacks subtlety. A good explanation is what a theologian friend said recently, “It’s like a used car salesman putting his hand on your knee.”

Maurizio Cattelan's sculpture sold for 3 million dollars

The interesting thing about the blasphemous work of Pope John Paul II being crushed by a meteorite by Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora, 1999, (exhibited at Royal Academy, London, sold at Christies for three million dollars), is that the plastic exact replica of the Pope stooped and falling is indeed how we all saw him die. He showed us how to die as his mentor, Jesus Christ, did. Who knows what his being crushed by the big rock is supposed to mean? It becomes very expensive kitsch because it serves a political point of view.

In a similar way, the famous work of 1987 by Adres Serrano, Piss Christ was made to shock hence the title. The little crucifix in a jar of urine offended many. Without the title, if you just viewed the photograph, the photograph is the artwork, you would see a crucifix bathed in streaming golden light. Art critic Lucy Lippard writes, “…it is a darkly beautiful photographic image… the small wood and plastic crucifix becomes virtually monumental as it floats, photographically enlarged, in a deep rosy glow that is both ominous and glorious." If you did not know the title, you would not be offended. But why did he do it? Why does Serrano throw something in our face and on our belief?

The sculptor flying cape maker has stumbled upon an image that has an ambiguous meaning and at the same time fails the Modernist’s test for interesting form. You see it once, you got it all. There are no subtleties to discover, don’t hope it will get better with time. And to bad it’s bronze, that indestructible metal of importance. This piece of sculpture will never acquire the charm and magic of any of the marble talking statues in the city, like the Pasquino. They weather, people write on them, they are like us in the city and don’t call attention to themselves with a set apart monumentality, and they don’t hit us on the head with a one note message.

I have cited two works of art that were made expressly to offend. With fondness I show two sculptures, the Manzu relief, and the Pasquino, two works that have become part of the integral fabric of the city. They have evolved organically and were not products of the government foisting something not right upon the citizens.

It is not good that artists work alone today. That is the only explanation of how this awkward sculpture could have happened. Would that a peer, a friend, had said early on “Lose the cape it’s a bad idea”. Artists did not always work in isolation.

"The most remarkable meeting of Renaissance artists ever recorded, arguably the most extraordinary encounter of its kind in history, occurred on January 25, 1504, when some two dozen painters, sculptors, artisans, and architects were convened to take up the question of the appropriate location for Michelangelo's all but finished David." Three Worlds of Michelangelo, James Beck, 1999 p 123.

On the committee were Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli. There were no lawyers, no politicians, and no hobbyists. Peer involvement guaranteed quality.

This sculpture of the pope represents the antithesis of the dignity of the individual human person as articulated in Blessed Pope John Paul’s Theology of the Body. From a writer friend who always gets to the essence of things - “It's pretty awful---it's Marxist art---the attempt to meld the individual into the collective---and so, it's ugly because it's false.”

Copyright (c) 2011 by Edmund Cornelius Sullivan

Fr. Barron on Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-29T08:11:00.001-05:00

Retrieved December 29, 2011 from Fr. Barron's Word on Fire website

Why “Merry Christmas” beats “Season’s Greetings”

2011-12-27T14:45:00.000-05:00

I know it is already the third day of Christmas, but I just read this excellent essay by Michael Cook. We should not be so ready to abandon the whole of Christian civilization in the same of some vague attempt to be pc, inoffensive to anyone, or because of a desperately misplaced belief in the superiority of paganism, ancient or modern.

Michael Cook | Tuesday, 20 December 2011

7 reasons why “Merry Christmas” will always beat “Season’s Greetings”

Don’t let Grinches steal your Christmas by substituting meaningless slogans.

Let’s imagine for a moment that Christmas had never happened and that the Roman Emperor Aurelian had succeeded in establishing the feast of Sol Invictus on December 25 back in the year 274 AD.

Instead of Christmas, we would have had the Feast of the Unconquered Sun. At this time of year, just after the winter solstice, the lantern beaming light and heat hangs low in the sky; the days are dark and cold. But day by day it climbs back, infallibly reaching its fiery zenith at the summer solstice six months later. Yay! Way to go! This god has won more rounds than Manny Pacquiao!

Had this happened, the colourless salutation “Season’s Greetings” might have conveyed something vaguely meaningful, especially if you’re shivering in the northern hemisphere. Something like: gor blimey, I can’t handle this brass monkey weather, but let’s hang in there and may the gods grant us a good harvest.”

It’s a hopeful sentiment, but not an inspiring one, a bit like the experience of eating tofu and celery sticks for Christmas dinner instead of tucking into mince pies and roast turkey. The sun rises and the sun sets; seasons come and seasons go. Whatever good or evil men do, the sun shines on them all alike with a divine indifference. For devotees of Sol Invictus, “Season’s Greetings” would have been a token of our inevitable submission to fate. This was the popular wisdom of the ancient world – from which Christmas has rescued us.

Whether or not you accept the Christian theological beliefs which underpin the celebration of Christmas, they have transformed Western society and they are in the process of transforming nations far from Bethlehem. Christmas, that is, the celebration of the moment in which the all-powerful creator of the Universe took on human flesh and entered human history, sends powerful, if unspoken, messages. Here are seven which are implicitly conveyed when we wish friends a “Merry Christmas”.

God cares. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, — They kill us for their sport.” This comes from King Lear, but it is the wisdom of paganism. Life’s a bitch, and then you die. What the Incarnation, as the theologians call the act of God becoming man, shows for all time is that the Creator cares about his creatures. As the carol says, “and he feeleth for our sadness, and he shareth in our gladness.” Jupiter, on the other hand, when presented with complaints about our sadness would probably say something like, “Yeah, whatever. Get over it. Stuff happens, you know.”

History matters. The ancients believed in the myth of the eternal recurrence, that history was not linear, but cyclic. Their cosmic fate was to live imprisoned in cycles which end in fire and then return in a new cycle, playing the same role over and over again. Its symbol is the dragon devouring its tail. But the implication of the Incarnation is that history is moving towards a climax which begins at Bethlehem. Our own participation in history makes a difference.

All men are fundamentally equal. We can get used to Christmas paintings of the manger, in which shepherds are rubbing shoulders with the Magi as they peer over Joseph’s shoulder. But the implications of this setting are immense. “With the poor, the scorned, the lowly, lived on earth our Saviour holy”: before the infant in the lowly cattle shed, distinctions of talent, rank and education are insignificant. All men are brothers.

Families are the cornerstone of society. Bethlehem suggested the ideal to which Christian families should aspire: a father and mother doting on their child, willing to make any sacrifice for his welfare. But the homely tenderness of this scene was virtually unknown in the ancient world. The Greeks and Romans were not strangers to domestic affection, but this was not the paradigm of their families. Without Christmas we would never have had the bubbly, loving warmth of the Cratchit family made famous in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Women have dignity. No women appear in Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. There are famous women in ancient history, but most of them are queens and empresses like Cleopatra and Zenobia. In Bethlehem, a simple village girl, Mary, is the central figure. Kings bow in homage to her and her child. In the Christian tradition, capacity for motherhood gives women an incomparable dignity. As Cristina Rossetti’s marvellous poem (and carol) says,

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Thronged the air,
But only His mother
In her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

Children are special. The ancient world defined children by their powerlessness; they were just underdeveloped adults. But Bethlehem suggests that we should treasure their innocence and dependence. “Once in Royal David’s City” is a Victorian carol, but it expresses it nicely:

For he is our childhood's pattern,
day by day like us he grew;
he was little, weak and helpless,
tears and smiles like us he knew.

The fact that a defenceless child is the centre of the Christmas story also means that men and women are not to be valued by how productive they are, but simply because they are with us and share in a common nature. In the Gospel account this is underscored by the sequel to the Nativity, the Massacre of the Innocents by the vicious tyrant Herod.

We should send more Christmas cards. Western art was born on Christmas Day. We take for granted the human drama depicted on Christmas cards. But in other cultures, art was meant to be a faint reflection of unchanging, inalterable divinity. That’s why statues of Buddha depict him in a few stylised postures. Even Greek and Roman art presented idealised figures and seldom depicted ordinary life.

But art of the Christian era is based upon an altogether different philosophy: that all of human life has dignity because the Child of Bethlehem is both God and Man. Since then, everything in human life carries within it a spark of divinity and becomes a worthy subject for an artist. What sort of greeting cards would we have if the cult of Sol Invictus had survived? Probably much like we have now: images of snow-bound homes or decorative calligraphy. But nothing human, affectionate and tender.

So there you have seven reasons to say “Merry Christmas” with greater gusto in 2011. Let’s defy miserabilist Grinches who want to banish it from public life.

In any case, all this has happened before. Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans banned the celebration of Christmas in England. In the 1640s the Long Parliament decreed that no holy days other than Sundays were to be celebrated. December 25 was to be observed with fasting and humiliation for the sins of countrymen who had turned the day into a feast, sinfully “giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights”. Shops and market were to be kept open for trading. Parliament was to meet for business on December 25. Christmas, said the Puritans, was a pestilent popish festival with no Biblical justification.

However, Cromwell failed to convert Merrie England to miserabilism. As soon as Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, the Christmas bans were swept away. Mirth, mistletoe and plum pudding returned and the Christmas fast vanished. The reason for the season was no longer treason. Merry Christmas and "God bless us every one!"

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Want to read more articles by Michael Cook Click on the links below

Just one hitch with all those eulogies | 19 December 2011
A mortal threat to marriage | 6 December 2011
Non, je ne regrette rien | 24 November 2011
At long last, Dutch doctors draw a line in the sand | 17 November 2011
Another death in the family | 8 November 2011

Retrieved December 27, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/7_reasons_why_merry_christmas_will_always_beat_seasons_greetings

Ancient carol from Cyprus composed by Romanos the Melodist 6th century

2011-12-27T10:59:00.000-05:00

Christmas Day

2011-12-24T23:45:00.000-05:00

LUCIANO PAVAROTTI - Tu Scendi Dalle Stelle by Saint Alfonsus Maria de' Liguori

2011-12-24T18:57:00.003-05:00

by Saint Alfonsus Maria de' Liguori

Italian Christmas Song “Tu scendi dalle stelle” – “You Come Down from the Stars”

December 21st, 2005

Here are the lyrics to Tu scendi dalle stelle from Italy, in Italian and with an English translation…

Tu scendi dalle stelle
(Italian)
Tu scendi dalle stelle
O Re del Cielo
E vieni in una grotta
Al freddo al gelo.
E vieni in una grotta
Al freddo al gelo.
O Bambino mio Divino
Io ti vedo qui a tremar,
O Dio Beato
Ah, quanto ti costò
L’avermi amato.
Ah, quanto ti costò
L’avermi amato.
A te che sei del mondo,
Il creatore
Mancano panni e fuoco,
O mio Signore.
Mancano panni e fuoco,
O mio Signore.
Caro eletto, Pargoletto,
Quanto questa povertà,
Piu m’innamora
Giacche ti fece amor
Povero ancora.
Giacche ti fece amor
Povero ancora.
Here’s a rough English translation of Tu scendi dalle stelle by Monique Palomares…
You Come Down from the Stars
(English)
You come down from the stars
Oh King of Heavens,
And you come in a cave
In the cold, in the frost.
And you come in a cave
In the cold, in the frost.
Oh my Divine Baby
I see you trembling here,
Oh Blessed God,
Ah, how much it cost you,
Your loving me.
Ah, how much it cost you,
Your loving me.
For you, who are of all the world
The creator,
No robes and fire,
Oh my Lord.
No robes and fire,
Oh my Lord.
Dear chosen one, little infant
This dire poverty,
Makes me love you more
Since Love made you
Poor now.
Since Love made you
Poor now.

Text and translation retrieved December 24, 2011 from http://www.mamalisa.com/blog/italian-christmas-song-tu-scendi-dalle-stele-you-come-down-from-the-stars-2/

Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori (September 27, 1696 – August 1, 1787), composer of this favorite Italian Christmas carol, was an Italian bishop, spiritual writer, scholastic philosopher and theologian, and founder of the Redemptorists, an influential religious congregation. He was canonized in 1839 by Pope Gregory XVI. Pope Pius IX proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church in 1871.

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T09:42:00.001-05:00

Fr. Barron on Christmas

2011-12-23T21:44:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas! Gaudete!

2011-12-23T21:03:00.000-05:00

Blaming the Jews - Again

2011-12-21T22:24:00.002-05:00

Blaming the Jews—Again

8:52 AM, Dec 20, 2011 • By ELLIOTT ABRAMS

If you were an anti-Semite dedicated to spreading your hatred of Jews, what charges exactly would you make in 21^st century America?

You would avoid the blood libel—too medieval to write of sacrificing Christian children to make Passover matzo. That kind of stuff circulates in Arab lands or Pakistan, but won’t sell in suburban America. And the “Christ-killer” material is also dated, what with Vatican II, Evangelical support for Israel, and the like.

There are two charges you would make. First, the rich Jews control our government. Second, those Jews are trying to push America into war so your sons will have to fight for Israel.

In the last week that is exactly what we have seen. First came the Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Perhaps it was jealousy from seeing Walt and Mearsheimer sell all those books with this line, but Friedman here tips right into the swamps.

And now we have Joe Klein, in Time magazine, in a section accurately entitled “Swampland”: “Iowa Republicans are not neoconservatives. Ron Paul has gained ground after a debate in which his refusal to join the Iran warhawks was front and center. Indeed, in my travels around the country, I don’t meet many neoconservatives outside of Washington and New York. It’s one thing to just adore Israel, as the evangelical Christians do; it’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.” READ MORE

Retrieved December 21, 2011 from http://bit.ly/s9aXE7

Pew Forum on the Global Demographics of Christianity

2011-12-21T21:19:00.003-05:00

A new Pew Forum demographic study of more than 200 countries finds that there are 2.18 billion Christians of all ages around the world, representing nearly a third of the estimated 2010 global population of 6.9 billion. Christians are also geographically widespread - so far-flung, in fact, that no single continent or region can indisputably claim to be the center of global Christianity.

Christian Demography

Marcus Roberts | 21 Dec 2011 |

In the lead up to Christmas, the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life has released a report on the demographic breakdown of Christianity in the world. The report can be found here on the Pew website and comes with interactive maps and even a quiz. Some of the more interesting findings is that there are about 2.2 billion Christians in the world – nearly a third of Earth’s population. This proportion is roughly similar to that occupied by Christians in 1910. The largest change in the last century has been the physical spread of Christianity throughout the world. In 1910, the centre of Christianity was clearly Europe where two-thirds of Christians lived. Instead:

“...[t]oday, only about a quarter of all Christians live in Europe (26%). A plurality – more than a third – now are in the Americas (37%). About one in every four Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa (24%), and about one-in-eight is found in Asia and the Pacific (13%)...Although Europe and the Americas still are home to a majority of the world’s Christians (63%), that share is much lower than it was in 1910 (93%). And the proportion of Europeans and Americans who are Christian has dropped from 95% in 1910 to 76% in 2010 in Europe as a whole, and from 96% to 86% in the Americas as a whole.”

Christianity is today, as the report summarizes, truly a global faith. It is also diverse theologically:

“About half are Catholic. Protestants, broadly defined, make up 37%. Orthodox Christians comprise 12% of Christians worldwide. Other Christians, such as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, make up the remaining 1% of the global Christian population.”

Half of the world’s Christians live in ten countries, and the United States is still the largest Christian country in terms of absolute amount of professing Christians.

There is a wealth of other information on the Pew website for you to look at, but the main point I took from it was that Christianity isn’t dying as a religion in terms of numbers, but it is spreading more widely and to every country in the world.

Retrieved December 21, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/10107

Benedict’s Christocentrism: Realities of a Primary Order | First Things

2011-12-20T22:03:00.001-05:00

Benedict’s Christocentrism: Realities of a Primary Order

Dec 20, 2011

Elizabeth Scalia

Pope Benedict XVI will be 85 years old next April and, while the pontiff is fully in his wits, we can see a loss of weight; it is reported that he feels a quite understandable fatigue born of pain, age, and heavy responsibility. A few days ago the Associated Press, noting “a decline” in the Holy Father, immediately focused on “. . .questions about the future of the papacy given that Benedict himself has said popes should resign if they can’t do the job.”

One gets the impression that the drama-hungry press would love to see Benedict step down, both for the sheer novelty of it (the last pope to resign was Gregory XII, in 1415) and for the narrative reinforcement such a move would lend to utilitarian philosophies lately in vogue, especially among those medical and economic planners for whom a person’s usefulness is a primary measure by which both cash and care are dispensed. READ MORE

Benedict’s Christocentrism: Realities of a Primary Order | First Things

Obama's Catholic Problem

2011-12-18T11:20:00.001-05:00

Song for a baby girl in China

2011-12-16T08:49:00.001-05:00

Must-watch video: If kids are so damn expensive why does our China need a one-child policy?

Michael Cook | 15 Dec 2011 |

Singer Chuanzi (real name 姜亚川 Jiang Yachuan) was a troubled teen who ended up in jail. But after being released, he forged a new career as an entertainer. When he appeared on China’s Got Talent with his singing dog “Dudu” he became an instant hit. “Zheng Qianhua” is one of his best known songs. It's about a new father who names his daughter “Zheng Qianhua,” which literally means, “to earn the money to spend.”

“I have a friend surnamed Zheng who was very happy at the birth of his daughter. He wanted me to help him write a song for her. So I asked him what her name was, he said Zheng Qianhua. I was so surprised I didn’t believe it, but he swore it was true. And he wanted me to write his daughter into a song. My friend has guts, and I promised him I would, so I wrote ‘Zheng Qianhua.’”

It's a simple song, but its economic analysis is faultless. In other countries birthrates have sunk far below China's -- without the repressive, inhumane, unspeakably cruel, one-child policy.

Retrieved December 16, 2011 from http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/10077