Unnatural Selection - Jennifer Roback Morse

Jennifer Roback Morse | Monday, 6 February 2012

Unnatural Selection

A book by a pro-choice feminist faces up to an unintended consequence of the West's fertility war.

Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men | Mara Hvistendahl | PublicAffairs | Hardcover: 336 paages (June, 2011)
ISBN: 1586488503

This brave and timely book has many strengths and one glaring, but understandable, weakness. The strength of this book is the reporting. Mara Hvistendahl, a liberal, pro-choice feminist, painstakingly documents the catastrophic consequences of the worldwide “choice” for male babies: gender imbalance leading to prostitution, sex slavery, and male frustration and aggression. The weakness of this book is the political analysis. She doesn’t understand how deeply Roe v. Wade changed American political culture, particularly within the conservative movement broadly conceived. But both these strengths and weaknesses work together to yield an honest and courageous book that should be read by anyone who considers himself (or herself) well informed.

Let’s start with the strengths. Hvistendahl is a very honest reporter. She became aware of the gender-imbalance problem while living in China as a journalist. She recounts how she visited a grade-school classroom to write an article on the solar heating system being installed in the school. She found herself in a “classroom full of smiling boys. I was tempted to abandon the solar power article and interview the teachers about the school’s population.” That experience repeated itself so many times that she couldn’t stand it anymore. Her journalist instincts required an investigation of the imbalanced sex ratio in Chinese society.

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Church Militant in Peril

Here is the letter of Bishop DeWane read at all masses today in the Diocese of Venice:

Bishop Frank Dewane’s Letter Regarding the HHS Healthcare Mandate

The following letter is scheduled to be read at Mass in the Diocese of Venice during the weekend of February 4-5, 2012 

January 31, 2012

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

An alarming and serious matter that negatively impacts the Church in the United States directly has arisen, and strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith. The federal government, which claims to be “of, by, and for the people,” has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people—the Catholic population—and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees’ health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the health policies they write. Further, almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.

In so ruling, the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so). The Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.

We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. Do not be misled by attempts to turn this into a debate about Church teaching or the morality of contraception. The issue here is religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

Already our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will have joined in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect Her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust She can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Future generations deserve nothing less.

Therefore, I would ask of you two things. First, as a community of faith we must commit ourselves to prayer and fasting that wisdom and justice may prevail, and religious liberty may be restored. Without God, we can do nothing; with God, nothing is impossible. Second, I would also recommend visitingwww.usccb.org/conscience, to learn more about this severe assault on religious liberty, and how to contact Congress in support of legislation that would reverse the Administration’s decision.

I take this opportunity to extend to all of you my continued consideration and prayers. United in prayer and in confidence in God's goodness, I remain

Sincerely yours in Christ,

+ Frank J. Dewane
Bishop of the Diocese of Venice in Florida

###

PA:

This is an alarming and serious matter for the whole Church.  It is an unprecedented (in the United States) attack on religious liberty and so on the basic freedoms of all Americans, regardless of their views on the specific matters of abortion, sterilization, and contraception.  We do not know yet how all the Catholic and other religious organizations affected will react--those the Administration is coercing under this HHS rule to purchase products and services that they consider gravely immoral.  The most compromised may find some clever way to justify to themselves their compliance with this unjust law.  The best will refuse to comply and refuse to pay the onerous fines the rule calls for (said to amount to $10 million for Notre Dame in the first year alone and escalating thereafter).

Some communities, dioceses, and organizations are so weakened by the developments discussed in my previous post that they will be hard to mobilize.  In other cases, like my own hometown of Ave Maria, FL, as seriously Catholic community as can be found outside a seminary or monastery, the resistance will be solid.  Here, in marked contrast to the situation Philip Lawler describes for Boston, everyone (something like 95% on any given Sunday) goes to Mass on Sunday and close to two thirds of the students attend Mass daily.  There are four Masses celebrated on Sunday and three daily.  The president of Ave Maria University has already said that AMU will not comply with this rule.  Since this whole new town is built around the university and the church at its heart, an unrelenting implementation of the rule could well close down the whole community and result in financial ruin for many of us.  Some militant secularists would not be sorry to see us go, no doubt, but many who are not Catholic or even sympathetic to the Church or her teachings will be troubled.  They will correctly see the Administration's decision as a move to abnegate the First Amendment, drastically undermine civil society, and impose a uniform state religion, a secularist orthodoxy, on the whole population.  As in the first centuries of Christianity, many Catholics will buckle and pay obeisance to the state's gods, but many will stand firm regardless of the sacrifice involved.

As I watch the procession of priests, deacon, and servers at the beginning of Mass and follow the recession at the end, I lock my eyes on the large crucifix that leads the little group.  It is an image the early Church was afraid and perhaps embarrassed to display, being the symbol of state terror, warning everyone of the price to be exacted from those who defied the state and its demands for sacrifice to the state's gods.  It is also, as Fr. Barron points out, a kind of taunt, in which we proclaim the triumph of the Cross, the persistence of the Church against which--we have the divine promise--the gates of hell will not prevail.  The very place where Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome is the physical center of the Church.  Peter's successor is to be found there today, two thousand years later, while the emperors, kings, tyrants who persecuted the Church have crumbled, along with their mighty regimes, to dust.

As Peter's latest successor has said, the Church suffers when she becomes used to too much comfort and has too close an accommodation with secular powers.  She grows in strength and numbers, not through establishment (look at the sorry state of the Church in western Europe today, especially where the Church was most 'powerful' or hegemonic in worldly terms) but through and in the face of persecution.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.

Fighting with Weakened Forces

The U.S. bishops are taking a lead on the HHS contraception mandate that is inspiring to see and is bringing together the theologically orthodox and liberal dissenters.  The two sides are united in defense, not of Church teaching (on which they disagree) but of the Church's right to have a teaching on the matter and of its members and organizations to be free of government coercion that would impose an obligation to collude in practices it considers gravely immoral.  That is, whatever their view on Church teaching about contraception and abortion (and remember that abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization are at issue and not just condoms), everyone agrees that religious liberty, the first freedom, must be defended against an ever-more intrusive and authoritarian secular state.


Well, not quite everyone.  As is to be expected, the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) effectively sides with the most anti-Catholic administration in my lifetime.  A recent "commentary" trivializes the authoritative teaching of the Magisterium by asking "Which Catholics are against contraception coverage?" as if the teaching of the successors of the Apostles were just a minority opinion in the Church.  It misses the distinction between being free to buy contraceptives--no-one argues that employees of Catholic organizations should be prevented from doing so--and being forced by the state to purchase such products and services against your conscience.  The article, like so much in that publication, not only rejects the Church's teaching (citing as usual assorted dissident theologians) but also denies the teaching authority of the bishops and the Magisterium.  


[Update: NCR has since come out in favor of an expanded exemption, but--as editor Dennis Coday puts it, because it sees Obamacare itself as threatened by the controversy and because "a wider exemption will be necessary to defend against bills concerning life issues such as euthanasia, abortion and genome research pending in state legislatures."  In other words, NCR's position on religious liberty is completely unprincipled.  Their support for wider conscience exemptions depends on their own view of the matter involved.  Coday's "call for compromise" consists almost entirely in an attack on the bishops--so business as usual at NCR.]


Of course the Obama administration has a host of post-Catholics--politicians who publicly reject Church teaching and defy the Church's authority to teach but who, like NCR, hang on to the label of Catholic and so provide cover for those Catholics who have little understanding of Catholic teaching and little connection to the Church except for family rituals and perhaps Christmas and Easter.  They vote Democrat out of historical and ethnic reflexes but their loyalty to the Church, once such a powerful marker of personal and ethnic identity, has evaporated.  


It is this hollowing out of Catholic parishes and communities, described so powerfully by Philip Lawler for the case of Boston in his invaluable book, The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston's Catholic Culture, that makes the position of the Church so weak in the present confrontation.  It is what makes it possible for a Democratic administration to dismiss so contemptuously the concerns even of those Catholics who have covered for it in the past (like Fr. Jenkins, the president of Notre Dame).  The administration's post-Catholic spokespeople explain with relish that hardly anyone believes or follows the Church's teaching on contraception anyway, again reducing timeless moral teaching to a matter of head counts.


Lawler argued that the sex abuse scandal has been devastating in its effects on Catholic communities, not least in that it emboldened the media, such as the never-sympathetic Boston Globe, to attack the bishops openly, virulently, and relentlessly.  (The same phenomenon is evident in other once hyper-Catholic communities - in Ireland, Quebec, and Spain - now among the most thoroughly secular places on the planet.)  But as Lawler says, the abuse scandal is part of a wider postconciliar context.  The laxity in faith and morals, especially sexual morals, in seminaries (where homosexuality was protected and fostered while orthodoxy, asceticism, and piety were excluded as evidence of 'rigidity') created an environment in which traditional discipline was relaxed and sexual abuse could arise in the clergy in the next two decades to approximate the level in the general male population.  The corruption of the 'liberal' seminaries was aided and abetted by Catholic theology departments and dissident nuns.  At the same time, a ruthless and unrelenting iconoclasm stripped from the faithful their accustomed devotions, liturgical practices, statues, altars and altar rails, music, and architecture.


The bishops played a key role in enabling all this devastation by their failure to confront the virulent growth of dissent in the seminaries, theology departments, parishes, and among the 'church mice' (those who scurry about the parishes and chanceries on their own errands and who constitute the core base of NCR).  The failure to deal effectively with cases of abuse of minors (mostly adolescent boys) was, Lawler argues, part and parcel of a too comfortable accommodation to the secular world, where the bishop was an important public figure.


So for years before Cardinal Burke, then Archbishop of St. Louis, told Senator John Kerry, 'Catholic' Democratic presidential candidate and public supporter of abortion, embryo-destructive research, and same-sex unions, not to present himself for Communion when campaigning in his archdiocese, the defiant behavior of such cultural Catholics had been tolerated by other bishops.  This despite the clear provision of canon law to the effect that such public opposition to the Church's teaching on abortion puts one outside the Catholic Church.  Burke's stance resulted in a public split among the bishops.  It revealed, not so much that the bishops could not rely on the faithful to support them if they took an unpopular stand (in fact, the bishop of Providence did just that, stood up to a barrage of criticism from the media over his line on Catholic pro-abortion politician Patrick Kennedy, and retained support from local Catholics) as that the bishops themselves had become weak, ineffectual, and divided.  Their own failure to deal with the sex abuse scandal had robbed them of credibility even when they did seek to provide moral leadership in the public square.


The key trigger for this destruction of Catholic culture was the open and public dissent of theologians and priests from the Church's teaching on marriage and contraception in the context of Vatican II and the sexual revolution of the 1960s.  There was an expectation by many that the Church's teaching would change but instead Pope Pius VI's encyclical Humanae Vitae reasserted and reinforced it.  The resulting open dissension and quiet disregard created a split between Church teaching and 'pastorally' indulged practice, along with an accommodation or silence of the bishops that has been compared to the "Truce of Clement IX" (1667-1713) in face of Jansenist dissent.  The bishops' failure to confront this open disobedience and dissent from theologians and priests helped to break down the Catholic culture in the most strongly Catholic communities, creating the impression not only that contraception was acceptable, but soon that attendance at Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation was no longer obligatory, and that the sacrament of Confession was no longer necessary for reconciliation with God and the Church except in the case of the most heinous sins like murder or adultery.


In my opinion, though apparently not Lawler's judging by the second (2010) edition of his book, many of today's bishops are incomparably better, stronger, more orthodox, more capable of standing up to the pressures of an increasing hostile and authoritarian state secularism, than their predecessors.  But they have to lead an American church that is, in some of its erstwhile bastions, devastated and in ruins. 


In the piece below, Howard Kainz provides one example of how many priests, especially those trained in the 1970s and 1980s, deploy the "pastoral" excuse to trump even the most basic Church teaching in the areas of life, death, sex, and marriage.  There's no doubt that the derelictions of bishops in that period allowed the rot to spread in their ranks.  The result is also clear.  The Church and her bishops have severely weakened forces with which to defend the Faith against the secularist onslaught.

SATURDAY, 04 FEBRUARY 2012

Vatican II and the Two Ends of Marriage

By Howard Kainz

A Catholic couple that I know went to a pastor to arrange for marriage. They had mentioned to friends and relatives that for various reasons they had no intention of having children, and they made this known to the pastor when he asked. He had no problem with that decision, and they were married in the Church several months later. I was surprised. Obviously, the pastor’s stance indirectly approved using contraceptives indefinitely for a fertile couple that had no interest in Natural Family Planning. And if contraceptives failed and the woman became pregnant, the presumed right of the woman to avoid nine months of pregnancy could be interpreted as implying a right to abortion. I asked a Jesuit theologian what he thought about the situation. He answered in terms of the traditional Catholic doctrine concerning the two ends of marriage – the procreative and the unitive; but he insisted that the two ends could not be arbitrarily separated. In fact, he thought that if a marriage were conducted with agreement that it would be childless, it would be invalid canonically. Recently I came across the pastor in question and decided to ask him about what I had heard. He defended his decision on the basis that with Vatican II there was renewed thinking regarding the ends of marriage, downplaying the procreative purpose, and emphasizing the unitive purpose. I told him the view of the theologian that the two purposes could not be separated, but he insisted that for pastoral purposes, the unitive end, which is most important, would satisfy Church requirements. The main document from Vatican II regarding marriage is Gaudium et Spes (“Joy and Hope”), which does not exactly prioritize the unitive aspect of marriage, but states that it is not less important than the procreative aspect, and proceeds to restate this latter aspect:  While not making the other purposes of matrimony of less account, the true practice of conjugal love, and the whole meaning of the family life which results from it, have this aim: that the couple be ready with stout hearts to cooperate with the love of the Creator and the Savior. . . .Married Christians glorify the Creator and strive toward fulfillment in Christ when with a generous human and Christian sense of responsibility they acquit themselves of the duty to procreate. The message that the unitive aspect is just as important as the procreative may be understood as an attempt to correct certain earlier theological positions which did not recognize this truth; and the reemphasis of the unitive aspect is of course particularly important in cases where married couples are infertile, past the age of childbearing, in sickness or hard times, etc. But the same document also warns that “Sons of the Church may not undertake methods of birth control which are found blameworthy by the teaching authority of the Church in its unfolding of the divine law.” With a view to possible misinterpretations of Gaudium et spes, Pope Paul VI’s 1968 Encyclical Humanae Vitae brought out the procreative dimension more explicitly:  Each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life. . . .This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act.  This view notoriously triggered dissent among many clerics and theologians. A widespread silence in many areas has amounted to non-enforcement, which, as I mentioned in a previous column, was one of a number of things that, for some strange reason, were considered by many to be connected with “The Spirit of Vatican II.” The expectation among dissenters now seems to be that eventually the magisterium of the Church will catch up with the modern world, rescinding restrictions that Christians from Apostolic times have taken for granted. Dampening such hopes, Pope John Paul II in his 1984 “Reflections onHumanae vitae,” reiterated the “inseparable connection between the unitive significance and the procreative significance of the marriage act”; and in his 1993 Encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, emphasized that the “concern for the transmission and preservation of life” was one of the three “precepts” of the natural law, according to St. Thomas Aquinas. American bishops, at the 2009 USCCB meeting, issued a Pastoral Letter, “Marriage: Love and Life in the Divine Plan,” further sidelining the liberals’ plans for “reforming” a Church which is “behind the times.” For seculars, and for many Catholics, the command of Yahweh in Genesisto “increase and multiply” has now been superseded by unwritten commands to protect the environment, free women from childbearing, and – most importantly – to combat the “overpopulation crisis” which is one of the most potent mythsinfluencing ethical policies and decisions in the modern world. The inseparability of the two ends of marriage is of absolute importance. Does anyone marry just to have children? History tells us that royalty looking for male heirs occasionally did this – Henry VIII being an extreme example. And I have encountered young women who said they wanted to have children but not marry. Let’s hope, this attitude is on the wane. Certainly an indispensable pastoral objective is to make sure that the union of the two “ends” is present in the aspirations of couples contemplating marriage. In any case, the procreative end of marriage has not become less important because of some perceived “Spirit of Vatican II.” Howard Kainz is emeritus professor of philosophy at Marquette University. He is the author of many books, including the recently published The Existence of God and the Faith-Instinct. © 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org Retrieved February 4, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Patiently Explain!

My experience matches that of Professor Arkes.  At least in academic circles and, from what I read, among the cultural elite more generally, there is an assumption that arguments against the unlimited abortion license instituted by Roe v. Wade and subsequent SCOTUS decisions, must rely on appeals to religious belief or revelation.  Demands for conscience exemptions may reinforce that impression.  But the position that abortion always involves the deliberate and direct killing of an innocent human being, and that the intentional killing of innocents is always wrong, does not depend on revelation.  It is a conclusion accessible to reason and is compelling on its own terms, without appeal to canon law or Scripture.  In the Clash of Orthodoxies, Robert P. George showed that the deep social divisions in matters of life, death, sex and marriage do not involve a clash between religious orthodoxy and secular reason, but a clash of orthodoxies--religious and secular-liberal--the second of which is blind to its own ideological nature and which seeks to impose itself on society as the established state religion.  As he shows, the religious orthodoxy on these issues is much more persuasive on rational grounds alone.


The problem, as Arkes notes here, is that so many otherwise intelligent, educated people are unaware that there is any rational case against abortion.  They have never heard the arguments and simply do not believe there are any.  In the case of professional abortion proponents like Planned Parenthood, this is a matter of deliberate strategy which takes the form of a refusal to engage in any kind of rational debate with their opponents (who now number a slight but growing majority of the population).  As I argued in an earlier post (following Richard John Neuhaus), it is the essentially conservative and paternalistic position that it's all settled, it's not going to change, and there's nothing to discuss.


Calling the pro-life position "religious"--and so, the implication is, subjective and personal--is a lazy way to dismiss the case against abortion without taking the trouble to engage in moral reasoning, consider the arguments, or examine the science.  It also reflects the sad fact that many, many people, and not only students, have never heard any serious argument on abortion.  The movement, the marches, vigils, and legal maneuvers are all essential, but the task remains, to borrow Lenin's phrase, to "patiently explain."


Note: Christopher Kaczor, professor of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, reviews all the arguments and scientific advances related to abortion over the past 40 years in his recent book, The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice.  There is a lengthy interview with the author at National Review Online, where Kaczor notes:

My argument is not faith-based, but rather based on reason and evidence. There is no appeal to theological authority; there are no Scripture citations to justify conclusions, and no premises that come from ecclesial authority. The case against abortion is made to all persons of good will, regardless of their faith or lack thereof.

TUESDAY, 31 JANUARY 2012

Arguments Ever New

By Hadley Arkes

January 23, the first weekday after the anniversary of Roe v. Wade:  The March for Life was assembling in Washington, and I found myself, not in Jerusalem, but Athens (Ohio, that is), the site of the first university in the Northwest Territory, Ohio University (founded in 1804).    Two young historians, Robert Ingram and my former student Paul Milazzo, had founded a program to bring to the campus voices and perspectives not usually heard there. They thought we should sound the argument on abortion to an audience composed of students, and even older people, who have probably never heard any serious argument on abortion.    The jolting part, for many of these people, is to hear that the argument is a weave of embryology and moral reasoning. It begins with what science knows about human life from its beginning, but it then moves with the discipline of principled reasoning.    The revelation, as ever, is that there is no appeal to revelation or faith. It is all what we might call “natural law reasoning” – and we throw in, as an aside:  “by the way, that has always been the teaching of the Catholic Church, that you don’t have to be Catholic to understand these arguments.” The constant surprise is that the most elementary arguments, which we have been making for more than thirty years, still come as news to people, for those slogans without substance still hang on:  “It’s her body.  She has to carry it.”  Whether they carry the label or not, the answers still offer a version of Moral Reasoning 101. A British professor of history, knowing most of the answer himself, asked me to respond to the argument of his students that “it’s her body.”   Well, it’s not solely “her body.”  Unless something is alive and growing in the womb, an abortion is no more “indicated” or relevant than a tonsillectomy. And it is a distinct human life, separate in its genetic definition from that of either parent.    The right to one’s own body never entailed a right to destroy anyone else’s body. And if we are clear that we are dealing with an unjustified taking of a human life, the agent and the location are matters of indifference. So is the victim.  We still recognize in the law, or in our moral understanding, the wrong of self-murder, or suicide. In fact, we recognize a whole class of things so wrong that people may not do them to themselves. They may not contract themselves into servitude or slavery; they may not participate in duels even with their consent, rent their bodies for the pleasures of others, or ask a doctor to sever a limb to satisfy a bet.   We had a name for this class of things:  we used to call them “unalienable” rights – rights we had no right to alienate or waive even for ourselves. People seem curiously to forget that even the Supreme Court never established as the ground of its holding in Roe a sovereign right of a woman over her own body.  For the Court acknowledged that legislatures could insist that abortions take place only in a licensed clinic or hospital for the sake of safety.   But with that move the Court ruled out the argument of the woman who might say:  “I can use an unlicensed abortionist for far less money, and I should be the sole judge of the risks I’m willing to take with my own body.” The most notable surprise of this evening came from a professor quite in sympathy with the pro-life movement. He asked how we dealt with the claim that forcing a woman to carry through her pregnancy, against her own wishes, was a form of “involuntary servitude.” I thought that this kind of argument was made only in precincts of preciosity in the law schools, where professors with imaginations unanchored claim that the laws restricting abortion violated the Thirteenth Amendment (the Amendment that forbade slavery and “involuntary servitude”).   Here the answers were indeed so axiomatic, so rudimentary, that they may not be noticed any longer. In the very “logic of morals,” a “wrongful” act is that which no one ought to do, that anyone may be rightly forbidden from doing.   If we are talking about the taking of innocent life, a killing without justification, then no one suffers a wrong, or the deprivation of his rights, when he is restrained from carrying out a wrongful act.  As Aquinas – and Lincoln – taught, we cannot coherently claim a “right to do a wrong.”     We cannot be said to be suffering the wrong of “involuntary servitude” or any wrongful denial of our liberties, if we are reminded that we are of course obliged not to destroy a life we have no justification in taking.   The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus once complained to Rabbi Abraham Heschel that he was invited to Cleveland, but he would be giving arguments he had given so often in other places. And Heschel said something to the effect of “Why, Richard, do you think that the people in Cleveland have already heard what you’ve said in other places?”   The pro-life arguments, for many people, still come as news. Those arguments are never out of season, and we should never tire of sounding them anew. Especially in those dark places found, most likely these days, in college towns. Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law. © 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org Retrieved February 2, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/arguments-ever-new.html

Totalitarian liberals - a follow-up to Obama's HHS power grab

In the words of John Paul II (Veritatis Splendor, N. 101):

Today, when many countries have seen the fall of ideologies which bound politics to a totalitarian conception of the world — Marxism being the foremost of these — there is no less grave a danger that the fundamental rights of the human person will be denied and that the religious yearnings which arise in the heart of every human being will be absorbed once again into politics. This is the risk of an alliance between democracy and ethical relativism, which would remove any sure moral reference point from political and social life, and on a deeper level make the acknowledgement of truth impossible. Indeed, “if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism”.  

 A good reminder that not only are tyrants and totalitarians always ethical relativists, like Nietzsche reducing truth to power, but also ethical relativists inevitably have totalitarian tendencies.  It becomes all about using coercive state power to impose your views on what you see as a backward populace.

Michael Gerson has a good article in the Washington Post about how "Obama plays his Catholic allies for fools."  The HHS mandate was delivered with a sneer, Gerson suggests.

Both radicalism and maliciousness are at work in Obama’s decision — an edict delivered with a sneer. It is the most transparently anti-Catholic maneuver by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875 — a measure designed to diminish public tolerance of Romanism, then regarded as foreign, authoritarian and illiberal. Modern liberalism has progressed to the point of adopting the attitudes and methods of 19th-century Republican nativists. 

 It is a move so patently contemptuous of religious freedom and respect for conscience that it leaves those Catholics who provided Catholic cover for Obama with some explaining to do--not least the president of Notre Dame.

Consider Catholicism’s most prominent academic leader, the Rev. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame. Jenkins took a serious risk in sponsoring Obama’s 2009 honorary degree and commencement address — which promised a “sensible” approach to the conscience clause. Jenkins now complains, “This is not the kind of ‘sensible’ approach the president had in mind when he spoke here.” Obama has made Jenkins — and other progressive Catholic allies — look easily duped.

As John Paul II had warned, there is in this radical secularism embraced by this Administration as well as other political leaders across Canada and Europe, a growing intolerance of any kind of institutional pluralism, a profound shift in the understanding of liberalism.  It amounts to a turning away from America's founding principles and Constitution, from a democracy that depends on the strength of mediating associations and institutions that are not dominated or suppressed by the state.  As Gerson concludes,

Obama’s decision also reflects a certain view of liberalism. Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-­clericalism. 

The administration’s ultimate motivation is uncertain. Has it adopted a radical secularism out of conviction, or is it cynically appealing to radical secularists? In either case, the war on religion is now formally declared. 

Unless you become like little children - Against sacrificing children

Saints of the Child Jesus

By Anthony Esolen

WEDNESDAY, 01 FEBRUARY 2012

Everywhere outside of Christianity, wrote Hans Urs von Balthasar, the child is automatically the first to be sacrificed. Only for Christians is the adult the imperfect child. Everywhere else the child is the imperfect adult, and falls subject to our lust for domination.

It is easy to see why. Men who do not know the true God, or who turn away from Him, do not therefore cease to worship. For God Himself, as Augustine says, gives us the delight in praising Him: He has made us for Himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. 

We turn then to the false gods, and since no man bows down before what he believes is beneath him, we inevitably turn towards what is in our eyes great, powerful, even ruthless. Men summon demons not because they find their company agreeable. They summon them, Chesterton noted, because they believe the demons have no nonsense about them. They get things done.

What use, then, can we have for the helpless child? We have, from Carthage, no delightful amulets portraying the god Moloch in an attitude of joy, for having received from the people his quota of children. Moloch wants the child-flesh, roasted or broiled, but not the children. 

Even the Greek gods, those glorious forms of male and female beauty, do not condescend to take note of children, at least until the boys are old enough to compete in the games at Olympia or Delphi. “Children are our greatest resource,” goes the ghastly and insincere saying, as if they were minerals to be mined and put to use.

Many among us are ready to deny children their full humanity, on the grounds that they can’t do anything. And because we worship the demonic getting-things-done, instead of the almighty God who chose to dwell among us as a weakling babe, we are now reverting to the weary old pagan wisdom. 

Precisely because the child is weak, we allow it to be vulnerable to our designs. It is not yet one of us, and so we can exert upon it our sovereign power, to mold it as we will.

True, we don’t inhale the narcotics and beat the timbrels, while placing in Moloch’s arms the poor man’s baby we’ve “adopted,” to cut the economic deal with that horrid king. What point would there be in that? We all agree now that Moloch was only a demon of man’s fevered imagination. Moloch can’t get anything done. 

But if getting things done –accruing raw power for ourselves – is the aim, then the child is either constantly in the way, or is the one who suffers the exercise of our power. We murder children in the womb. Why? The child would, in his very helplessness, destroy our aims. 

         He, who was once a child, never ceased to be that child.

We can’t drop out of school now. We can’t quit our important work. We can’t tie ourselves down with marriage. Or, to consider the decision from beforehand, we will do as we please with our bodies, and if something unfortunate happens despite all our technological precautions, we have a technological solution for that, too.

We haven’t yet regressed so far as to murder children outside the womb. We retain a superstitious regard about that. The ancients believed that the lion was too noble a creature to kill a sleeping man. We are in this regard the reverse of the lion. We are those cowardly beasts that will kill a child sleeping in the womb, but will duck and shrug and grouch once it has come awake. 

But if we can’t murder children yet, we can certainly murder childhood. That murder follows naturally upon our decision to worship the false god of prowess. When Macbeth murdered the good King Duncan in his sleep, it wasn’t just the single man’s death he was guilty of. No, the doughty Thane of Glamis and Earl of Cawdor hears a voice crying out,

Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more: Macbeth shall sleep no more.

In killing the sleeping man, Macbeth has murdered the very principle that allows us to sleep in peace: our trust that our weakness will be honored, and that we will be protected. 

So too, once we agree to subordinate the child to our dreams of power, then childhood itself is scotched as it were in the egg. We wish to design our children, as we draw up blueprints for a banking house or a factory. We institutionalize them as early as possible, because we want to “make something” of them, or because we want them out of the way while we are “making something” of ourselves. 

We are the tools of our tools. We subject these simple children to batteries of tests, regardless of the waywardness of the child’s developing mind. We murder their innocence every day by exposing them to what is lewd, vicious, and demeaning, justifying it because, we say, that’s the world they’re going to have to live in. Is the child sensitive to the holiness of his body? Too bad, kid.

How far this is from the family huddled in the stable, and the child wrapped in swaddling bands! In the child Jesus we do not see God hiding his power so much as revealing what it is, really, to be mighty: for power divorced from the magnificent self-lavishing of love is demonic, and is finally futile and empty. 

Rummage for human empires in the garbage heap of history. “Unless you become like little children,” said Jesus, “you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” It must be so, since He, who was once a child, never ceased to be that child. He wants for us that innocence, that wonder before the glory of God, because then we will be filled with that mighty and Holy Spirit that plays forever in the love between the Father and the Son.

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. His latest book is Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child. He teaches at Providence College. 

Retrieved February 1, 2012 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/

Fr. Robert Barron - Additional Comments on the HHS Contraception Mandate