Not exactly a profile in courage

As a Connecticut Catholic myself, I feel marginally qualified to comment on this item. AP reports:

Connecticut’s Roman Catholic bishops have changed course and agreed to administer emergency contraception to all rape victims at Catholic hospitals just days before a new state law requiring them to do so takes effect.

The church, which runs four of the state’s 31 hospitals, has been fighting the law for the past two years, arguing that legislators were forcing medical personnel to violate their religious beliefs and perform chemical abortions by providing emergency contraception, sold as Plan B, to women who are ovulating.

This was the biggest controversy in Connecticut for the last two years. Emotions ran very high on both sides. The bill in question (legislative summary / text), which goes into effect on Monday, Oct. 1, mandates that healthcare facilities providing assistance to victims of sexual assault make “emergency contraception” available to them. The bishops wanted to be dispensed from said obligation if tests showed the woman was pregnant or ovulating. Catholic teaching allows for postcoital contraception in the event of a rape, but obviously abortion is always strictly prohibited. Problem is, depending on when they are administered, emergency contraceptive pills can work by (1) preventing ovulation, (2) preventing fertilization of an ovum by sperm, or (3) preventing an already-fertilized ovum (i.e., a conceived human embryo) from implanting on the uterine wall, causing, essentially, a chemical abortion. So the bishops wanted a provision in the bill dispensing hospitals from the obligation to provide emergency contraception if tests could show that the woman was pregnant or had ovulated. I’m not clear about why this was a step too far for proponents of the bill.

In any case, state legislators vented frustration that the bishops were unwilling to compromise, which is understandable since their right (and moral/religious obligation) not to perform abortions was at stake. So the state legislature passed a bill dispensing hospitals from the obligation to provide emergency contraception if an FDA-approved pregnancy test came back positive, but prohibited the use of an ovulation test. My understanding is that a pregnancy test may not come back positive for at least some time after conception, and an ovulation test would help add precision to the determination of whether fertilization has occurred. But legislators at least made some attempt, albeit inadequate, to address the bishops’ concerns, which they understood as grave and sincere. The liberal Republican governor signed the bill, and it goes into effect on Monday.

Now the bishops have released a statement, suddenly declaring that an ovulation test is not, strictly speaking, morally necessary, that a pregnancy test suffices, and that they will comply with the law. (There was speculation that they would challenge the constitutionality of the law.) They also add some confusing dicta about how neither the science nor the theology surrounding this issue are settled — which sounds like nonsense to me. Thomas Peters at American Papist, and Jeff Miller at Curt Jester, have rightly raised some well-founded objections to the statement. Basically, the bishops are saying: since it is not an intrinsically evil act (i.e., a necessarily evil act) to administer postcoital contraception to rape victims without an ovulation test, therefore we can do just that in all cases.

But the premise here was true all along, so why all of a sudden do the bishops draw this new conclusion? The moral issue here turns on prudence: it is irresponsible and imprudent to give a pill that can cause an abortion to a woman who is possibly pregnant. Is it intrinsically evil–i.e., always and everywhere, in any circumstance, evil–to drive over a bump in the road when you’re pretty sure, but not positive, that it isn’t a person lying there? I suppose not, but to do so without moral certainty that there is no person in the road is surely imprudent and negligent at best. That is basically the same moral situation into which the law forces hospitals, and that is the situation to which the bishops–until now–have objected.

To spend two years fighting this bill only to publicly about-face and embrace it is a major embarassment for the dioceses of Connecticut and undermines the credibility of every argument they made against the bill, and of every person who argued against it on their behalf. Even if the bishops planned on caving in and following the law, why did they have to announce anything? Everybody knew they had already lost the legislative battle, so the presumption is that they have to follow the law, however grudgingly. Instead, they opted for an entirely unnecessary, bold, and public reversal of position. They essentially declare: “It doesn’t really matter that we lost, because the bill is acceptable anyway.” What!? The bishops have pulled the rug out from underneath every faithful Catholic who went to bat for them–writing letters-to-the-editor, lobbying their state representatives, defending the Church to friends and colleagues–over the course of this controversy.

And now I arrive at the real point of this post. The Catholic Church is the most politically inept major institution in the United States. That is the deeper scandal underlying this current one, and that is what the Catholic blogosphere should be talking about. For its size, the American Church should be far more influential and politically powerful than it actually is. The Church, time and again, refuses to leverage the influence that it could. From the political incompetence in this case, to the impotence of the Archdiocese of Boston in fighting against mandated gay adoptions, to the eagerness of Catholic colleges to invite anti-Catholic politicians to campus, to the U.S.C.C.B. sticking its nose into issues that aren’t its business, it is abundantly clear that the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the United States hasn’t a clue about how to engage political authority, or even how to flex its own substantial political muscle. The result is that politicans walk all over the Catholic Church without consequence, and we are left to watch our religious freedom gradually erode at the hands of ever-expanding government regulation and bureaucracy.

There was a time in history when social services were the exclusive domain of the Church, which established schools, universities, hospitals, clinics, orphanages, and homeless shelters all without government mandates or assistance. It served the poor and “the least” of society in obedience to a command from our Lord to love and serve Him in our neighbors. The Church remains the largest provider of social services in the United States except the government, and yet contemporary liberal ideology seems to have sent governments on a quest to monopolize social services and push the Church out. When will the Church stand its ground?

The late John Cardinal O’Connor knew how to play political hardball. What would happen, for example, if the Connecticut Catholic hospitals simply refused, in spite of the law, to dispense Plan B without first performing an ovulation test? Would the state of Connecticut shut down those hospitals — which are critical to health care in Connecticut’s four largest urban centers? In any case, to suddenly about-face after two years of uncompromising insistence that this law would force Catholic hospitals to violate their religious beliefs undermines the Church’s credibility, and makes the bishops look fickle and insincere. It is past time for the U.S. bishops to get smart about politics, and the lay faithful must demand that they do. Per Matthew 10:16:

Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.

Good point

The Vatican just released a response to questions from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on moral considerations involving care of patients in a “vegetative state”. It is worth reading. An excerpt:

Patients in a “vegetative state” breathe spontaneously, digest food naturally, carry on other metabolic functions, and are in a stable situation. But they are not able to feed themselves.  If they are not provided artificially with food and liquids, they will die, and the cause of their death will be neither an illness nor the “vegetative state” itself, but solely starvation and dehydration.  At the same time, the artificial administration of water and food generally does not impose a heavy burden either on the patient or on his or her relatives. It does not involve excessive expense; it is within the capacity of an average health-care system, does not of itself require hospitalization, and is proportionate to accomplishing its purpose, which is to keep the patient from dying of starvation and dehydration. It is not, nor is it meant to be, a treatment that cures the patient, but is rather ordinary care aimed at the preservation of life.

The crucial point, in my mind, is that the patient in a vegetative state is merely disabled, not dying or terminally ill.

Academia and Religion

Raymond Ibrahim, in Jesus and Mohammad, Version 2.0, comments on the poverty of contemporary “religious studies” scholarship:

In the end, the so-called “historical” Jesus that sticks in people’s minds based on these academic distortions is little more than a liberal-minded, sexually ambiguous wandering sage, stripped, ironically, of all historical context.

Anachronism, you think? Since when did bona fide, professional historians cede the entire domain of the history of world religions to odious, agenda-driven “religious studies” professors?

[N]owhere is the arrogance of modernity better manifested than in the universities, where the straightforward words of history’s primary sources are increasingly brushed aside.

As it turns out, the religious studies crowd turns the same blind eye to firsthand accounts of Muhammed’s life, although with the effect not of trivializing him, a la Historical Jesus^TM, but rather of making him more credible by downplaying his flaws. Read the whole thing.

God’s discipline

From St. Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews 12:5-13:

And have you forgotten the exhortation which addresses you as sons? — “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor lose courage when you are punished by him. For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed.

Madness, Love, and Sanctity

From The Praise of Folly (p. 128 of the Penguin Classics edition), by Desiderius Erasmus:

To sum up (or I shall be pursuing the infinite), it is quite clear that the Christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly, though it has none at all with wisdom. If you want proofs of this, first consider the fact that the very young and the very old, women and simpletons are the people who take the greatest delight in sacred and holy things, and are therefore always found nearest the altars, led there doubtless solely by their natural instinct. Secondly, you can see how the first founders of the faith were great lovers of simplicity and bitter enemies of learning. Finally, the biggest fools of all appear to be those who have once been wholly possessed by zeal for Christian piety. They squander their possessions, ignore insults, submit to being cheated, make no distinction between friends and enemies, shun pleasure, sustain themselves on fasting, vigils, tears, toil, and humiliations, scorn life, and desire only death — in short, they seem to be dead to any normal feelings, as if their spirit dwelt elsewhere than in their body. What else can that be but madness? And so we should not be surprised if the apostles were thoguht to be drunk on new wine, and Festus judged Paul to be mad.

From chatper 1 of G.K. Chesterton’s Saint Francis of Assisi:

The practical reconciliation of the gaiety and austerity I must leave the story itself to suggest. But since I have mentioned Matthew Arnold and Renan and the rationalistic admirers of St. Francis, I will here give the hint of what it seems to me most advisable for such readers to keep in mind. These distinguished writers found things like the Stigmata a stumbling-block because to them religion was a philosophy. It was an impersonal thing; and it is only the most personal passion that provides here an approximate earthly parallel. A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love. The first fact to realise about St. Francis is involved in the first fact with which his story starts; that when he said he was a Troubadour of a never and nobler romance, he was not using a mere metaphor, but understood himself much better than the scholars understand him. He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubador. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men….

Abp. Sheen on the Church’s detractors

From Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s foreword to Radio Replies Vol. 1, page ix [source]:

There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.

Against materialism

From a lecture on God’s Existence by Boston College Prof. Peter Kreeft:

The thing that is the most carefully designed thing in the universe is the human brain. We haven’t yet made a computer that’s quite that efficient. Now, the brain is very much like a computer. If you were riding in an airplane, and the public address system said, “There is no pilot, but this plane is piloted by a computer which has been programmed by a football player trampling over computer cards with spiked shoes this morning.” You would feel perfectly content, right? No, I think you would pray. Or: “This airplane has been programmed in the following way. The keyboard was left out in a field last night, and there was a hail storm, and the hail stones hit the computer keys.” Again, you would not put much confidence in that plane. Well, then, why do you put confidence in your brain to understand the universe, and to do science, if your brain is a product of mindless chance? Twenty million years ago, there was no intelligence anywhere in the universe as far as we know. And no one seriously maintains that the solar system was designed by extraterrestrials. So if all intelligence now is totally caused by the mindless, pointless, and purposeless, and accidental, colliding of atoms, then why do you trust it?

In praise of ritual

From Thomas Howard’s If Your Mind Wanders at Mass…, pages 9-15:

It is an oddity about us mortals that when we come to the most profound experiences of our lives we become aware of the pale inadequacy of our own ability to respond with anything like an appropriately weighty response and find that we have to reach for something precast and structured. [...] Nothing will do but ritual and ceremony, that is, words and movements, which by virtue of themselves springing from the heart of the race, as it were, and of having been tested and dignified by ancient usage, have taken on the weight and solemnity that answer to the occasion, as opposed to our own helter-skelter attempts to respond to what has happened. [...]Since worship, along with the other central mysteries of our human existence, outstrips our own spontaneous attempts at responding adequately to the event at hand, we all find the help we need in words and movements handed down to us by wise tradition. [...]“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound!” These words, written two hundred years ago by John Newton, somehow give us the very thing we grope for. Far from cramping us or stultifying our originality, the ritual words set us free and lead us to vistas immensely higher and more radiant than our own staggering phrases could have reached.

This is the reason for all that is written down in the prayer books and missals used in Christian worship. As we make our own voice one with the immemorial voice of the Church, we find that we are vaught up into something much bigger than the tiny pool of our own resources. Gloria in excelsis Deo! Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus! Who will want to interrupt here with his own poor notions?

Formal pronouns

From page xxiv of “Shakespeare: An Overview”, by Sylvan Barnet of Tufts University, in Signet Classics’ 1998 edition of The Merchant of Venice:

In Middle English, thou, thy, and thee were used among familiars and in speaking to children and inferiors; ye, your, and you were used in speaking to superiors (servants to masters, nobles to the king) or to equals with whom the speaker was not familiar. Increasingly the “polite” forms were used in all direct address, regardless of rank, and the accusative you displaced the nominative ye.

Hmm! I had always assumed that “thou,” “thy,” and “thee” were more formal than “ye/you,” “your” and “you”. Many traditional prayers written (or translated, as it were) with the informal pronouns sound very elevated and flowery to the modern (Anglophone) ear. But maybe it’s best to try to use the formal when addressing our Lord.

Math, music, and reductionism

From the second lecture of Prof. Robert Greenberg’s How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Ed., available from The Teaching Company:

Were the ancient Greeks indulging in that hoary old myth and saying that music was math, that math was music? No, that’s not what they were saying. They were saying that the relationships between different sounds and rhythms were governed by the same basic mathematical ratios that they believed governed the cosmos. The ancient Greeks notwithstanding, it’s a rhetorical question I’m asked all the time. “Music’s like math, right?!” Wrong. Music’s like music, and math is like math! Here’s another question for which I wish I had a tenspot for every time I’ve been asked: “Johann Sebastian Bach’s music is like math, right?!” Wrong. Bach’s music is like Bach’s music. Now, look, I know what these questioners mean. They hear in Bach’s music an order, a logic, a control, a disciplined rightness that they associate with arithmetical sums and algebraic equations. But saying “Bach’s music is like arithmetic” is like saying that a human being is nothing but five dollars worth of chemicals, add some water, and stir. This may be true, but it is reductionism at its trivializing worst — because we are rather more than the sum of our chemical parts. We are also about love and wit, about intelligence and stupidity, about wisdom, imagination, spirit, awareness and about soul. These are the essence of what we are, no matter how unquantifiable these elements might be. Bach’s music is not like arithmetic. Bach’s music is like Bach.Here’s another one I get all the time: “I’ve read studies that correlate musical and mathematical abilities. Einstein played the violin, you know.” Yes, Einstein played the violin; he played it badly! And if musical and mathematical abilities are indeed one and the same, how then are we supposed to the explain fact that Beethoven, who had a grade school education, was hardly able to do any more than add and subtract small numbers? Multiplication and division — well, they lay completely outside his ken. Does this make Beethoven a bad musician or simply a dummy? No, he was neither. I would suggest that we do not trivialize music or math by attempting to render them equivalent. They are what they are, but they are not the same.