Ferguson and the Media

Here's my final thought on Ferguson for the time being. (The rest are on Facebook, incidentally, if you're accessing this through the blog and wondering,  "Last of what series?")

I've watched/listened to probably something like six hours of coverage in the last 36 hours.  One of the developing tropes, coming out of yesterday's press conference, is the role of the news media in all of this. I want to say something about that.

Let me admit up front that I have a natural affinity for, and probably even bias in favor of, journalism and journalists. This might, however, shock some readers who see me often decrying "the media" and especially "the mainstream media" as complicit in terrible things. But that's because I make a distinction when I speak of "the media" - and there's the rub. It wants elucidation.

I have in mind here especially the 24 hour news channels, but also the major wall-to-wall coverage engines that can now be managed online by everybody from the likes of HuffPo down to the local ABC affiliate that knows how to do on the Twittface.

I will repeat. I've tuned into about 6 hours of the last 36 hours of coverage. That's one sixth of the total coverage (#Maths). But during that time, I've seen a whole lot of the same things repeated over and over again.

When CNN and MSNBC and FOX get frustrated about being accused of shallow coverage, I can understand the frustrations of the journalists. They are often doing their jobs fairly decently. It is the editors and producers and consultants for marketing and all the rest of the managerial sort involved in making 24 hour news that are failing miserably. 

Repition is the mother of study. We learn through repetition - especially in this meme-filled, RT'ing, Buzzfed world. And if you take note of what the major 24 hour networks repeat, versus what is unique, it is fascinating. The repeated things are always the sensational things, the outrageous or scandalous things. Heading into every commercial break and coming back from it, we are hit with footage of burning cars and protestors shouting, tear gas being fired, and banners evincing a sense of urgency and crisis and Armageddon brought to you by Sears.

In between, you sometimes get treated to insightful commentary, but often these segments are framed around the same boilerplate. Each expert guest or leading figure is asked to comment on the clip we've seen a thousand times, of the political hack blathering at the podium or the angry step-father screaming amidst the crowd. And while the expert or leading figure might have something interesting to say, it only barely "informs" us because it's the sixth different opinion we've heard on a controversial matter. The image or soundbite itself, however, is firmly seared into our minds at least, and it keeps us hooked like a drug. We want to see what the next special person is going to say about it.

The whole style of presentation of all this is, overall, patronizing in the cheapest of ways. The anchor switches between every segment to greet the viewers who may have just tuned in with a "Breaking News Alert," which is actually an alert about news that broke five or six hours ago. The viewer who has been tuned in somehow falls for the trick each time, like a child when grandpa pulls the quartwr out from behind our eye - exactly like that, in fact, because we know it isn't magic, but grandpa is fun. So we fool ourselves into expecting that maybe they'll finally say something new, when - lo! - it seems to be just that the on-location reporter has moved to a different part of the street with a different car on fire of which we need so urgently to be informed, and said reporter goes on to tell us the same shit he told us twenty minutes past. The upshot for those who are, in fact, just tuning in is that they're too stupid to know why they're turning on a 24-hour news station at 8:42 PM and might really be shocked to find something happening somewhere, or at any rate too stupid to catch up in media res, because it isn't like they have words flashing all over the screen and a scrolling banner at the bottom telling you exactly what the hell is going on.

Now, some will say that it has to be this way or that's the market or whatever - and I say, "Bullshit."

Here's what should've been repeated during the 6 hours I spent watching Ferguson on the news lately:

- statistics about how many young black men that encounter cops are shot by cops, annually; compared to whites; and cross-referenced to relevant demographic data; (in fact, they'd find this data nearly impossible to gather, because somehow it is a big mystery how many cops even shoot people each year nationwide - so, yeah, media, about that job you're supposed to do...?)

- facts about how grand juries work, and how they are statutorily managed in the state of Missouri;

- facts about what civil disobedience means, citing relevant laws and court cases;

- handy tips on what are a person's rights regarding detention by police;

- facts about how protests work, and how they're governed under law - hell, you might even find cause to actually quote the First Amendment verbatim!

... but what, some may ask, would any of this accomplish? What would quoting the First Amendment verbatim do to inform us about what's happening in Ferguson?

Nothing. But neither does the shit it would replace. It would, on the other hand, educate us - which cannot be said for what it would replace.

If the First Amendment had been quoted *half the times* I saw the same pictures of tear gas and burning cars over those six hours; and if the number of black men aged 18-34 pulled over by cops last year in a given representative area were presented the other half of the time - then I'd go to bed tonight with those things solidly memorized, seared into my mind and forming germs for constructive thought. And I have a shrewd bet that, besides teaching me those two actually useful things (and maybe some more besides) they could've still found time to show me the same damn soundbite of Obama twenty or thirty times as well as twenty or thirty camera shots of the same damn car burning. I don't think I'd miss the other 150 helpings of each.

In short, media - please be journalists. Please, for the love of God, inform the public and educate the public and give them tools for productive democracy.

And repeat. Repeat for the sake of news, and leave repetition-as-entertainment to Hollywood and the creators of the Umpteenth rendition of SpiderMan. Repeat the useful stuff, and ease up on the things that add shock value (and distraction). Repeat even facts that have finer points that are debatable: be discerning, be partial, pick a fact and repeat it. Repeat at the expense of debate even: because the "dialogue" you present us in debating controversy is often nothing other than a trading back and forth of useless talking points constrained to the smallest point and the end result is just as liable to be stilted in partiality anyway by the anchors.

Repeat what is useful, I say again. (See what I did there?) And maybe, better informed and less distracted by infotainment static, our country will find a way not to repeat the tragic mistakes and failings that seem continuously to fill our 24-hour news cycles.

Monday is D-Day at SCOTUS - What I'm Watching For

I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a legal expert.

I'm a blogger and a sometime court watcher. And I'm someone who has followed with interest and engaged in activism regarding the Department of Health & Human Services' so-called "contraceptive mandate," a regulation enacted as part of the implementation of "Obamacare."

Surely my reader will be aware by now of the case pressed by Hobby Lobby stores and the owning family, the Greens, against this law. The case was heard, along with another similar case of a for-profit private industry, in March of this year. Now, everyone expects that this coming Monday - June 30th - will be "d-day" - decision day.

Those who follow my Facebook page, Standing with Hobby Lobby, will notice that I have gone more or less silent about this matter since the hearings in March. It is time that I explain myself on that score, which will deal with some of my expectations and apprehensions as Monday approaches and as we anticipate the decision of the Court.

Why I March: Because of Her

[W]e are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the "culture of death" and the "culture of life". We find ourselves not only "faced with" but necessarily "in the midst of" this conflict: we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life.

 - John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae 28

Why, You DO Hate Babies!

[EMPHATIC CONTENT WARNING: Some of the content in this post might be disturbing to more sensitive readers, so proceed with caution. It's nothing that will get you fired or anything, but it could leave you heavy-at-heart.]

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"Why do you hate babies?"

... or puppies, or kittens, or rainbow, or flowers, or any and all things good?

So goes a meme or trope or whatever you want to call it that frequently is bandied about among my friends in internet conversation. It's mean, of course, to parody those whose failure to engage in rational discourse leads them inevitably to ad hominem type attacks or to convenient non sequiturs.

Thus, for example, if in a public forum (such as on my Facebook timeline), I were to criticize the actions of a certain type of pro-life activist whose tactics were offensive for some reason, there is a certain other type of pro-life who probably before long would come speeding in with a line of accusations. None of these accusations would be based in any reasoning or facts; none would follow in any logical way from my criticisms. But the probability is so high as to appear a necessity that sooner or later in any thread of the sort, the following sorts of comments will be made:

I DARE criticize SO-AND-SO?!? [NB: ALL CAPS are a useful tool for this type of commenter.] What have I done for the pro-life movement, that I should talk? How @#$%ing DARE I be so UNCHARITABLE? Why, I am aiding and abetting the entire abortion industry myself! I might as well be performing abortions with my own hands! I just DON'T CARE, I guess, about the poor innocent BABIES!... and so on, ad nauseam. 

Is the Jury Still Out on Vaccines?

Recently on Facebook, I posted an article regarding the new trend of anti-vaccination and offering a rebuttal. It was a pretty poor article, I realize in hindsight, and I'd only skimmed it at the time. But I posted it in the interest of getting a conversation going. It, er... well, it worked, let's just say.

A lot of people posted a lot of things; some facts and documentation on both sides combined with anecdotal and authoritative experiential accounts, also on both sides. As with the original article, I sloppily skimmed all this material, and now (as with the original article) I'm hastily posting my own thoughts on the matter. I am, if you haven't noticed, A Guy With A Blog.

On Trolling Planned Parenthood (and You Can Too!)

[This post is occasioned by a conversation in which I was asked to defend one of my strategies for engaging in pro-life work: to wit, trolling Planned Parenthood. There was, to this, an implicit moral angle and I do respond to that here, although somewhat tangentially. But I want to foreground one point which is only ancillary and not directly related to the outline of my tactics given below. It, nonetheless, expresses what truly is one of my motivations in all of this, and part of what you might call a "test case" approach. You see, my strategy in dealing with Planned Parenthood focuses on promoting the truth by revealing their lies. And that is a strategy I'd recommend to be more widely adopted.]

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When I'm bored or suffering writer's block, I troll Planned Parenthood on Twitter. They are pretty dependable for putting their foot in their mouth for those who can read between the lines.

Thus, for example, way back in May, they posted this sanctimonious and diabolical B.S., for which I gave them a hard time:

Don't get me wrong, I was as happy as anyone that Philadelphia "House of Horrors" abortionist Kermit Gosnell - who operated mere blocks from my home, and whose "clinic" I would travel past on a regular basis (with a shudder) - was found guilty for his crimes...

But it seemed to me at least a bit disproportionate (if not positively disingenuous) to report on the verdict focusing on the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter (for the death of one of his female patients) while being silent on the three first-degree murder charges for killing babies born alive in botched (illegal) late-term abortions.

It was this shady tweet that first got me interested in trolling @PPact and their subsidiaries on Twitter.

Check it out!

I am grateful to Nancy Brown and the American Chesterton Society for graciously reproducing my lecture from this past summer at the International Institute for Culture on Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World as an episode of the Uncommon Sense podcast. If you like, you can download the podcast directly or, if you do the iTunes thing, subscribe there - there is a load of other good content that you're missing out on if you don't subscribe already.

Both the ACS and the IIC are organizations about which I care deeply and which are on the front lines of the much-needed mission of re-evangelizing our culture. Please give them your support!

Thanks again!

Quick Invitation and Call to Prayer

If you're at all like me, you may have groused, groaned, mumbled, grumbled, or even uttered an oath upon stepping out of doors into the extreme cold these past couple days.

I don't guilt myself with that, nor do I think you should, but I do see an opportunity in it for growth in virtue and for efficacious prayerful offering. And so that's what I'm going to do, and I decided I'd invited you to do the same.

As Wednesdays are a traditional day of fasting and penance anyhow, and as it will still fall at least somewhat in the cold snap for most of us here in America, I'm inviting my friends and readers to make tomorrow, Wednesday, January 8, a day of fasting and prayer for the less fortunate.

"Christ of the Homeless" (1982) by Fritz Eichenberg

In addition to the ordinary means of fasting by abstinence from meat and reduction in victuals, I'd also recommend trying to make a spiritual offering of the suffering involved in encountering such cold weather - and yes, it is a kind of suffering, and maybe for some of us (depending on various conditions we might have and the like) a greater suffering than for others.

But of course we can also take the opportunity to pray through this experience as well, reminded as we are by this suffering of the cold that there are many more less fortunate who suffer much more terribly, without shelter and proper clothing, dependent upon the charity of others. (And, needless to say, while I won't go so far as to challenge us to go looking tomorrow for an opportunity for charity, I hope we will hold ourselves ready to act upon such an opportunity should it arise.) All of which is to say, there should be no lack of substance for meditation and reflection as we imagine what it must be to lack shelter on days such as this: Hospes eram, et collexistis me (Mt. 25:35).

So, I hope you'll join me in making a special offering of suffering this cold weather tomorrow (Wednesday, January 8th), adding to it prayer and fasting, offering any part of our discomfort through it all up in prayer to God, calling for His generous blessings upon the less fortunate and acting in reparation for whatever sins of mankind might be contributory to making them so unfortunate.

+ A.M.D.G.

Between a Woman and Her Doctor

An historian's artistic rendering of the 4th Lateran Council. 

G.K. Chesterton famously observed in Orthodoxy that when he came finally to look critically at Christianity in light of so many charges leveled against it by so many of its critics, he realized that "[i]t looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with."

This insight comes back to me frequently nowadays in internet debates (especially on social media), where it seems that for every authentic representation of a particular Church figure or a particular Church teaching there abound besides legion straw-men and bogies, such that in the end finding the Truth becomes like an ideological "Where's Waldo."

Among the more annoying convenient cudgels exploited by moderns who would denigrate or challenge the Church specifically in the matter of Her teaching on birth control (and I give benefit of the doubt that ignorance prevails in many of these cases rather than malice) is the canard about the Church "coming between a woman and her doctor."

Friday Frivolity: This NPR Lady Did This Great Satire of Same-Sex Marriage Without Even Knowing It

The story's title is, "When The Supreme Court Decided Tomatoes Were Vegetables."

In a recent show, we talked about an importer that sold pillows shaped like stuffed animals. Or maybe they're stuffed animals that can be used as pillows.

It turns out, this distinction — is it fundamentally a pillow or a stuffed animal? — is important, because there's a tariff on pillows but not on stuffed animals.

She explains how this is not unprecedented, referencing a 19th century Supreme Court case on the identity under law of the tomato:

In the Supreme Court decision, the justices distinguished between science and everyday life. The justices admitted that botanically speaking, tomatoes were technically fruits. But in everyday life, they decided, vegetables were things "usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats ... and not, like fruits generally, as dessert."

Justice Anthony Kennedy would later famously write, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life…." Apparently, he was just following a long tradition of jurisprudence and extending its application to human beings.

At the heart of liberty, you see, is the right to legally decree that "Apples and Oranges" indexes a distinction without difference.

How do you like them oranges?

Right and Wrong Thinking People Getting Things Wrong and Right (or Wrong?)

Two completely unrelated articles came across my news feed today, and somewhere in my brain alighted a tenuous connection between the two, but when I tried to grasp hold of it the bird had flown like the tricky minx in "Norwegian Wood." Good thoughts, like women, can be elusive that way. (And women can be a cause of reasoning going all crosswise, too - yet another connection worth exploring if only one could find the ends of the strand. But I digress.)

Despite my inadequate grasp of what I'm thinking, I'm going to try to express it anyway - and this, itself, will maybe end up seeming an irony in light of the subject I plan to explore, as we shall see.

The two unrelated articles seem to be sourced from opposite ends of so many spectra, but I really think they have more in common than first is apparent, both a falsis principiis proficscendi.

Revisiting the Duck Dynasty Kerfuffle: The Real Point for Me in All This...

I posted earlier in the week my first reactions to the dust-up over Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson's remarks and the subsequent reaction by A&E executives, the media, and supporters of the Robertson family.

I'm not backing down from those statements, but I want to make a few observations about how things have proceeded since then.

The Motific Overture

Fans of musical theater know how an overture works. Before the play begins, the audience is treated to a tasting of the sundry songs they may hear throughout the piece. In overtures from the likes of Rogers and Hammerstein, these are pretty baldly presented in something like a musical montage, one set-piece after another with sometimes abrupt transitions (a full stop with a boom from the timpani, a crash or a cymbal, or, in The King and I, perhaps a flourish of the gong). But in more sophisticated compositions (such as those of Leonard Bernstein, for example), these themes are interwoven in more subtle ways, becoming musical motifs that will resonate throughout the rest of the play: certain chords that will make a reappearance at crucial points in every song, particular instruments playing a single measure that later comes to be associated with one particular character, and so on. And it's fun once you've experienced the play a first time to note, on a second encounter, how this tightly interwoven foreshadowing in the overture works.

We similarly often reflect back on the careers of great movie directors, or writers, or statesmen, or yes, even Popes, and trace how early overtures can be observed to set out the motifs which in a way become hermeneutics for understanding that individual's legacy.

For Pope Benedict XVI, for example, his coinage of the phrase "dictatorship of relativism" is a monument in his career that helps elucidate his overall project and legacy. So, too, many have seen his famous Regensburg lecture as an important touchstone in interpreting his papacy and his intellectual oeuvre. There are many other examples one could offer.

Anyway, the reason I'm thinking about this today is because - at the risk of foolishly prognosticating - I think we've recently seen Pope Francis introduce one of those motifs in his own 'opening overture'. It's one of those coinages like "dictatorship of relativism" that could become something of a catch-phrase for his papacy: namely, the "globalization of indifference."

Francis introduced this theme in his recent homily at the Mass he celebrated during his visit to the immigrant island of Lampedusa:

Today no one in our world feels responsible; we have lost a sense of responsibility for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: "poor soul…!", and then go on our way. It’s not our responsibility, and with that we feel reassured, assuaged. The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people, makes us live in soap bubbles which, however lovely, are insubstantial; they offer a fleeting and empty illusion which results in indifference to others; indeed, it even leads to the globalization of indifference. In this globalized world, we have fallen into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; it’s none of my business!

[...] The globalization of indifference makes us all "unnamed", responsible, yet nameless and faceless.

[...]  We are a society which has forgotten how to weep, how to experience compassion – "suffering with" others: the globalization of indifference has taken from us the ability to weep!

In a globalized and information economy, a technocracy in which day-to-day life seems to track at an ever faster pace of chaotic hurry, this sense of anonymity and atomisation increases with every passing year - even though this problem has been complained against and warned about since at least the beginning of the last century (one thinks of poets like Eliot of Auden, for example).

Interestingly, this isolating totalization of inhuman and structural forces above the level of individual or community action which nevertheless impacts the lower levels of society has been seen most graphically in our modern history in totalitarian states (or the fictitious dystopias written about such): in other words, it's striking to me that this "globalization of indifference" is itself a kind of "dictatorship." One wonders: is this just a name for the same complex of phenomena Benedict called the "dictatorship of relativism"? Or are these two things separate facets of larger forces at work within the broader spirit of the age?

In any event, I think this phrase is a fertile source for reflection and perhaps should become a monument in Francis's project moving forward, a helpful remembrance from early in his papacy that might aid us in understanding how things develop from here on out. Even if not, it will still have been a fascinating note sounded in the overture and worth savoring in its own right; and I for one will be thinking about it more in-depth in the days and weeks to come.

Hateful Speech

Saturday morning, 2 AM.

I sit in my comfortable recliner, grading students' papers.

As happens every Saturday and Sunday morning at about this time, the bar next door finishes last call and issues forth from the doors of the grimy Club National all that pent up pandemonium that has been erstwhile restrained among the dizziness of strobe lights and the din of hip-hop.

To say that I am annoyed would be an understatement. Tonight, I happen still to be awake. On other occasions, my sleep is disturbed by this event; less often, I am aided by the effects of my own weekend conviviality and manage to preserve my rest despite the noise. Yet whether I sleep through it or no, the hellish scene plays out unfailingly, and I indignantly wonder how many dreams of babes living in my building are interrupted by all the hollering and honking of horns.

I cast this phenomenon in diabolical terms not merely to be inflammatory. Rather, it is because I have sensed other Spirits than gin and vodka to be operative in its issue. On this occasion, for instance, I am sure that one has flown along with the sound of the ruckus into my living room, and that the rage to which I am tempted is a dangerous mixture of righteous wrath and rueful repugnance. Terms like "unwashed masses" and "urban refuse" spring unbidden to mind and it takes all my power to remind myself that these hooligans are my brothers and sisters in the human family. I cannot let my anger become personal; but I cannot either ignore that there is a profound problem involved in this situation and that the behavior of these folks is symptomatic of a deep disease in our culture of which it must be cured or die.

As much as the next one, I enjoy good drink and the elation it brings. I like a night out with friends and even a bit of rabble rousing. But I don't think I've ever grown unrestrained so that I have not been able to show courtesy to neighbors. More importantly, though, I try hard never to let my passions escape the control of my reason, whether due to drink or any other drug or influence. And yet, in places like this club next door, the whole atmosphere and purpose seems aimed at fevering man's animal heat. The music, the dancing, the clothing, the socialization - mechanisms which ought to serve to civilize and engender culture here converge to barbarize and destroy culture. And, lest anyone take exception to my rhetoric, let me be clear: the denizens of such places are no way animals, except as man is an animal and may well act like one; nor are such barbarians, except insofar as they engage in what is barbaric. All connections with the essential human things - gender, ethnicity, race, age - are incidental and accidental; to take me as insinuating anything else is to misunderstand me.

But other connections attain which coincide with these other categories - as causes coincide with effects - connections to situation of neighborhood, of education, of economics, of religion. The material fact is forever generating the moral fact in our society, because we have opted for materialism over morality. Those who critique the moral situation and the underlying material exigence are only too liable to be libeled for casting moral aspersions on the basis of material coincidence. The irony becomes, for example, that the person who notes the eugenic tendencies of Planned Parenthood in exterminating black people is the one accused of racism, rather than the ones exterminating black people. As a result, this and so many other serpentine evils in our society continue to wind more and more tightly round the heart of culture and squeeze it to death, and the victim - mistaking the threat - thrashes against the knife-wielding friend coming to break the vicious circle, and this thrashing only serves to speed asphyxiation.

Yes, I despise the club next door; I despise everything it represents as a symptom of dying culture; I despise the coincidence in the makeup of its clientele as symptomatic of the same deeper ills in culture; I despise the related symptom that makes me despised for despising all this; and I despise most those spirits of distortion who formulate all confusing speech, the hell-babble pandemonium of parties and parking lots and professional politics. Renaming love hatred and mixing personal affront with general criticism, these spirits disarm us by fear of all language except in two equally useless forms, namely the mere shouting of acerbic argument or the effete niceties of political correctness. Such speech is a blunted weapon, pointless in the proper sense of the word. The demons know what they are about, for they know that without precision of speech we cannot name them, and naming them take away their power.

But I don't want to be thus disarmed by fear. So, I risk sounding hateful to avoid using the only speech that is truly hateful - that is, worthy of being hated. I cannot see my way around being misunderstood by confused society unless I say nothing at all (even if it be with many words) - and I simply cannot accept that option. Therefore, I've taken a risk here at naming some demons I see at work. No doubt they will, like Legion, endeavor to throw their victims into a fit and frenzy at the affront. But no matter; I am convinced that my words aim to heal rather than hurt. Not only that, they aim to protect myself as much as anything else - for, I, too, felt tonight an attack and onslaught in my own home, and as my anger waxed I may easily have fallen victim to the very thing I deplore. So, I aim these words to deflect that temptation. I aim them to gain power for myself so that I can help empower others. I aim them to cut Moloch and Mammon and whomever is haunting Club National loose from their addled victims and, hopefully, to help in some way put an end to all hateful speech.

Control Freaks (Not Normal People)

As the news cycles continue to spin absurd tangents off of the tragedy in Arizona, I'm venturing another opinion about an issue which I really think unrelated to the current events but which is the center of much discussion in the wake of them. The issue: gun control.

I'll keep this short.

I am not a member of the NRA. I do not own a gun. I have no inordinate love of guns.

Furthermore, I think that many of the defenders of gun rights give an absurd reading of the second amendment and present a figment of a constitutional right.

There is, however, a common sense approach to this matter which, if overlooked by gun advocates, is even more frequently missed by their opponents.

I have fired weapons in my lifetime. I've shot paper targets and tin cans. Perhaps, in my youth, I once or twice made sport of small birds and mammals with a carefully aimed bee-bee. [I do not doubt that this admission could itself form an inroad to a whole other controversy. Bring it on!] All in all, my experience with firing guns has been entertaining, a sporting affair - even when it was in the context of military training. In the back of my mind, I always prayed I would never have to use a weapon in earnest. I enjoyed the skill of marksmanship, learning my way around the weapons' intricacies, the thrill of the trigger pull after a controlled exhalation. And I've never shot anyone. Never even thought of it.

Now, sure, there's an argument to be made about defense of home and property that a person ought to be allowed a gun in the home. Most moderates (I consider myself, all in all, to be among that political class) will admit this. Ordinarily, the gun control argument gets hairy when someone drops this ballistic bombshell: "There's no reason that somebody needs a whole collection of guns or semi-automatic weapons in the home." And, as far as it goes, this argument is sound: there is, in the pragmatic way of looking at things, no reason. And, according to the same system of evaluation, there are many reasons indeed that such arsenals ought to be "controlled".

But - here's the rub - it all depends on what we regard as most reasonable. It all depends on what we consider to be the reasons - that is, the philosophical causes - that inform our day to day existence in the most profound ways. For me, those reasons are not ultimately the practical and the pragmatic. They are more holistic. In my ideal view of things, man's pleasure is often found in the things that don't have the immediate reason the rationalist looks for: stamp collections, idle walks, improvised whistling, falling in love, joining a political party, shooting a gun at inanimate objects.

Why does a man need a machine gun? I don't know that any man does. But I can think of why a man may want one. If a man likes shooting cans or paper targets, he might like shooting them in a variety of ways. With each weapon comes a different skill, a different pleasure, a different art - art, the quintessential pleasure of man, and what Dante calls the grandson of God. Indeed, there is much in our divinely imprinted nature that shines through in our ability to manipulate machinery to such precise ends, to aim and to cause reactions faster than our physical natures could ever cause without our artifaction.

There are some who will find this a weak argument for non-restriction of weaponry by device class, and I respect their concerns. The truth is that the effect of certain weapons can be very much more terrible when aimed at a living being than other weapons'. However, the aim is the most terrible part. And it is more causally, more philosophically, related to the effect which we all (of course) desire to avoid. The question is whether we want to cede control of a thing which may be used harmlessly and for pleasure because of the perverted individuals who use that thing for pernicion.

This relates, of course, to what I said in my last post about our propensity as a people to respond categorically to aberrations and to try to "control" every aspect of our lives; I've tagged this post with many labels, including subsidiarity, and there is the reason why. We are always and everywhere giving up ordinary freedoms and passing laws to restrict the liberties of normal individuals in order to control against those abnormal few who abuse the gifts of freedom and will. It is a strategy which perhaps is justified in a Kindergarten, but it has no place amongst the affairs of civilized men and women. I need not make any of the slippery slope arguments (which only may be fallacious) about how a restrictive society will continue in its rut; for, if you, dear reader, have not yet felt sympathy for my philosophical appeal, I don't know whether we'll ever come to agree on this.

For my part, I doubt I'll ever start a gun collection: it's cost prohibitive. But I'd like to know that I may do so if I choose - if I win the lottery or get my wits about me and get out of academia so that I can earn money. My aim in doing so, however, would not be to take life, but to give it: to live more vitally, more freely, more artfully, more pleasurably. To shoot with friends at things which there is no harm and all fun in shooting, to feel the rush that it gives, to respect the awful power it represents, to deplore the terrible violence that is its perversion. In short, to revel in controlling what is my right as a normal man to control, and what needs no other to control on my behalf.

Ordo Amoris

I'm going to be brief, for the sake of tact as well as for having little to say.

When a tragedy such as the recent shooting in Arizona occurs, we tend to figure things out as a culture. Often we respond to these sorts of things in a way which I call "programmatic." We have, in my opinion, a habit of overcorrection in our society. We've been convinced by the theorists and social scientists that everything can be planned and managed. When aberrant people do aberrant things, we go to a system and try to somehow correct for the aberration. (Meanwhile, we normalize countless other aberrations - it all depends what we can convince the majority is an aberration. When a mother murders her prenatal child, this is no longer considered even problematic.)

I say all this firmly with no intention to offend those who have suffered, either directly or empathetically, from the recent events. I am sympathetic to all involved and commend each person affected to God in my prayers - the victims and their families, and, yes, even the shooter. But having been asked by several people several times already for my thoughts on the matter, I must honestly say that these reflections are the ones dominating in my mind. I fear our society's tendency to over-correct, to respond to extraordinary breaches of conduct on the part of strange individuals by disrupting the ordinary freedoms of normal folks.

The example that comes most readily to mind is in the way that the media is reporting what this tragedy "means" for politics. We're already hearing a lot about how politics has become too angry and too emotional, and how we need to calm down and become more rational. Now, I see several problems with this - for one, the fact that this idea can't eve really be managed; we could pass laws about the rhetoric of political speeches and ads, probably, but we can't really overtly reshape public sentiment, not while remaining at all free anyway. But the bigger problem is in the premise: that is, I do not think "calming down" is always tied with being more rational. The village idiot in his sedentary reserve is less risible than the blokes at the public house or the ones at the Houses of Parliament. But it is not necessarily because he has his wits more about him. Conversely, the fellows in Parliament may be very cooly intellectual indeed and go about their poking and prodding of the human condition with all the disinterest of a scientist with his rats, and I do not think politics better for it. The gents in the public house, now, they seem to have found a balance. They get angry at the things which ought to make a sane man angry, but they argue without spite and keep their reason and their emotions in check to one another, based on the mutual conviviality and a view of the common brotherhood of man. They love each other; it's love that makes them so angry when they see error in one another's ways.

Augustine said of virtue that it is the ordo amoris - the directing to each object the kind and degree of love (passion) which it deserves, no more and no less. I do not think we will gain a better political discourse by getting folks simply to be less angry - nor even to be less angry and more intelligent. Because, frankly, as I've said often enough on this site, there are plenty of causes in our world today to which the only properly ordered response is anger. But anger is not blind rage - it is a passion, governed under the reason in man and exercised in accord with virtuous will. Or, it should be. Such is what we need, and such is what we need to learn from this state of affairs that has transpired. Anger without reason will become rage; but reason without passion (more importantly, compassion) can lead to crimes even more terrible. No, we need a political discourse that holds emotion and reason in tension and orders them together according to the demand of the matter being discussed, rather than based on some arbitrary sense of propriety or political correctness.

Emphatically, I think this response the only one both feasible and just. We cannot ask people not to care about things that deserve to be cared about; we cannot expect them not to be angered by what merits anger. Nor can we expect them to know what to do with that anger, unless we endeavor to augment it with good philosophy, rationale, and discernment.

Perhaps this course is difficult; perhaps we can't even imagine what it would look like. But try either extreme and we'll end back where we started, looking at the man we've rebuilt lopsided and wondering why he cannot walk a straight line.

What Christmas Is All About (..., Charlie Brown)

I had to run to the grocery store for some last minute items needed for Christmas dinner. On the way out, I was privy to overhear part of a conversation between two women in the entryway. The segment I heard started out agreeably enough, but soon went (in my opinion) askew.

"... and the true meaning of Christmas is not about how many presents you have underneath that tree," said one woman.

"Yep, that's right," agreed the other.

"I told him what it's really all about is that we're all together..." she continued as I left through the door, probably wincing visibly at this last part.

Now, of course, Christmas is not not about being all together: surely, the Church in Her Wisdom proclaims this day an Obligatory Holy Day, which carries - along with the requirement of assisting at Mass - the duty "to abstain from those works and aVairs which hinder the worship to be rendered to God, the joy proper to the Lord's day, or the suitable relaxation of mind and body" (CJC 1247; emphasis added). Enjoying family and fellowship are part and parcel of "the joy proper to the Lord's day" certainly and arguably have some connection as well to rendering due worship, considering that family life is a vocation and essential to offering acceptable praise to God is living well one's vocation.

But, what Christmas is all about? Not quite - that is, not all.

You hear this sort of thing a lot, sometimes in forms much less innocuous than the one expressed by the lady at the grocery store. This simplistic watering down of the meaning of Christmas is really at its best in my example, stemming from undoubtedly good intentions and some degree of mere ignorance; at its worst, it can be a very deliberate and seditious ploy typical of the dictatorship of relativism.

I offer this short note as a reminder for us Christians that we must witness to the true meaning of Christmas in all its vitality and power; we should take this opportunity to reflect upon the fullness and depth of that meaning so that we can manifest it forth in more compelling ways.

And what is that meaning? It is Christ Himself: there is no easy reduction or formulaic distillation of this meaning. The babe in the manger is God Himself: He is God the Son, co-eternal with the Father, sent in time as a Man to live as man - and, lest we forget, to die as man, in reparation for the sin of man and the sins of men - each and every sin from the creation of the world to the end of time. God the Son, truly born in time of a Woman - a woman perfected in grace, the new Eve, so that redemption may begin in the manner that sin began.

Christmas is the revelation of God among us (not the beginning of it, mind you - that was 9 months ago). The hope and joy that Christmas brings to us are bound up with the fact that this gift is not merely the gift of a birth, but the gift of a life - the singular life of God as a man, which becomes the gift to all men of participation, if they accept it, in the life of God.

There's no end to the meaningfulness of this moment in time and eternity, but something it means definitely for us is humility. God humbled Himself this day, born by lowliest birth. We must be humble in turn, recognizing this mystery and speaking about it always with wonder and awe, at the grocery store or any place. In sight of what He's given us, we owe Him that much at least.

So, What Would Dorothy Day Do?

About a fortnight ago, I posed a question and promised to return to it.

And so, let's get to it. But how?

It would be tempting to start with an invitation, dear reader, that you reflect with me upon the world in which we find ourselves, now nearly a full year into the second decade of the second millennium of the Christian era. But what use is it? I don't know how it goes for you, but for me the reflection overwhelms me almost the moment I've begun. How difficult it would be even to try to catalog the major problems we face, to pick perhaps the top ten maladies plaguing society, and then even tentatively to suggest how Dorothy Day's example might help us in addressing just one of them! How, then, to begin?

Well, in short, not there. We have already been warned against the wrong-headedness of such an approach by the great Chesterton, who called it - in What's Wrong With The World - "the medical mistake":

[T]his scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder; the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.... The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right. [Source]

And so we will undertake a different approach, a positive project: we will outline certain aspects of the example of one modern saint and see whether these qualities suggest anything to us that can be transfered into and emulated in the context of our own age, not so distant from her own. I might suggest certain crises of culture which seem to line up in particular ways with Dorothy's life, but the choice of how exactly and to what extent her own actions apply in a given situation calls for personal discernment and the diligent exercise of prudence.

But here I must take one more tangent. I own that this list is by no means exhaustive; but even with that caveat I know some will disagree with what I have remarked as "essential" to Dorothy Day's character based on my own study of her life and works. I fear this is unavoidable - yet, I will not apologize nor over-correct for the possible disagreement. I cannot enter deeply here into any discussion of where and why I see these features figuring prominently in Dorothy's biography (nor discuss why I choose these particular qualities above others equally worthy of consideration). My main goal is too modest for all that; I am concerned here to explore the usefulness and fruitfulness of our question as a practical one for translating the Gospel in our age. I welcome dispute and conversation on the matter and will happily work to justify my observations at a length in the comment-boxes that would be cumbersome to this main post. [For those who are simply unfamiliar, there are plenty of good resources out there to get started in a study of this fascinating woman's life: here are just a few.]




Today, I offer for our consideration three manners in which Dorothy Day is a modern exemplar of the Christian life and the practice of the Gospel: as a radical, as a personalist, and as a woman with an apostolate.

Dorothy Day: Radical

In identifying Dorothy Day as a radical, I borrow from the wisdom of Archbishop Charles Chaput who recently offered some reflections on her witness to our age on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of her death. In his own choice to call Day a radical, the Archbishop returned to the etymological root (pun intended) of the word: "She was radical in the truest sense of the word," Chaput said, "committed to the root of the Christian vocation." She witnessed to the Gospel in season and out of season, and "refused to ignore or downplay those Catholic teachings that might be inconvenient."

Thus we find the first use for our question, "What Would Dorothy Day Do?" It translates into the many situations in which the relation of the Christian vocation to the status quo is one of paradoxism. We might think especially, in our age, of situations which seem to imply a binary choice, wherein neither proposed way seems really consistent with the demands of the Gospel. How often are we choosing "the lesser of two evils" - when do we give into compromise for the sake of social manners and communal comfort? Such are situations which probably call for radicalism.

We may ask, what would Dorothy Day do in political life? Whose "side" would she have taken in the many conflicts which define civic discourse in our age: in the airports, at the borders, outside the abortuaries, across the world from the battle zone? I think that her life gives us clear indications of what she might have done in any of these scenarios; but it does not finally matter so much whether we choose to do exactly as she might have done, rather it is important for us that we, when once we've discerned the way that our vocation seems to indicate, do not hesitate in following through to the radical consequences that may unfold. We need not seek ridicule, strife, indignation, or imprisonment: consequences which Day's social actions earned for her with striking regularity. But when the cause of righteousness seems to lead to these things - which seems more and more likely an event - then we may find a useful measure of the full extent of our call in the radicalism of Dorothy Day. And if the situations of paradoxism plaguing our world discomfort only our minds but do not otherwise affect us, then we may well ask whether we are truly fulfilling our Christian call. If the times call for radical response and we do not give it, who will?

Dorothy Day: Personalist

I have remarked before on how the personalist vision is essential for rightly-ordered social action. I believe that it is, philosophically, the key to unlocking the import of the Catholic Church's Social Teaching.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of Christian Personalism - a response to and development upon Christian Existentialism - I think a useful encapsulation can be found in a teaching by Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day's own tutor in this school. She recounts somewhere (I am paraphrasing) how Peter described "selfhood" as being essential to living in true communion: He said that when any number of "I"s are present - that is, truly thematic selves - then there is a "we", and "we" is the essence of community; where, on the other hand, there is only "they", there is not community but "a crowd".

Crucial to the living of the Christian vocation is finding the other truly as a "self", a fully realized person with whom we are called into relationship. For Day, the importance of this is that the very self of the other is transformed by the Incarnation and by Christ's teaching on the judgment: when we serve others who are hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, we serve Him: and discovering Him in this way is crucial to having true relationship with Him. This is an inimitable aspect of Christian life which prayer and even the sacraments - even the Eucharist - cannot replace. Thus, for Dorothy, the exercise of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy became essential expressions of the Christian vocation: not merely peripheral concerns or even fruits of some deeper experience of holiness and grace. Christ is waiting to be met in personal encounters with the poor and needy in a way that is necessarily complementary to the manner in which He comes to us through sacrament.

[[It is an interesting side-light on this matter that the present Holy Father's social teaching seems to take a very similar tact to that of Dorothy and Peter Maurin. I have written about the Pope's work here in light of his affinity with the Christian Personalism of Dietrich von Hildebrand. I also treat of an instance in section IV) where, on the unique category of love of neighbor, Benedict seems to go beyond the master's theology; it occurs to me now that the direction he seems to be taking in this respect is really foretokened in the examples of Day and Maurin.]

So, what would Dorothy Day do as a personalist in our age? Where - in whom - would she find Christ waiting for compassion, for respect, for love? Would she wait for Him to come to her, or go to seek Him out? ... which leads us to our next category:

Dorothy Day: Woman of Apostolic Living

Dorothy's apostolicity comes in two categories: word and action.

In Word

Dorothy challenged the orthodoxies of her day with words seeded by the Gospel's teachings. What conversations call for authentic Christian voices in our world today? In her own age, Dorothy published a paper for a penny-a-copy with a pittance of resources. We have unprecedented technological means for spreading the Christian message, for reaching untold audiences at the click of a mouse. On our own Facebook Walls we have, in all likelihood, audiences which numerically equal or surpass the initial subscribing membership of The Catholic Worker. Do we use this to our advantage - rather, to the Gospel's advantage? Do we choose our words to discomfort the smug and comfort the afflicted? Do we challenge with our words? Do we respond to the errors that cross our screens and add our voice to the conversation, or for the sake of anonymity and convenience turn a blind eye?

In Action

Dorothy was not content merely to wait for the challenge of the Gospel to cross her doorstep. She went out and gathered the lost and forsaken. She let her lodgings be overtaken by those in need and found larger ones when she ran out of space so that more could have the advantage of her aid. To our jaded age it may seem she was often taken advantage of. Perhaps she was. But this seemed to her less of a risk than the risk of doing too little, of missing a chance to engage in the apostolate.

The answer to our question here is so vast and varied as to almost seem unhelpful. There are so many ways in which we can help, so many ways in which we can make a difference. We know this much from the Gospel - so how does Dorothy's example really help to elucidate and distill that teaching for us and make it practicable?

I would argue that Dorothy's apostolic action is a useful model for us in its ambition and scope. In the name of humility, and in the name of the virtues of prudence and temperance, it seems that Christians today might let themselves too easily off the hook for simply not doing more that they could. (I should note that here, as in all of the above - in case you haven't realized it yet - I accuse myself first of all!)

This is, again, something I have written about before. In our age excuses are not hard to come by. Furthermore, -and I know this will be one of my more controversial points - it seems more in vogue these days to encourage the ordinary ways of holiness, to call for Christians to be more perfect in their day-to-day lives as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, businessmen, workers, painters, writers, etc. And, surely, this is needed. But I think we also need to intensify our call for Christians to do more - to go beyond the ordinary, to become immersed in the apostolate in a thorough-going manner, to go to the brink of when it seems they can simply do no more and then give even a little extra.

Perhaps it will seem that we are being taken advantage of, that the needy are bleeding us dry. But, then, perhaps this is the kind of bloodshed called for in this apostolic age, a new kind of martyrdom. And so, rather than asking what action Dorothy would undertake among the many social imperatives that need the work of good Christians, we can ask our question as a measure of degree: when we wonder whether we should do more, we can ask: "What Would Dorothy Day Do?"

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I began this series of reflections by looking at the question, "What Would Jesus Do?" The question emblazoned on bracelets adorns the hands of believers throughout the world; what should really be found at the hands of believers is the answer to that question. In the hands of Dorothy Day, that answer was found: hands cuffed in radical action against injustice, hands lovingly stroking the face of a stranger, hands typing the words of evangelistic love, hands serving food to Christ in the breadlines. Ultimately, our purpose in asking our new question is not the question itself: it is the answer we will give: the answer we must give: the answer that reveals how Jesus already had done and continues doing "what He would". He calls us - and sends us forth.

How to Swallow a Camel

The sideshow in the Press goes on unabated as the usual suspects (the "Catholic experts" whom the liberal media keeps on speed dial and who are conversant in Newspeak) get trotted on to the scene to clear things up for us. Thus, Fr. James Martin, SJ - a "prominent Jesuit," mind you! - proclaims Benedict's declaration on condoms to be a "game changer." (What exactly does "prominent Jesuit" mean? Prominent within the Jesuits? Within the Church? Or, having a few book deals and a familiar face with a collar beneath it?) FoxNews, at least, in an odd instance of really being fair and balanced acknowledges that not all theologians see it that way: Fr. Fessio - not called here a "prominent Jesuit" but I for one would like to see him and Martin arm-wrestle - says "nothing new has happened." John Haas and Germain Grisez (whose prominence is actually substantive and pertinent to the matter we're discussing, which is moral doctrine), both lament the confusion engendered by this unfolding of events.

And then there's I, who am neither prominent (alas!) nor a Jesuit (hooray!), but presume to try to add to this discussion within the small sphere of influence that I do (inscrutably) inhabit.

I wanted to urge a couple more points of consideration which - regardless of what the Pope actually intended to say - must shape our perception of this entire debate.

So, first, I want to make a point about language. Our impoverished capacity for nuance is contributing in an important way to this entire discussion. For one thing, there is the conflation of the notion of contraception with the tools which are often used to that end, but which are not bound inextricably to it. What I mean to say is that contraception is a moral object and not a (or several) material object(s). Thus, condoms are sometimes put to contraceptive use, and when this is the case, they may be spoken of as "contraceptives". However, they are not always "contraceptives", as in a situation when used between two men in an act of sodomy, an act to which the contraceptive end does not - and cannot ever - attain to the act. As such, I would propose another term which encompasses a broader meaning, namely prophylactic. If a condom is used in a situation to which the contraceptive end does not attain, for purposes of sanitation, then the condom is not a contraceptive at that point - it is, however, still a prophylactic. When, on the other hand, the contraceptive end attains - regardless of the intention of the individual - then, the prophylactic functions as a "contraceptive", whether a condom or an IUD or what have you. We need to be clear on this point, and I think it needlessly confusing to use the term "contraceptive" to describe the use of an object in an act to which the contraceptive purpose is irrelevant. This is regardless of whether the Pope's remarks actually do extent to cases when that end is relevant (as some have suggested they do, such as Father Lombardi, although I am skeptical whether the Pope meant to include such circumstances).

Once that bit of language is understand, we can begin to articulate meaningful distinctions on this issue. One could say that when a condom is used as a prophylactic but not as a contraceptive, it may be allowable per se.

Let's move on, then, to consider hypothetically whether the Pope's remarks can be taken in a broader way, to include scenarios of dual use for the prophylactic.

Now, as I mentioned in my early post on this matter, if the Pope is making such an argument, this is not "same old" theology and does represent a new turn in the discussion - at least, for the Pope, considering that this very issue was the subject of a commission at the Vatican a few years back which (significantly) never issued a concluding report. Nevertheless, there is a theological strain of argument that could make sense of the Pope's remarks even if they were taken to extend to heterosexual acts outside of marriage where a condom would be used to prevent the spread of HIV but also result in the prevention of conception.

Now, let us first note that this isn't a "double effect" argument per se, since contraceptive activity is inherently evil and certainly flows directly from the act with as much immediacy as the prophylactic function (it should also be always kept in mind that condoms are inefficient in achieving either end). But the argument would be that Humanae Vitae condemnation of contraception applies only to the bond of marriage; that is, since sex belongs in marriage, along with its two functions - the unitive and the procreative - then, outside of marriage we're already dealing with a disordered situation and the only effect that contracepting would have would be to perhaps increase the gravity of the situation.

An analogy could be drawn to the Church's Just War Doctrine, and its component of "proportional means." An aggressor in battle is bound to observe the rule of proportionality in order to maintain justice in its cause. Now, this only applies properly to situations in which the agent is capable of just action in the first place: only a legitimate State has the authority to wage war. Suppose an instance where an illegitimate agent undertakes to wage war. Here, the action undertaken already is illegitimate and disordered; in this case, whether the agent chooses to demonstrate proportional restraint is less consequential and somewhat a moot point. In such a case, demonstration of proportional use of force would be similar to what the Pope said about a male prostitute using a prophylactic to protect his partner: a step in the right direction, but a step taking place in a process which is already problematized by a higher level moral concern.

The gist of this would be in line with Fr. Lombardi's approach to this discussion: that the Pope is objecting the trivialization of sex that this whole line of discernment implies: that, in the context of sex being abused outside of its naturally ordered context (within a loving marriage that is open to new life), the use of condoms - and perhaps even the contraceptive use - is a matter of straining gnats while swallowing a camel. And if there's anything the media is good at doing for the sheeple of America, it's getting them to swallow a camel.

Again, I'm not entirely sure of the cogency of this approach. For example, I would argue that in the context outside of marriage, the rejection of contraception - remaining open to life, and abhoring the contraceptive function of prophylactics - would represent the same positive sort of step in the right direction as the use of a condom by a male prostitute infected with HIV. Note that the Pope said that part of this moral value was in the "acceptance of responsibility", which moral value is lost when the contraceptive end attains.

I won't go further on about this matter in this post, but I offer these considerations as another means of understanding what's at stake in this media circus. Let's bear these kinds of things in mind as the matter unfolds.

The Pope and Condoms

UPDATE - (11/20/10 at 1545 EST): Professor Janet Smith, a moral theologian of some repute, seems to be taking basically the same tact on this as I have done below.

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This is going to get ugly - you've been warned!

I originally titled this post The Object of an Objectionable Act - which I'll come back to. But I've changed the title since this is sort of a breaking story, and I figured I could enhance my web-footprint a bit (and also disrupt the misinformation campaign rapidly ensuing) with this more straight-forward title.

It seems like we've been through all this before. You remember the score. The Pope, on a plane flight, observes to some journalists that condoms are not the right approach to stopping the spread of AIDS. A Harvard don backs him up. Chagrined, mass media lets slip its mask and becomes pandemonium seething.

Well... here we go again.

Now, for anybody who has taken any time in studying moral theology, this whole situation wants a stiff whiskey and a staunch wall against which to bang one's head. But I'm going to try to pre-emptively wade into this matter and make some distinctions which are necessary for understanding what the Pope is - and is not - saying.

First things first: the story. A new book coming out recounts an interview between Papal pundit Peter Seewald and Papa Benedict. This is not the first time this pair have met; Seewald interviewed then Cardinal Ratzinger for his book God and the World. This book will likely sell a bit better, though, for two reasons: one, Ratzinger is now Pope and it is the first book of its kind; two, a comment from the book with which the media is having a field day.

Here's the quotation from a representative news story:

Journalist Peter Seewald, who interviewed Benedict over the course of six days this ummer [sic], revisited those comments [i.e., the ones from the plane] and asked Benedict if it wasn't "madness" for the Vatican to forbid a high risk population to use condoms.

"There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility," Benedict said.

But he stressed that it wasn't the way to deal with the evil of HIV, noting the church's position that abstinence and marital fidelity is the only sure way.

Now, let's tuck in, shall we?

First, note that the quotation itself is the only direct wording from the interview that is selected for the news story. The paraphrase which follows the longer quotation is likely to be passed over in most of the media's treatment of this matter - and the content of that paraphrase is a very important caveat for fully appreciating the moral issues at hand in this discussion. It must be noted that this is not a reversal of the Pope's earlier comments on the use of condoms in preventing the spread of HIV. The Pope understands the scientific evidence, that condom distribution has not been correlated to reduced frequency of infection, and in fact that their distribution can cause a spike in high-risk behavior. The Pope's quotation from this latest interview does not address the issue of social organization and the treatment of epidemics: he is speaking about individual moral choice and responsibility. This is a crucial point.

Nor is this latest remark a reversal of the Church's long-standing teaching on contraception and condoms in general, which are seen to be intrinsically evil. But here we need to make some distinctions. The confusion caused by the press in coming days will be largely due to the fact that people don't understand in the first place what the Church means by Her condemnation of contraceptives. So, let's look to the Catethicism of the Catholic Church.

CCC 2370 - quoting the encyclical Humanae Vitae - succinctly states that

'every action which, whether in anticipation of the conjugal act, or in its accomplishment, or in the development of its natural consequences, proposes, whether as an end or as a means, to render procreation impossible' is intrinsically evil" (emp. added).

The italicized text is important to our understanding. The dictum of moral theology is that a moral act is conditioned by the object of the act. This is not the "intention" - an important point, since intention is another of the sources of evaluation for the quality of a moral action and not to be conflated with the end of the act itself. Rather, the object (CCC 1751) "is a good toward which the will deliberately directs itself. It is the matter of a human act." This chosen object "morally specifies the act of willing" (CCC 1758) and, in the case of intrinsically evil actions, can never be chosen, is never ameliorated by the intention or the circumstances. In the case of contraception, the moral object is not reducible to the material and genital particularities, althought these tend to be bound up with the act: the contraceptive act is the one which chooses "to render procreation impossible."

The use of a condom, in and of itself, is not the greatest concern in this regard. The use to which the condom is put is essential. For the sake of example, a condom could be envisioned as taking part in the (already disordered and perverse) act of masturbation. Yet, it would be absurd to see the role of the condom in this case as substantially changing the nature of the moral action. It might add in degrees to the gravity of the act, according to how it shapes the perverse intention of the person doing it. But here, the condom becomes primarily a factor in the other two criteria of moral action, namely intention and circumstances, rather than being bound up with the object of the act. The condom is being used: but it's not, morally speaking, "the use of a condom."

From there, we step over into the moral situation with which the Pope is grappling in his interview: the case of a male prostitute who is himself infected or servicing an infected client. We have seen at least how a condom is not necessarily bound up with the object of the contraceptive act (which is intrinsically evil). Now, in the quotation from the Holy Father which I provided above, we don't see any explicit address of this issue. However, in the Associated Press article floating around out there, there is a common trope being used:

Benedict said that for male prostitutes — for whom contraception isn't a central issue — condoms are not a moral solution. But he said they could be justified "in the intention of reducing the risk of infection."

We the readers are left wondering whether this notion of contraception not being "a central issue" comes from something the Pope explicitly stated in the interview, or is material implied by the context in which the discussion took place. To my mind, this question is central: because, as far as I can see, it will determine the difference of whether we're talking about a condom being used or morally distinguished "condom use" (i.e., the contraceptive act).

I cannot put words in the Pope's mouth, nor have I read the book. I'm only trying to make sense of the burgeoning firestorm in the media. This situation wants clarity, but until we have it, I think we can at least direct the matter to the appropriate evaluative measures by means of hypothetical consideration.

I'd suggest that the AP account of the interview implies a context for the dicussion - perhaps an unspoken understanding about the moral "players" of the hypothetical situation - which took "male prostitutes" to mean "homosexual male prostitutes." Now, I offer this because it's really the only way I have of making sense of what the Pope might have meant - if he really said it - by saying that, for these folks, "contraception isn't a central issue." In male-to-female (vaginal) sexual relations, it would be very hard to see how the use of a condom doesn't translate into an instance of the contraceptive moral act. However, in homosexual relations - a perversion of the life-giving act of sex between a man and a woman - the condom is not bound up with the object of the act in the same way, as with the example of masturbation given above. In this case, there's not question of disrupting conception since conception is impossible. Thus, - in terms of individual action, which is the focus of the Pope's remarks (as distinct from social planning to combat an epidemic) - the choice of the male to use a condom could be the kind of "first step" toward "responsibility" the Pope acknowledges. Plenty of objections will be raised to this, and it really forms the kernel of a whole other discussion. Suffice to say for now that the condom in this situation is not part of the intrinsically evil act of contraception; rather, it is something impacting the circumstantial and intentional parts of the moral action of sodomy, which is already intrinsically disordered. On the finer points of this we can - and I imagine will - have further debate.

In the meantime, we will have to wait and see what clarification comes out about these comments - as surely some clarification must. If the Pope meant male prostitution in general... well, then I simply must join the droves of perplexed readers waiting with eyebrows raised. Regardless,though, of what may be forthcoming, it is essential for any understanding of this discussion to know ahead of time what the Church means in Her teaching about condoms and contraception, about the end of the sexual act and the problems of its disordering. These notions a little clearer in our minds, we will be better poised to make sense of whatever it is the Holy Father really did say to Peter Seewald, and therefore help give this issue the nuance it requires (which certainly will be wanting in the main-stream media's treatment).