While We’re At It

• It was far from the most important development as the Terri Schiavo case seized the nation’s attention, but it should not go unremarked. There were repeated statements by the Holy See, statements by William Cardinal Keeler of the pro-life office, by the bishops conference, by numerous individual bishops, and by the bishops of Florida collectively. All spoke with one voice on the moral impermissibility of killing Ms. Schiavo by removing her food and hydration. And then there was the statement by Bishop Robert N. Lynch, former general secretary of the bishops conference and bishop of the Diocese of St. Petersburg, where Ms. Schiavo’s family lives. Bishop Lynch said, “At the end of the day (the judicial, legislative days) the decision to remove Terri’s artificial feeding tube will be that of her husband, Michael.” Of course, it is precisely this that the national protest and the extraordinary actions by Congress and the president aimed to prevent. There is no way of reading Bishop Lynch’s statement without concluding that he thinks the final decision should have been made by Michael Schiavo, who for years aggressively pursued his goal of making his wife dead. Compounding the inexplicability of his statement, Bishop Lynch compares the circumstance to one in which “families of the person in extremis agree that it is time to allow the Lord to call a loved one to Himself, feeling that they have done all they possibly might to provide alternatives to death, every possible treatment protocol which might be helpful has been attempted.” Anyone who has paid even cursory attention to the Schiavo case, and it seems the whole world paid more than cursory attention, knows that no part of that description applies to Ms. Schiavo’s circumstance. Bishop Lynch proposes “a single focus of achieving the best result for Terri.” The best result for Terri, we are given to understand, is that she should be dead. This is her own bishop speaking. How could the bishop be so astonishingly ignorant of her circumstance? Could it be anything other than willful ignorance, which entails grave moral culpability? I am only asking questions, but they are questions that his fellow bishops should be asking of Bishop Lynch. What is not a question but is an indisputable fact is that the bishop has—whatever his intention—publicly rejected the Church’s clear teaching on the care of the disabled and has lent the authority of his office to those whose undeniable purpose is to kill Ms. Schiavo. To my knowledge, no bishop or other church authority has publicly admonished Bishop Lynch for his very public offense. After the recent sex abuse scandals, there was much talk about the need for “fraternal correction” among bishops. Was it just talk? Again, I am only asking.

• Contributions to deep moral reflection on the Terri Schiavo ordeal came from many quarters. Herewith excerpts from Salon‘s interview with Jesuit Father John Paris, Walsh Professor of Bioethics at Boston College. Salon asks what the Schiavo case is really about. Paris: “The power of the Christian right. This case has nothing to do with the legal issues involving a feeding tube.” Salon: Are there any extenuating circumstances? Paris: “The law is clear, the medicine is clear, the ethics is clear.” Salon asks how Fr. Paris squares his view with the Pope’s statement that denying food and water is euthanasia by omission? Paris: “There are some radical right-to-lifers there [in the Vatican], and they got that statement out . . . . His comment wasn’t doctrinal statement, it wasn’t an encyclical, it wasn’t a papal pronouncement. It was a speech at a meeting of right-to-lifers.” Fr. Paris admits to being surprised by the response to the Schiavo case. “I hadn’t anticipated the power of the Christian right. They elected him [George W. Bush], and now he dances.” Boston College is a school “in the Jesuit tradition.”

• Criticizing Robert Sloan’s leadership, a former president of Baylor says, “Faculty are not here to engage in religiosity. They’re here to teach algebra, political science, the best way they know how, which is to me the Christian way to do it.” This is the “two truths” heresy with which Sloan, and other presidents of Christian colleges, have had to contend. There is the truth of fact and science, on the one hand, and the truth of Christian faith, on the other. Ne’er the twain shall meet, except at the level of subjective intentionality. Baylor is caught up in Texas Baptist politics but also, writes Robert Benne, in “the question of Baptist identity.” “Nonfundamentalist Baptists are in a quandary about who they are today . . . . The Sloan administration has proposed a view of Baptists as orthodox, doctrinal, evangelical, ecumenical, and in the Free Church tradition. It affirms that Christianity has intellectual content that should be shared by all Christians, and that provides the substance for serious faith/learning encounter. It has bolstered the university by inviting Christians from the great magisterial traditions—Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran—to enrich the rather thin Baptist intellectual tradition. It has hired and nurtured Baptists who are open to this kind of ecumen icity.” Some might question whether the “great magisterial traditions” of Lutheranism and Calvinism survive today outside distinctly unecumenical groups such as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church or the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. But Benne is right that scholars formed in those traditions do have, along with Catholics, intellectual resources for joining faith and reason that are largely absent from the Baptist tradition of anti-traditionalism and, too often, anti-intellectualism. Sloan’s candid acknowledgment of this Baptist intellectual deficit was no doubt a factor in his troubled efforts to cope with Texas Baptist politics.

• The times they are a-changin’—which is the one thing you can count on not to change. A couple of years ago, Colleen Carroll took a lot of people by surprise with her book The New Faithful: Why Young Adults are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy. An engaging case study in that larger phenomenon is now on offer in Matthew Lickona’s Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic (Loyola, 278 pages,, $19.95). I will not be surprised if this becomes something of a niche classic. Lickona and his wife Deirdre are graduates of Thomas Aquinas College in California and live with their four (as of this writing) children in La Mesa, California, where he is staff writer for the San Diego Reader, an alternative newspaper. “Alternative” is the word for the ever-ancient, ever-new way of life they are striving to live, a life of self-discipline and spiritual struggles joined to the hilarity and high adventure of Catholic fidelity. (Four days into the honeymoon they were still virgins because, being committed to Natural Family Planning, the time was not right for Deirdre.) Thomas Aquinas is among the more prominent of alternative Catholic colleges established in recent decades, and this charming and frequently crazy book serves as a report card on what such schools are producing. If the Lickonas are representative, a rigorous (they would say vigorous) orthodoxy results in a way of being Catholic that has left behind the stale liberal-vs.-conservative squabbles about what went wrong and what went right after the Second Vatican Council and has moved on to living the faith in all its fullness. Theirs is not a return to the Catholic “ghetto” or “subculture,” nor are they part of an angry counter-culture. Rather, Lickona provides a delightfully high-spirited and candid account of living Catholicism as though it were true, scapulars included. The author is in lively engagement with the surrounding culture and the problems encountered by those who have chosen another way. “Let’s be open and clean,” he writes. “Let’s drag this out into the light and discuss. Let’s not be shocked and resentful; let’s love the lonely. Perhaps, coming from a fanatic, the message of God’s love will regain some of its wonderful outrageousness. ‘Listen. I have a secret. I eat God, and I have His life in me. It’s the best thing in the world; it leads to everlasting life. But first, you have to die to yourself.’” There is a good deal of Matthew Lickona’s self in Swimming with Scapulars, but with the guidance of St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church a new man is manifestly a-borning. This book may not be a portent of the Catholic future, but it is a compelling account of the Catholic present as experienced by a growing number of young people who have dared to accept Christ’s invitation to “put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” In catching, Matthew Lickona has been caught, and with winsome enthusiasm he recommends the experiment to others. The times they are a-changin’.

• Stanley Milgram died—writes John Darley, professor of psychology at Princeton—”leaving us with the knowledge that evil is not inherent in all of us, yet showing us how evil can be performed by essentially ordinary people.” Well, yes and no. Stanley Milgram, it may be remembered, was a man famous, or infamous, for his “obedience studies” conducted at Yale in the 1960s. He recruited people from New Haven who would serve as “teachers” in administering a test to “learners.” When the learners made a mistake, the teachers would, at Milgram’s orders, administer an electrical shock. What the teachers did not know is that learners were actors who would fake severe pain, sometimes crying out for mercy. The key thing is that the teachers, when told to do so, would administer more and more severe shocks, even to the point of apparently endangering the lives of the actor-learners. Milgram described the results in a memo to the National Science Foundation: “In a naïve moment some time ago, I once wondered whether in all of the United States a vicious government could find enough moral imbeciles to meet the personnel requirements of a national system of death camps, of the sort that were maintained in [Nazi] Germany. I am now beginning to think that the full complement could be recruited in New Haven. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.”In his review of a new book on Milgram, The Man Who Shocked the World by Thomas Blass, Darley describes his own research in support of a somewhat different theory called “situationalism.” The theory, which he says is currently dominant, “holds that the major determinant of a person’s actions is construction and internal representation of the meaning of the situation.” He admits that such a statement may seem “obvious,” and it does. He cites an experiment in which a research subject would stay in a room filling with acrid smoke, if two others also stayed. This presumably demonstrates a propensity to conform. In another experiment, a real student will conform by giving a wrong measurement of a line, if play-acting students also do. “Half a dozen of these others, whom the subject perceived to be equally naïve subjects, one by one all gave an obviously false answer to a simple perceptual question, which involved the length of a line that they could all see. The naïve subject often conformed.” I suppose some subjects were cowardly conformists, but others, seeing apparently bright students giving an apparently wrong answer, may have figured that the others knew something that they didn’t. As a theory, “situationalism,” like so many academic theories, seems embarrassingly self-evident. Who does not, in ways both worthy and ignoble, tailor his actions in ways appropriate to what he perceives to be his situation? That is true of both the craven and the heroic. That there are more cowards than heroes does not come as news. Which brings us back to “the knowledge that evil is not inherent in all of us, yet evil can be performed by essentially ordinary people.” Evil is not inherent in us, if by inherent one means it is intrinsic to being human. Otherwise, Adam before the fall and Christ would not be truly human. Christ, the new Adam, is more truly human by virtue of being sinless. However ethically dubious were Stanley Milgram’s “obedience studies,” and however he may have over-dramatized the results by invoking the Holocaust, he discovered nothing that should surprise those who are aware of Original Sin, which is aptly described as the only Christian doctrine that can be proven beyond reasonable doubt. At the time and still today, Milgram’s work was thought to be so controversial, in large part, because it offended against the delusion of the morally innocent and self-directed rational self. To the extent that he exposed that delusion, he rendered a service.

• “Civic friendship.” What a beautiful idea, but in our rancorous political climate some might be excused for thinking it is a pipe dream. In an instructive little book published by the Acton Institute, Trial by Fury, by law professor (and First Things contributor) Ronald Rychlak, applies the idea of civic friendship to tort reform. Here is how a tort system that encourages accepting responsibility in the context of community relations ought to work: “Those who have been harmed know that the legal system will guarantee that they are compensated, and those who have committed the harm know that society ultimately will not let them avoid responsibility. Above all those without genuine claims will know that neither will the legal system permit their compensation nor will society condone their immorality. This knowledge encourages potential litigants to resolve disputes justly and privately. The perceived superiority of courtroom justice over personal interaction (civic friendship) is neither part of Christian social thought, nor historically corroborated, and it is very harmful to the community and to justice itself. As the tort law system evolved over the past several decades, however, it has moved away from practices that promote community relations. Courts lowered barriers to litigation, dismantled immunities, lessened causation requirements, and increased monetary awards. These developments have transformed the legal landscape and the message that the tort system carries.” Rychlak thinks tort reform is on the way and proposes some directions: “Effective tort reform, therefore, must return the system to one based on fault and causation, that holds responsible those who caused the damage, makes the injured whole, and does not impose upon the innocent. This will require careful examination of the current incentives that exist to the filing of lawsuits, especially class action lawsuits. Among the first matters to be considered would be the restoration of some form of immunities to entities that are today held responsible for actions that are outside of their scope of responsibilities. At the very least, the concept of awarding punitive damages against charities and governmental agencies must be revisited. Judges and juries also need to have more structured guidance regarding punitive damages in all cases. A loser pays system for attorney fees would also go a long way toward easing the fear currently felt by so many individuals and entities in the society.” Civic friendship. An idea that is not only beautiful but, if we have the will and the wit for it, maybe possible.

• At Boston College in March, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, D.C., once again addressed the question of Catholics in public life. In the course of his remarks, he offers an interesting account of his much-controverted use, at the June 2004 meeting of the American bishops, of then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s communication on exclusion from communion. He adds, “This, of course, did not stop the media critics on the extremes who continued their tactics of promoting division in the Church.” Without knowing who he has in mind, I really do not believe that, for instance, Commonweal and the Wanderer are out to divide the Church. Cardinal McCarrick is on more solid ground when he notes that the larger question is the proper disposition in receiving the Blessed Sacrament: “This is not only for politicians but for all of us. Many of us believe that the reception of the Eucharist in our churches has become something of a habitual practice and without the kind of prayerful preparation that it always needs to have. The way that it is organized in large churches, which tend to empty out row after row to approach the altar, promotes this kind of communion without thought or without the necessary preparation.” On the specific question of politicians who publicly and persistently oppose Catholic teaching on the culture of life, it would be good if the bishops could achieve greater clarity and unity in pastoral practice before the next electoral cycle is in full swing. One hopes that those bishops who in 2004 said they needed time to pastorally engage offending politicians have been energetically applying themselves to such engagement. The excuse is still heard that such engagement would appear to be “partisan” because it would likely involve more Democrats than Republicans. To which it needs only to be observed that the parties and the candidates are responsible for their positions, as the bishops are responsible for firmly and persuasively asserting the teaching of the Church.

• Some Muslims in the United States have suggested that apostasy from Islam should be discouraged by law. Syed Mumtaz Ali, president of the Canadian Society of Muslims, argues that Canada’s multicultural policy of granting group rights should allow Muslims to punish apostasy and blasphemy in their communities. In deference to non-Muslim sensibilities, Mumtaz adds that this need not necessarily entail enforcing the “Islamic punishment” of death for such crimes. In fact, Muslims who commit apostasy, mainly by conversion to Christianity, are very few in number. According to the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, “Christians and Muslims both send the bulk of their missionaries to people of their own faiths. In this sense, the foreign missionary enterprise of the world’s two largest religions is largely an attempt to renew their own traditions.” As, we may hope, Canadians will maintain their tradition of taking a dim view of people who kill or otherwise punish people for exercising religious freedom or saying uncomplimentary things about Islam.

• Of the thousands of books that deserve a review, relatively few get reviewed here or elsewhere. Sometimes we plan a review but, for one reason or another, it doesn’t pan out. Happily, that can be partially remedied by borrowing, as I here borrow from Daniel J. Mahoney’s excellent review of Samuel Gregg’s On Ordered Liberty: A Treatise on the Free Society. Writing in the Journal of Markets & Morality, Mahoney notes: “On Ordered Liberty exposes the radical limitations of utilitarian thinking and shows that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the philosophy of academic liberalism. It also provides a much-needed alternative to libertarian dogmatism in all its forms. It shows that there is nothing authentically liberal about an approach that fails to distinguish between better and worse preferences and that refuses to acknowledge any rationally discernable distinction between the noble and the base. In truth, Gregg’s real target is not utilitarianism, as he declares, but rather the ‘contractualism’ that is at the heart of post-Hobbesian political thought. Social contract theorizing denies the naturalness of the political community and affirms that those authoritative institutions (family, church, and other intermediate institutions) that civilize and socialize human beings lack legitimacy because they limit the free choices of autonomous human beings. Defenders of the free society must finally choose between the contractualist and conventionalist denial of the Good and a more truthful and salutary concept of human freedom. They must choose between an older liberalism that freely acknowledged the dependence of modern freedom on premodern moral capital and a liberty that refuses to bow even before the requirements of Truth. It is to Samuel Gregg’s great credit that his book so thoughtfully clarifies this inescapable battle for the heart and soul of liberalism.”

• People of a delicate sensibility were made uneasy by Terri Schiavo’s being forced to die of hunger and thirst. Hurrying to the aid of the morally scrupulous, the New York Times offered the assurance of Dr. Sean Morrison of Mount Sinai School of Medicine that such a death is very quiet, very dignified, and very gentle. “Experts,” the Washington Post reported, “are virtually unanimous in saying that it does not appear to be painful.” And the Los Angeles Times offered the comforting information that “going without food and water in the last days of life is as natural as death itself” and that “contrary to the visceral fears of humans, death by starvation is the norm in nature—and the body is prepared for it.”Christopher Levenick of the American Enterprise Institute was among the many who were much relieved. He suggests that Governor Jeb Bush should introduce legislation requiring that the State of Florida use forced starvation as the preferred method of execution for its 368 inmates on death row. The objection might be raised that we do not know whether Terri Schiavo knew what was being done to her, while a prisoner would certainly know. To that objection, Levenick responds, “It is the tranquility of the death itself that should concern us. Conscious or not, if deprived of food and drink, a human being will enter into a uremic coma, chemical imbalances in the brain will induce a sedative-like effect, and the heart will, in due course, stop beating.” The experts are virtually unanimous in saying it is so.

• Easy virtue takes many forms. Staying at a hotel down in Washington, I was taken with a card prominently displayed by the management: “Being mindful of the environment and ultimately the world is the best way to serve our guests.” The service may be shabby, the carpet soiled, and the air-conditioner making loud rattling noises, but what is that in comparison with knowing that the management is mindful of the environment and ultimately the world? “Kimpton Hotels helps to keep our planet tranquil by changing bath linens by request only.” Dirty towels mean a tranquil planet. It seems a small price to pay. And it saves the hotel a lot of money on laundering. Then there is this by Danny Seo (who is described as Kimpton Hotel’s “eco-stylist”): “Small choices can really add up. Kimpton makes it easy for their guests to make a difference.” Ah, to go to sleep, the noisy air-conditioner notwithstanding, and know that your life has made a difference. And to provide me with such moral satisfaction my hosts were billed only $425 per night. At least in that respect it does not fall under Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s strictures against cheap grace.

• More than a few readers were taken aback upon reading an interview in the National Catholic Reporter with Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles. He is reported to have said, “Any priest coming in, knows that if he confesses to a reportable crime I have to report it.” Did he mean he would violate the confessional seal? We asked the cardinal, and he offers this clarification: “Please be assured that I was definitely not referring to the Sacrament of Reconciliation by using the word ‘confesses.’ Rather, I should have said that ‘Any priest coming in, knows that if he admits to a reportable crime I have to report it.’ This presumes that the priest is making this admission for the very first time to a mandated reporter under California law. Since January 1, 1997, all clergy in the State of California became mandated reporters of suspected child abuse. The Sacramental Seal of Confession is total and absolute, and no priest or bishop who learns of a reportable crime may pass that information on to anyone in any circumstances whatsoever. The priest or bishop could urge the penitent to take the reportable crime to the public forum, but he can never divulge that information learned in Confession to anyone.” Cardinal Mahony’s clarification is most welcome.

• “Atheist psychiatrist argues that gays can change.” That’s the subhead of a Christianity Today interview with Robert Spitzer, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. It is no criticism of Christianity Today to note that his being an atheist is viewed as a plus. It is to say, “Hey, it’s not just we Christians who think this way.” The Spitzer story is indeed interesting. Back in 1973 he was instrumental in having the American Psychiatric Association declare that homosexuality is not a clinical disorder. Thirty years later, after extensive research with homosexuals who had undergone reparative therapy (the preferred term now is “reorientation therapy”), he concluded that it was about as effective as most therapies. A storm ensued when he published his findings in the October 2003 issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior. Spitzer thinks his position is less controversial today. Asked if he is planning a follow-up study, he said, “No. I feel a little battle fatigue. But also I’m not sure what the study would be. Some people have said, ‘Follow these people, interview them five years later, see how many of them have switched back,’ since it’s well known that some ex-gays give it up. But suppose you found that 5 percent or 10 percent did switch back. I mean, so what? You’d find the same thing if you followed people who had treatment for drug addiction. Some are going to relapse.” That sounds about right.

• The sentiments are drearily conventional. Hendrik Hertzberg writes in the New Yorker, “Terri Schiavo’s life, as distinct from the life of her unsentient organs, ended fifteen years ago.” The whole fuss was organized by Republican politicians pandering to extremists, he explains. “Terri Schiavo has become a metaphor in the religio-cultural struggle over abortion.” And then the claim that “the fervor of Terri’s Christianist ‘supporters’ was motivated by dogmas unrelated to her or her rights.” The use of “Christianist” is interesting. I have seen it before here and there. I believe the unfortunate Gore Vidal is fond of the term. But I have not seen it in an approximately mainstream publication such as the New Yorker. I suppose it is thought imprudent to launch an assault on “Christians” in a country where 80 percent of the people identify themselves as such. Mr. Hertzberg invites Christians to separate themselves from the Christianists. The word has a certain resonance with the word “Communist.” I do hope this does not portend an interreligious form of McCarthyism.

• There are, according to a reader with too much time on his hands, hundreds of books for dummies. Catholicism for Dummies is ranked the number 4 bestseller, The Bible for Dummies number 48, Buddhism for Dummies number 78, and Religion for Dummies number 140. There are also Labradors, basketball, football, pugs, and bookkeeping—all for dummies. Sex for Dummies is way down the list at number 194. About some things people apparently do not want to admit that they don’t know.

• It is true that we have not paid attention to John Cornwell’s latest book, The Pontiff in Winter: Triumph and Conflict in the Reign of John Paul II, and it is not an adequate excuse that almost nobody else has either. Cornwell is author of Hitler’s Pope, the now notorious book-length slander of Pius XII. He doesn’t like John Paul II any better. Not that he knows much about him. In a chapter titled “Close Encounters,” he is reduced to quoting people who have met the pope and had critical things to say about him. Reduced further, he cites, apparently as evidence, dreams that novelist Graham Greene once said he had. Mr. Greene apparently did not like the pope either. Cornwell here repeats charges that he had retracted in the February 2001 issue of First Things and is sharply critical of the pro-papal cabal he calls “the First Things coterie.” Reflective of his penchant for painstaking accuracy, he says First Things is “a reactionary Catholic quarterly.” As one commentator observes, “He is wrong on all three scores.” At least we might all agree that First Things is a monthly. I expect the reason the book promptly sank without a trace is that even editors otherwise sympathetic to Cornwell’s viewpoint found somewhat distasteful the mix of bile and ignorance in beating up on an old man, and then giving him a few extra kicks for good measure. And now I am possibly guilty of paying more attention than the book deserves.

• Seventeen theological heavyweights in ELCA Lutheranism have issued a statement calling for the rejection of a task force’s recommendation of what is, in effect, a local option with respect to ordaining those living in a same-sex relationship and the blessing of same-sex unions. “The proposed shift of matters of such enormous import from the national to the local levels will have two adverse consequences,” the statement says. First, “the structural dissolution of the ELCA as it currently exists,” and, second, “creation of intense division and disunity at the local level, thus effectively undermining [in the words of the task-force report] ‘ways to live together faithfully in the midst of our disagreements.’” In preparation for the August churchwide assembly in Orlando, Florida, the sixty-five synods of the ELCA are being asked to join in rejecting the task force report. The signers of the statement include figures of significant theological influence in Lutheranism and far beyond, such as George W. Forell, Robert Jenson, Carl Braaten, Roy A. Harrisville, Gerhard Forde, Hans Hillerbrand, James Crumley, Jr., and William Lazareth. While they were the theological fathers of generations of Lutheran leaders, their influence with younger clergy and laity is not clear. Opponents of the task force proposals are planning a large meeting in September. Depending on the action of the Orlando assembly, plans for a nongeographical dissenting synod or even the launching of a new church body will be on the agenda.

• Forty years ago it was the Netherlands and Quebec that went with astonishing rapidity from what seemed to be deeply Christian cultures to a pervasive secularism. Now many fear that is happening in Ireland. In a national radio address, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin addressed the problem in a lecture on “The Christian Presence in the Pluralist Public Square.” He quotes President Vaclav Havel speaking to a 2000 meeting of the World Bank in Prague: “Why did someone in long bygone times engage in the construction of such costly edifices which appear to be of so little use by today’s standards? One possible explanation is that there were periods in history when material gain was not the highest value in human life and when humankind knew that there were mysteries they would never understand and before which they could only stand in humble amazement and perhaps project that amazement into structures whose spires point upward. Upward in order that they might be seen from far and wide. Upward to that which is beyond our sight, that which by its mere silent existence appears to preclude for humanity any right to treat the world as an endless source of short-term profit and which calls for solidarity with all those who dwell under its mysterious vault.” The Christian voice in the public square cannot be limited to that of the Church hierarchy. “If the Catholic voice is merely the voice of the hierarchy—as eloquent and holy as they might be—the game is up. If the hierarchy is neither eloquent nor holy, the game will not even get started.” Martin emphasizes that the public engagement of the Church must be clearly grounded in devotion to Jesus Christ and his continuing work of salvation, and he concludes with this: “Jesus teaches with authority. But that is not a license for his disciples to be authoritarian. The Church’s authority is in the authority of its teaching. Tomorrow’s Church will be a more humble, listening Church which realizes that the fundamental obedience is obedience of the Church itself to the word of God, which alone has the strength to change the world according to God’s plan. The Church will be more a pilgrim Church, which journeys with all those of good will who work for goodness and honesty and who genuinely seek the truth. An inquiring, caring public square will be enriched by the presence of inquiring, caring Christians who bring that same message that brought enrichment to the public squares and dust tracks of Palestine over 2,000 years ago by Jesus the Nazarene who revealed the strength of God by humbling himself.”

• Lee Edwards has done many books on conservatism in the United States, and the other day there crossed my desk his A Brief History of the Modern American Conservative Movement. I am not a gatekeeper of the conservative movement—not even an assistant deputy to the deputy assistant gatekeeper. Who is and who is not a conservative is a question that has never much interested me. I suppose I got my fill of disputes over ideological definitions an eon ago when I was generally viewed as being on the Left. It would seem that any movement of consequence, or with ambitions to be of consequence, has to draw lines indicating who is in and who is out, who belongs and who doesn’t belong, who is “us” and who is “them.” It is more or less inevitable, not only in politics but between philosophical and theological schools of thought, and, no doubt, in the corporate strategies of the world of business. For the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr., has been the chief gatekeeper and rule-maker since the days when, in the view of its detractors, conservatism was not a movement but only an irritable gesture. Buckley succeeded in excommunicating, so to speak, sundry screwballs and anti-Semites from the movement. I have tried to keep my distance from ideological infighting among conservatives, although oldtimers may remember that nasty brouhaha in which I was embroiled with the paleoconservatives of the Rockford Institute and Chronicles magazine back in 1989. In truth, there seems to be comparatively little infighting among conservatives these days. The “modern conservative movement,” if movement is still the right word, is a many-splendored thing of ingredients moral, social, religious, patriotic, entrepreneurial, and populist. Nobody seems much interested in excluding anyone. That is odd in a way, since it is often assumed that movements are cohesive in opposition but splinter in their success. And over the past half century, the conservative movement is, all in all, a success story. Of course one immediately adds that there is so much more to be done, but that is always the case. The reality is, however, that people under thirty today cannot remember when “conservative” was equated with “Neanderthal” (although the equation may still be in fashion on more stridently liberal campuses). Once called “the stupid party,” conservatism has produced almost every fresh and promising idea in culture and politics over the last twenty years. I saw the other day where Frank Rich of the New York Times was bemoaning this year’s Super Bowl entertainment and remembering the daring times when Janet Jackson’s nipple was exposed, which apparently he found quite exciting. The alternative to conservatism is reduced to this. As it is said, everything changes except the avant garde. I’m told the Democratic response to the State of the Union address included a call for a Marshall Plan for America. What next? Women’s suffrage? Such were random thoughts prompted by Lee Edwards’ Brief History. Offering the pleasures of nostalgia for older readers and the benefits of instruction for younger, it is worth a look.

• In the annals of historical progress one should enter a quite new phenomenon: child soldiers. According to a new book by P.W. Singer, Children at War, about 10 percent of soldiers currently involved in combat are children—children, as in twelve-year-olds or even five-year-olds. It used to be that soldiers had to be strong, capable of mastering lances, swords, and bayonets. Now with an AK-47 that costs less than the equivalent of ten U.S. dollars and can be mastered in a few minutes, a ten-year-old kid can blow away dozens of people. Apart from changed technology, former rules of war prohibiting child soldiers have been abandoned in conflicts in Africa and Southeast Asia involving the rival gangs sometimes called governments. Of course children lose limbs in battle and, since children’s limbs grow faster than their surrounding tissue, the kids need frequent additional amputations and the fitting of new prosthetic devices, although the devices are almost never available. Singer says children often have a hard time readjusting to civilian life when peace breaks out, having spent their childhood butchering their neighbors. You may wonder what five-year-olds can do for an army. It turns out that they’re great for minesweeping and are promised candy if they get back. There is an organization called the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers. It spends much of its energy protesting the U.S. policy of permitting seventeen-year-olds to enlist with the consent of their parents.

• “Paper, procedures, people, and prayer—that’s how I spend my time, and every day I wish I knew how to reverse the order.” So says a bishop who is overwhelmed by the demands of paperwork and committee meetings that prevent him from getting out among the faithful and turning inward to attend to the state of his soul. He and other bishops will likely have their frustration compounded if the “National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management” has its way. That is a new organization launched by Geoffrey Boisi, a top executive at JP Morgan Chase with deep pockets and a deep commitment to getting the Church to shape up, management-wise. He brought together 170 influential Catholics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, mostly from the corporate and financial worlds but with a smattering of left-of-center editors, academics, and activists. (“Left-of-center” here means people who think that America or Commonweal are the solid center.) The eighty-page report issuing from the meeting is filled with recommendations for running the Church on the model of the great success of corporate, financial, and academic leadership in America. It is emphasized that the Church in the United States employs more than a million people and has an operating budget of nearly $100 billion, and it is about time it started acting like the big business it is. Proposed are a multitude of new committees, commissions, task forces, and accountability review mechanisms, all calling for regular reports by bishops and new staffing to ensure efficiency in meeting strategic plans and corporate goals. The Wharton document is titled “Report of the Church in America.” The “of” is a nice touch. The bishops’ conference is treating the initiative politely, appointing a liaison committee to discuss the proposals with Mr. Boisi and his friends, who are, after all, people of great substance. It seems unlikely that much will come of the proposals but, if I’m wrong about that, my aforementioned bishop friend had better be braced to cut back drastically on the corporate inefficiencies of time spent on people and prayer.

• If you can measure the institutional seriousness of an undertaking by the number of acronyms it accumulates, this is a very serious undertaking indeed. The lead article in Ecumenical Trends is titled “A Sharing in the Ecumenical Task: USCCB/ BCEIA and CELAM/ SECUM.” As it happens, it is a fairly hopeful report on discussions between Catholics, evangelicals, Pentecostals, and others in Latin America. Such developments have been aided in no small part by “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” That’s ECT to the initiated.

• Kindly overlook the cheap shot at George W. Bush in considering Lucy Beckett’s review in the Times Literary Supplement of the new Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (co-edited by regular First Things contributor Edward T. Oakes, S.J.). One of the authors in the volume writes that Balthasar maintains that “in the ideal of the organic unity and mutual permeation of State and Church in the Middle Ages there is a failure to ensure the necessary distinction between God and the world.” Beckett observes: “To identify and condemn this permeation, or confusion, was the most important motive for Augustine’s writing of The City of God in the Christian Empire of late Rome. In the world of George W. Bush, Balthasar’s moment may have arrived. It is certainly a time to pay attention to ‘always greater’ Christian truth spoken from a rich, complex, Catholic, deeply and widely informed mind, and to understand the no more than relative and transient value of any and every human arrangement of power, or words. Among theologians, Hans Urs von Balthasar may seem like a fox among chickens, but in the last year of his life he ended the final section of his book, My Work: In Retrospect: ‘Christ sent his believers into the whole world as sheep among wolves. Before making a pact with the world, it is necessary to meditate on that comparison.’” The meditation is necessary even when, especially when, some of the sheep are engaged in the inevitably wolfish offices of temporal power.

• The mood at the annual meeting of the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA) was grim. Despite all the media chatter about religion in the public square, especially since the 2004 election, newspapers are cutting back on religion reporting. A big study put out by the school of journalism at Northwestern University, “The Power to Grow Readership,” has apparently convinced editors and publishers that people aren’t very interested in reading about religion. The folks in RNA believe they have all kinds of evidence to the contrary and are counterattacking. Says one, “We’ve got to find a better way to understand the impact of faith on such public issues as education, health care, the war in Iraq, and same-sex marriage.” That strikes me as precisely wrong. If people want to read about all those other things, the “religion factor” inevitably appears as no more than an add-on. Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer, an online review of religion and the press hosted by New York University, has, if I understand him, a more persuasive proposal: “Religion in the broad sense underlies, controls, permeates at least half the stories in the news, probably a lot more . . . . I want to know what the subjects of the story believed they were doing. That’s what religion writing has to offer to every other aspect of journalism: the focus on belief.” News reports about religion should be more about religion and less about religion’s influence on something that is considered newsworthy. Of course, most reporters feel incompetent when it comes to addressing what people actually believe and do religiously, and most probably are. In addition to convincing their editors that religion matters, the members of the RNA have to demonstrate that it does. (Incidentally, when NYU was setting up its online operation, they asked whether I would mind if they called it The Public Square. I said I did mind. So they went with The Revealer, which seems a bit presumptuous, implying as it does an odd notion of revelation, but that’s their problem.)

• Moments of Monumental Obviousness are sometimes perpetrated by certifiably serious people, but they are nonetheless to be noted and paid the tribute of a silent pause. Edward Rothstein of the New York Times reviewed Robert Alter’s translation with commentary of The Five Books of Moses. So much attention has been paid the biblical text, writes Rothstein, that “even the English language has been influenced by the glories (and errors) of the seventeenth-century King James translation.”

• The British sociologist David Martin is among my favorite thinkers, and here he is reviewing a book by two other favorites, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present by Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan. The problem with the O’Donovans’ understanding of Christian politics, writes Martin, is that there’s nothing specifically Christian about it. The O’Donovans contrast Karl Barth’s understanding of the politics of the Cross, which they think necessarily issues in pacifism, and Paul Ramsey’s commitment to a “realism” recognizing that human society always entails an element of force. Martin sides with Ramsey and writes: “Once accept that and it really does not matter what Christian lens you employ as the focus of argument, because you are going to end up in the same boat as everybody else: the assessment of likely scenarios within a tiny range of real options. Christian positions arrived at in this way simply cover the same spectrum as non-Christian positions, with perhaps a certain reluctance nowadays about being openly too realistic and, of course, a rejection of war for glory or the sheer hell of it. The just-war theory may have theological origins, but the arguments are entirely available to secular reason with no benefit of theology whatever.” The O’Donovans, says Martin, discuss in great detail the problems of democracy, the role of countervailing powers, and related themes. “No doubt these are urgent problems for our democracy,” writes Martin, “but theologically, so what?” Experiments in trying to combine realism and a specifically Christian theology of love grounded in the Cross have been mixed. “Even the Roman Church, precisely because it has historically come closest to devising a Christian polity, has had to institutionalize different levels of attainment as between God’s athletes organized in self-selected communities, and the worlds of politics and of l’homme moyen sensuel. Setting aside the corruption that so easily besets the ‘perfect society’ of the athletes, the very existence of institutionalized levels of attainment witnesses to the pressure of social and political reality on Christian aspiration.” Acknowledging the great contribution of Christianity to our civilization, Martin writes: “This shared moral wisdom might be rounded out by reverence for life and persons, the rejection of any idolatry of state, party or nation, the autonomy of voluntary associations, and the importance of sustained commitments (for example, in the family)—as well as justice and peace and the principle of hope. While the repertoire of Christianity, as imprinted historically in our civilization, may have shaped that civilization in the direction of these principles, none of them is logically dependent on a Christian foundation.” To which I am inclined to say, so what? Since when has history been logical? More seriously, it is highly doubtful that practices based upon beliefs about, for instance, the reverence for life, the dignity of the person, and the evil of idolatry can be sustained apart from those beliefs. Apart from “the story of the world” proposed by Christianity, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make a convincing, as in logical, case for such beliefs. Witness, inter alia, the heroic labors of John Rawls. Kindness prevents the mention of Peter Singer. There is, I am persuaded, a great deal more Christianity in the O’Donovans’ Christian politics than David Martin allows, and I am puzzled by his failure to see that.

• Out in the Bay Area, it says here, “a new form of church is happening at Ebenezer.” That would be Ebenezer Lutheran, which is “a diverse community.” Forum Letter, from which I lift this item, wonders how diverse a community of thirty people could be. In any event, Ebenezer, led by Pastor Stacy Boorn, is “standing firmly within the Christian tradition in order to reconstruct the divine by reclaiming her feminine persona in theology, liturgy, church structure, art, language, practices, leadership, and acts of justice.” Which, one might think, is an awful lot for thirty people to be doing. Ebenezer is also active ecumenically, in a manner of speaking. It is appropriating the rosary, or, to be more precise, the Goddess Rosary:

Hail Goddess full of grace.
Blessed are you and blessed are all the
fruits of your womb.
For you are the MOTHER of us all.
Hear us now and in all our needs.
Blessed be!

Well, I said “in a manner of speaking.” Ebenezer has also adopted The Nazarene’s Prayer as rewritten by former Catholic nun, Miriam Therese Winter: “Our Mother who is within us, we celebrate your many names. Your wisdom come, your will be done, unfolding from the depths within us” and so forth. Is it blasphemy and idolatry? But of course. Is it a good thing that over the years we have become inured to it, hardly able to muster a twitch of outrage? Probably not. Attention should be paid from time to time, if for no other reason than to be reminded of the multivalent thing that is religion in America, and to be alerted again to the perdurance of the temptation to worship ourselves by people who at this late date are excited about the novelty of the idea.

• Almost everybody agreed that the 1999 book by Jesuit Father Roger Haight, Jesus, Symbol of God, was over the top, and apparently he intended it to be just that. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) was not amused and entered into conversation with Fr. Haight. After five years of discussion, CDF issued a “notification” that the book is heretical and Fr. Haight is not to teach Catholic theology. It is not as though Fr. Haight’s book is a scholarly inquiry pressing at the edges of theological reflection. As CDF notes and the doctrine committee of the U.S. bishops conference confirms, the book frontally challenges such core teachings as the divinity of Jesus, the reality of the Trinity, the salvific nature of Jesus’ death and bodily resurrection, and the universality of his redemptive mission. The U.S. doctrine committee asserts: “Authentic doctrine, contained in the Scriptures and in the Apostolic Tradition and defined by the Councils of the Church, must be the explicit and unambiguous foundation not only for catechetical instruction, but also for theological teaching and inquiry . . . . While the theological community is not only competent but indeed obliged to address creatively and to debate strenuously theological issues that are open to authentic development, theologians are not permitted to espouse theological positions that are contrary to the teaching of Scripture and the Ecumenical Councils of the Church.” The theological community, to the extent it is represented by the Catholic Theological Society of America, issued a statement deploring the CDF “notification” and worrying about its chilling effect on theological scholarship. While the statement by his academic colleagues defended Fr. Haight’s competence and integrity, it conspicuously did not defend the positions espoused in Jesus, Symbol of God. Fr. Haight has the distinction of being one of only a handful of theologians publicly disciplined during the more than twenty-six years of John Paul II’s pontificate. He is currently teaching at Union Theological Seminary, the famously liberal Protestant institution in New York City.

• The trouble with Justice Antonin Scalia is that he thinks what he believes is true. Or so says Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. He cites an article in these pages in which Scalia speaks of political authority being derived from God. Writes Cohen, “It would have been one thing for Scalia to have said that the Founding Fathers probably saw things his way but it is quite another thing for him to assert a belief and call it truth.” One has to wonder how many things Mr. Cohen believes that he thinks are not true. With respect to religion and the American order, Mr. Cohen has a decided view. “Government neutrality—rigorous secularism—is the way to go.” Rigorous secularism is neutrality? I prefer to think that Richard Cohen does not believe that, but then, what I prefer to think may not be true.

• It’s been a while since I’ve referred to the Industrial Areas Foundation. The reason is that there doesn’t seem to be much new on that front. IAF was founded a half century ago by Saul Alinsky, who died in 1967. He was an old leftie who spotted the potential of churches, and especially the Catholic Church, for promoting radical causes. Today IAF is the force behind fifty-five affiliates, such as South Bronx Churches and Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development, with a major agitational effort among Hispanics in the Southwest. IAF says its “primary purpose is power” and its “chief product is social change.” Keeping the faith with Saul Alinsky, organizers unabashedly exploit anger and resentment to generate confrontation and division in the service of radical change. Training courses aim at immunizing activists against the seductive language of temperance and reconciliation that is endemic to Christianity. Predictably, IAF generates a great deal of anger and resentment among people who resist having their churches recruited to the cause of generating anger and resentment. A common complaint is that monies from an annual collection of the bishops conference, the Campaign for Human Development, frequently find their way to IAF activities. As I have mentioned before, I have had first-hand experience with IAF projects over the years and know of cases in which they have been a part of achieving change for the better—in improving housing for the poor, for instance. But even good causes are used to serve other ends. As IAF says, its primary purpose is power, and it boasts of being none too scrupulous about how that purpose is served. Alinsky exulted in the ruthlessness of the amoral maxims—since radicalism is its own morality—summarized in his book Rules for Radicals. An epigraph to the book, written by Alinsky, reflects at least part of the operative philosophy: “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.” Christians, one should like to think, are less admiring of Lucifer’s achievement.

• Correction: In the April issue, Sayyid Qutb, who was executed in Egypt under Nasser, was identified as the founding father of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hassan al-Banna founded the Brotherhood in 1928. Qutb authored Milestones in which he propounded an extreme version of Islamic jihad.

• I am accused of insufferable elitism and manipulation for having written in a promotional letter that First Things is published for a self-selecting audience of possibly no more than 75,000 subscribers. “Yes, I know,” writes this outraged gentleman, “that this is a marketer’s ploy, meant to appeal to my vanity. But shame on you!” He thinks it an insult to the country to suggest that “barely one tenth of one percent” of Americans are likely First Things readers. I do not take lightly aspersions upon my patriotism, but 75,000 subscribers would be very high for any publication requiring the level of intellectual attentiveness assumed by First Things. For the record, however, I hereby declare that we would welcome two million subscribers—or even ten million subscribers. Toward that end, we would be glad to send a free sample copy in your name to parties who you think may be likely subscribers.

Sources

: The Tyranny of the Minority, New Republic, March 21. The Polite Gentiles, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Toward Tradition, January 20. Our Culture, Counterculturally Speaking, New Republic, March 21. Father Paris on Schiavo, Salon, March 23. Baptist identity at Baylor, comments taken from ChristianityToday.com, February 16. Milgram and evil, Times Literary Supplement, December 10, 2004. Cardinal McCarrick on Catholics in public life, Origins, March 24. Muslims and apostasy laws, Religion Watch, February 2005. Mahoney on Gregg, Journal of Markets and Morality, Fall 2004. Levenick on starvation, personal correspondence. Cardinal Mahony on confidentiality and confession, personal correspondence. Hertzberg on Schiavo, New Yorker, April 4. Martin and Havel on the Church’s public role, Origins, February 10. Child soldiers, thanks to New York Sun, January 6. Churches in Latin America, Ecumenical Trends, February 2005. Beckett on Balthasar, Times Literary Supplement, March 25. Religion reporters in crisis, Religion in the News, Winter 2005. Rothstein on the English language, New York Times, December 29, 2004. David Martin on the O’Donovans, Times Literary Supplement, December 24, 2004. Ebenezer’s goddess, Forum Letter, March. Cohen on Scalia, Washington Post, March 8.