While We’re At It

• The people over at the New York Times take a lot of ribbing about their claim to be the newspaper of record. Never mind. There are in fact some things we would never know about were they not reported in the Times. For instance, in the February 13 National Report section, there is a long front-page story with the headline “At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution.” You possibly didn’t know about this nationwide marshalling of religious forces to defend the theory of evolution against the advocates of Intelligent Design and related nuts. It is happening. For instance: “At St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, a small contemporary structure among the pricey homes of north Atlanta, the Rev. Patricia Templeton told the 85 worshippers gathered yesterday, ‘A faith that requires you to close your mind in order to believe is not much of a faith at all.’“ Wait, that’s not all. “In the basement of an apartment building in Evanston, Illinois, the Rev. Mitchell Brown said to the 21 people who came to services at the Evanston Mennonite Church that Darwin’s theories in fact had compelled people to have faith rather than look for ‘special effects’ to confirm the existence of God.” That’s it. A small Episcopal church in Atlanta and a smaller Mennonite gathering in a basement in Evanston. The rest of the story quotes people who agreed with what the two ministers said. It mentions that ten thousand mainline/oldline clergy had signed a letter declaring February 12 to be Evolution Sunday. The two reporters on the story checked with other clergy who had signed, but they said they did not mention evolution in their sermons. Never mind, a story is a story. “At Churches Nationwide, Good Words for Evolution.” Anyway, “nationwide” is a term of art. If you’re the newspaper of record and, not incidentally, committed to puffing evolution, you gotta go with what you got.

• I have discussed in this space the brouhaha over religion at the Air Force Academy. Some chaplains tell me there really was a problem with some evangelical Christian officers who aggressively evangelized in a way that suggested that, if you are not one of them, you’re really not with the program. After months of controversy and deliberation, the air force has come out with a brief set of guidelines, including this: “In official circumstances or when superior/subordinate relationships are involved, superiors need to be sensitive to the potential that personal expressions may appear to be official or have undue influence on their subordinates. Subject to these sensitivities, superiors enjoy the same free exercise rights as all other airmen.” That sounds about right. It doesn’t sound right to Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, however. He complains that the guidelines will result in religious expression being biased toward Christianity. Given that 90 percent of the people involved are Christians of one sort or another, it is not surprising that religious expression would tend to be Christian. As I previously mentioned, Mr. Foxman hoped to pocket a militantly secularist victory with the air force and then move on to banning table prayers at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. In this he was joined by Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (a.k.a. Americans United for a Naked Public Square). Mr. Lynn was very upset by the new air-force guidelines. He said, “It appears that the air force does not understand that all prayer, including so-called ‘inclusive prayer,’ is an inherently religious activity for which not all staff and cadets wish to be subject to.” To paraphrase Churchill, the free exercise of religion is something that Mr. Lynn will not up with put.

• It has been said, and said truly, that John Paul the Great had a more informed appreciation of America—the Catholic Church here, but also American forms of religious, cultural, and political relationships—than any pope in history. In the modern era, Rome’s ways of thinking about democracy and religion were much more influenced by the French Revolution of 1789 than by the American Revolution of 1776. John Paul’s appreciation of the American experience is continued and in some respects refined in the thought of Benedict XVI. In Without Roots, recently published by Basic Books, Benedict responds to an essay by Marcello Pera, President of the Italian senate. He writes: “In this regard, I would like to quote a significant phrase from Tocqueville: ‘Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.’ In the letter that you addressed to me, you quote an expression from John Adams that expresses a similar thought, namely, that the American Constitution ‘was made only for a moral and religious people.’ In the United States, too, secularization is proceeding at an accelerated pace, and the confluence of many different cultures disrupts the basic Christian consensus. However, one senses much more clearly in America than in Europe the implicit recognition that the religious and moral foundation bequeathed by Christianity is greater than any single denomination. Europe, unlike America, is on a collision course with its own history. Often it acts as a spokesperson for an almost visceral denial of any possible public dimension for Christian values. Why is this so? Why is Europe, which has such an ancient Christian tradition, unable to know a consensus of this type? A consensus that, irrespective of membership in a specific faith community, accords a public, sustaining value to the fundamental concepts of Christianity? Since the historic bases for this difference are well known, a brief description of them should suffice. American society was built for the most part by groups that had fled from the system of state churches that reigned in Europe, and they found their religious bearings in free faith communities outside of the state church. The foundations of American society were thus laid by the free churches, which by the tenets of their creed and their very structure are not a state church but rather a free assembly of individuals. In this sense you could say that American society is built on the foundations of a separation of church and state that is determined and indeed demanded by religion (a separation whose motivation and configuration could not be more different from the conflictual separation of church and state imposed by the French Revolution and the systems that followed it). In America the state is little more than a free space for different religious communities. It is in its nature to recognize and permit these communities in their particularity and non-membership in the state. A separation that is conceived positively, since it is meant to allow religion to be itself, a religion that respects and protects its own living space distinctly from the state and its ordinances. This separation has created a special relationship between the state and the private spheres that is completely different from Europe. The private sphere has an absolutely public character. This is why the non-governmental is not excluded in any way, style, or form from the public dimension of social life. Most of America’s cultural institutions are non-governmental, such as the universities or arts organizations. The legal and tax system favors and enables this type of non-governmental culture, by contrast to Europe, where, for example, private universities are a recent and only marginal phenomenon.”

• Benedict has over the years been kept closely informed about the American religious situation and especially about the project called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. In the same book, he writes: “American Catholics also recognized the positive character of the separation between church and state, for both religious reasons and for the religious freedom that it guaranteed them. It is also thanks to their significant contribution that American society has maintained a Christian consciousness. Their contribution is more valid than ever at a time in which profound, radical changes are taking place within Protestantism. Since the traditional Protestant communities are continuously adapting to secularized society, they are losing their internal cohesion and their ability to persuade. The evangelicals, who used to be the most relentless enemies of Catholicism, are not only gaining ground on the traditional communities, but they are also discovering a new commonality with Catholicism, which they are coming to see as a defender against the pressures of secularization and an upholder of the same ethical values that they themselves profess: values that they feel have been given short shrift by their Protestant brothers.”

• Stanley Fish is a bright and engaging gadfly. He has been known to describe himself as a “sophist” in his mission to upset conventional wisdoms, most of which travel under the banner of “liberalism.” I have debated him in these pages (see “Why We Can Get Along,” February 1996) and frequently fail in resisting the temptation to see what he is up to now. Here he is again on the New York Times op-ed page. The subject is Christianity and Islam, and why Christians don’t stand up to radical Islam’s demands for submission. His message, in brief, is: “Let’s you and them fight.” Religions worth their mettle, according to Fish, are “comprehensive accounts”—they purport to be the truth about everything and true for everyone. You either believe what you say you believe and are therefore a thug, or else you only pretend to believe and are therefore a liberal wimp. As Fish would have it: “A firm adherent of a comprehensive religion doesn’t want dialogue about his beliefs; he wants those beliefs to prevail. Dialogue is not a tenet in his creed, and invoking it is unlikely to do anything but further persuade him that you have missed the point—as, indeed, you are pledged to do, so long as liberalism is the name of your faith.” But of course that is utter poppycock. A firm adherent to orthodox Christianity is firmly committed to dialogue. To be sure, he wants the truth in which he believes to be accepted by others. But it is very much a tenet of his creed that his duty is to faithfully bear witness to the truth, and to commend to God the truth’s prevailing. Some Christian theologians consider Stanley Fish an ally in the great battle (and great fun) of smiting liberalism hip and thigh. That is, I believe, a serious mistake. Fish’s contention that religion that hasn’t sold out to liberalism is fanaticism will be rejected by those who decline to choose between being a wimp or a thug.

• In the March issue I wrote about the dismissal by Wheaton College of a faculty member who entered into full communion with the Catholic Church. The president of the college said the decision turned on whether a Catholic could accept the authority of Scripture as construed by the Protestant Reformation. I pointed out that numerous heresies, before and after the sixteenth century, appealed to scriptural authority. Friends at Wheaton have pointed out to me, in turn, that the college’s Statement of Faith (available on Wheaton’s website) precludes most of the heresies I mentioned. True enough. I was aware of Wheaton’s Statement of Faith, but my comment was addressed to the president’s claim that acceptance of scriptural authority is the criterion by which a Catholic is excluded from teaching at Wheaton. I should have made that distinction more clearly. At the same time, I stand by my observation that there are at Wheaton, and in evangelicalism more generally, doctrinal disagreements of great moment that are not resolved by appeal to scriptural authority—nor, I would add, by appeal to Wheaton’s Statement of Faith. As I said, the reason given for the dismissal that gave rise to this discussion does seem to focus rather narrowly on preventing Catholics from teaching at Wheaton. (For a discussion of this and related questions, see the reflection in this issue by Alan Jacobs, who teaches at Wheaton.)

• Somewhat amusing are many of the responses to Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. The dominant note in the news reports is that Benedict was engaged in something like a public-relations game, putting forward a “friendly face” to counter the impression of Joseph Ratzinger as the Vatican “enforcer.” After all, what could be so warm and fuzzy as an encyclical entitled “God Is Love.” News reports here and elsewhere spoke of a document that is free from “the strictures of orthodoxy” and avoided such “controversial issues” as sexuality or priestly discipline. All of this is, I am convinced, quite entirely to miss the point. In the first encyclical of this still-new pontificate, Benedict recalls us to the most fundamental and radical of Christian truth claims: All that is is brought into being and sustained in being by love, by the God who is love, and who calls and enables us to respond to His love as supremely exemplified in the cross of Christ. This is the call to radical discipleship that is now, as always, the most “controversial” of the Church’s proposals to the world. Indeed, it is the enduring “scandal” of the gospel. If we don’t get that right, we are not likely to get much else right—including the numerous controversies that generate endless chatter about what’s right and what’s wrong about the Church and the world. An extended examination of the radical teaching of Deus Caritas Est is planned for the next issue.

• Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic is taking no prisoners. The subject is Daniel C. Dennett’s book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, in which the author sets out to smite religion hip and thigh, much in the style of village atheists of yore, but this time in the name of the dubious science of evolutionary biology. “In his own opinion,” writes Wieseltier, “Dennett is a hero. ‘By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose, or worse,’ he declares, ‘and yet I persist.’ Giordano Bruno with tenure at Tufts!” Dennett explains the development of religion by means not scientific but scientistic, says Wieseltier. “There are a number of things that must be said about this story. The first is that it is only a story. It is not based, in any strict sense, on empirical research. Dennett is ‘extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking,’ nothing more. Breaking the Spell is a fairy tale told by evolutionary biology. There is no scientific foundation for its scientistic narrative. Even Dennett admits as much: ‘I am not at all claiming that this is what science has established about religion. . . . We don’t know.’ So all of Dennett’s splashy allegiance to evidence and experiment and ‘generating further testable hypotheses’ notwithstanding, what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing.” Wieseltier concludes: “Dennett recognizes the uses of faith, but not its reasons. In the end, his repudiation of religion is a repudiation of philosophy, which is also an affair of belief in belief. What this shallow and self-congratulatory book establishes most conclusively is that there are many spells that need to be broken.”

• “Lose a few, lose a few.” That’s the frequently muttered motto of those contending for truth and justice in public affairs. But then, every once in a while, they win one. That seems to be happening in the campaign of vilification against Pius XII and his “silence,” or worse, in the time of the Holocaust. Churchill said that a lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on. Truth is now up and running fast. There was The Pius War, edited by Joseph Bottum and Rabbi David Dalin, and now there is Dalin’s own The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: How Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis, together with Ronald Rychlak’s Righteous Gentiles: How Pius XII and the Catholic Church Saved Half a Million Jews from the Nazis. All three books devastatingly debunk the scurrilous attacks that have appeared in the past seven years by the likes of John Cornwell (Hitler’s Pope), James Carroll (Constantine’s Sword), Garry Wills (Papal Sin), and Daniel Goldhagen (A Moral Reckoning). Rychlak, who is a professor of law and knows all the forensic ins and outs, is especially effective in a point-by-point rebuttal of the reckless charges that have been made against Pius. Cornwell, incidentally, has been forced to withdraw his claims, in a way, and now says we don’t know enough to make a definite judgment about what Pius did or could have done. Some detractors of Pius claim that we cannot be satisfied that he intended to rescue Jews in the absence of an actual written order from him to that effect. Rychlak notes that in this they are following the line of the Holocaust deniers who say that Hitler is exonerated because there is no written order by him calling for the killing of Jews. It will be remembered that, until Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy in the early 1960s, Pius was much praised, by Jewish leaders among others, for his efforts to rescue victims of the Holocaust. Then, quite suddenly, everything changed and he was depicted as a villain. Rychlak notes the close friendship between British Holocaust denier David Irving and Rolf Hochhuth. When, in November 2005, Irving was arrested in Austria for Holocaust denial (which is a crime in some European countries), he was the guest of Rolf Hochhuth. There is obviously an affinity between those who play fast and loose with history, in this case between a Holocaust denier and a defamer of Pius XII. (As of this writing, Irving told the Austrian court that he used to be but is no longer a Holocaust denier, claiming to have been convinced that it happened after studying journals and other documents of Heinrich Himmler. The Austrian court nonetheless sentenced him to three years in prison.) Not long before the pope’s death, Father Peter Gumpel of Rome’s dicastery for saints told me that John Paul the Great expressed the hope that he would live long enough to beatify Pius XII. That was not to be, but, if he is beatified, the vindication will be in significant part due to the efforts of people like Dalin and Rychlak. Lose a few, win a few.

• When this past February many thousands of Muslims ran amok in protest against a Danish newspaper that printed unflattering cartoons of Mohammed, many commentators, including your scribe, said the West must stand firm in making clear that we are not about to live by Muslim rules. There followed an article in the Wall Street Journal by a French writer, Amir Taheri, making the case that, in fact, Islam does not forbid the visual depiction of Mohammed and has often tolerated even the “making fun” of aspects of Islam. Mr. Taheri writes: “Islamic ethics is based on ‘limits and proportions,’ which means that the answer to an offensive cartoon is a cartoon, not the burning of embassies or the kidnapping of people designated as the enemy. Islam rejects guilt by association. Just as Muslims should not blame all Westerners for the poor taste of a cartoonist who wanted to be offensive, those horrified by the spectacle of rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam should not blame all Muslims for what is an outburst of fascist energy.” It is good to be assured that Mr. Taheri and many Muslims both past and present have a more friendly disposition toward the freedoms cherished by democracies. But we already knew that. Their argument is with Muslims, not with us. We can only hope that they win the argument.

• So I am asked: “How come you’re now in favor of the media’s mocking of religion?” The answer is that I’m not. I am in favor of censorship, with it being understood that the best form of censorship is self-censorship, which is simply another way of saying self-control. But, when governments try to quash free speech—except in cases such as yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater—I’m generally on the side of free speech. And when mobs threaten violence or death against those exercising the freedom to criticize, I’m always on the side of freedom. In the Christian understanding, the protection of freedom is integral to respect for the dignity of the human person, also when the person abuses that freedom. An additional and very important factor in the February events is that you had in Europe a demand, backed by threats, that Europe must live by Muslim rules. This is what is meant by the prospect of Europe becoming Eurabia. In this case, as in other cases over the last several years, the response of many European governments was not reassuring.

• In February’s violent Islamic protests against the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed in an unfavorable light, on February 5 to be exact, a gunman shot and killed Father Andrea Santoro while he was praying in his little church in Trabzon, Turkey. Herewith an excerpt from Fr. Santoro’s last letter to his friends: “Meanwhile, in Trabzon, the minute Christian community has met every Sunday morning to celebrate the Liturgy of the Word, and the church has been opened twice a week to Muslims, under the responsibility of a trustworthy person. I will let you know how it goes. I greet you, commending these reflections to you and exhorting you to always put faith in contact with the present moment. It must not be an abstract and generic faith, but a faith like that of the first ‘beginnings,’ which has been transmitted to us from generation to generation. As the gospel says, leaven has a mysterious capacity to ferment the dough, if it comes into contact with it—the dough of all times, all places, all generations. Moreover, Jesus said: ‘I am the light of the world, he who follows me will not walk in darkness.’ If his light illuminates us, not only will it illuminate every situation, even the most tragic, but in addition we too, as he always said, will be light. The tenuous light of a candle illuminates a house, an extinguished lamp leaves everything in darkness. May he shine in us with his Word, with his Spirit, with the sap of his saints. May our life be the wax that is consumed willingly. Affectionately, Father Andrea.”

• The great anxiety was to maintain one’s credentials as a liberal intellectual. Within that world, death came in the form of being perceived as having “sold out” or, even worse, having become a “neoconservative.” Such risks were run over the decades by writers such as Michael Walzer and the late Irving Howe, who criticized the more mindless excesses of the Left. The late and much-missed Christopher Lasch was almost alone in keeping his liberal audience while not caring a whit whether he was still seen as a man of the Left. It is very different with Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism at Columbia and, back in the olden days, president of the radical Students for a Democratic Society. Those of a certain age will remember the 1962 SDS Port Huron statement which condemned intellectuals who were victims of “unreasoning anti-communism.” Now Mr. Gitlin has published The Intellectuals and the Flag (Columbia University Press), criticizing the “fundamentalist left” for its contempt of patriotism. “Viewing U.S. power as an indivisible evil, the fundamentalist left has logically foregone the possibility of any effective opposition,” he writes. This was said many times during the 1960s and 1970s by liberal intellectuals. When I was still counted among them, I was impressed by the virulent reaction to my writing that “American power is, on balance and considering the alternatives, a force for good in the world.” I think I understand what Mr. Gitlin is going through. The remarkable thing is that he is still going through it thirty years later. Reviewing his book in the New York Sun, Gerald Russello puts it nicely: “Despite these strengths, the book will appeal only to that generation of Vietnam-era intellectuals who still believe left-wing nostrums, suitably repackaged, will carry the day. Despite Mr. Gitlin’s obvious sincerity and vigor of thought, these essays remain firmly in the bedrock of conventional liberalism. There is no talk here of immigration, abortion, crime, or other issues most voters consider central to their understanding of a civil community. Questions of culture are here, but they are refracted through Mr. Gitlin’s triple inheritance of [David] Riesman, [C. Wright] Mills, and [Irving] Howe. . . . Even when calling for a newly engaged leftism, disdain for those not imbued with the revolutionary zeal breaks through.” What others view as superannuated nostrums, Mr. Gitlin and a few stalwarts view as keeping the faith. Distancing themselves from the vulgar Michael Moores, Howard Deans, and Al Frankens, they are on the academic sidelines of censorious oldsters reminiscing about the days when there was an intellectual left of public consequence. The old ideas are repackaged, it is even allowed that conservatives may have a point on this or that, but beneath it all and through it all is the unquenchable byword of leftist continuity, “Come the revolution!”

• In recent years it has become a tradition—dare one say a venerated tradition—to stage The Vagina Monologues on February 14 on college and university campuses, including Catholic colleges and universities. The tide is turning. Father Brian Shanley, president of Providence College in Rhode Island, has read the play with care. He notes that it claims to be “a celebration of female sexuality in all its complexity and mystery” and “a bible for a new generation of women.” It is, he says, no such thing. “Far from celebrating the complexity and mystery of female sexuality, The Vagina Monologues simplifies and demystifies it by reducing it to the vagina. In contrast, Roman Catholic teaching sees female sexuality as ordered toward a loving giving of self to another in a union of body, mind, and soul that is ordered to the procreation of new life. The deeper complexity and mystery lies in the capacity of human sexuality, both male and female, to sacramentalize the love of God in marriage. Any depiction of female sexuality that neglects its unitive and procreative dimensions diminishes its complexity, its mystery and its dignity. Moreover, to explore fully the dignity of woman requires not only a consideration of female sexuality, but also of the capacity of woman for intellectual, artistic, moral, and spiritual activity; none of these dimensions are featured in The Vagina Monologues.” He draws attention to a monologue “wherein the alcohol-fueled seduction of a sixteen-year-old girl by a twenty-four-year-old woman is described as resulting in ‘salvation’ and ‘a kind of heaven.’“ Committed as Providence College is to the original Bible and a quite different understanding of salvation, Father Shanley concludes that the college will no longer sponsor or permit The Vagina Monologues.

• The Vagina Monologues, along with a Queer Film Festival, also figures in an extensive reflection on academic freedom, excellence, and integrity by Father John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame University. The issue, he says, is not censorship but sponsorship. His statement, published in the February 9 edition of origins, includes this: “The Vagina Monologues and Queer Film Festival have raised difficulties because they either are or appear to be at odds with certain fundamental values of a Catholic university. The fact that they have been sponsored annually by units of the university and have been widely publicized prominently associates the university’s name with them. Such occurrences suggest the university endorses or at least finds compatible with its values certain views which are not in fact compatible. The wide publicity and prominence given such events tends to instrumentalize our collective identity and our higher meaning. The concern here, as I said, is not with censorship, but with sponsorship.”

• Father Jenkins also said this: “You have, then, my thoughts on this matter. I am absolutely committed to Notre Dame’s continuing quest to be a truly preeminent university, to be a leader in inquiry and creative expression, to be a place of vibrant debate and intellectual engagement. I am equally committed to maintaining our distinctive Catholic character—indeed, with the other fellows of the university, I bear a special responsibility in this regard. It is with this mission of the university in mind that I have offered you my thought on academic freedom and our Catholic character.” One might raise a question about the “equally committed,” which could be misunderstood as suggesting that there is a tension between Catholic character and academic excellence. As fine and courageous as Fr. Jenkins’ reflection is, the case needs to be made more explicitly that Notre Dame’s commitment to excellence has its source and most critical support in its constitution as a Catholic university. But let me not quibble. Since becoming president, Fr. Jenkins has signaled that the country’s premier Catholic university is newly confident about its distinctive character and mission, and that is altogether good news.

• The editors of Commonweal are most decidedly displeased with my little essay “The Truce of 2005?” in the February issue. Their long editorial begins with this: “Fr. Richard John Neuhaus is clearly a man to be reckoned with. Counselor and confidant of presidents, cardinals, and popes. Conjurer of naked public squares, neoconservative triumphs, Catholic moments, ‘Great’ pontificates, and ‘the authoritative interpretation’ of Vatican II. Scourge of liberals, secular humanists, the imperial judiciary, lax bishops, mainline Protestants, and feminists. Writer, theologian, and self-confessed martini aficionado. Indeed, he is by all accounts precisely what he insists those who would follow him into the Catholic priesthood must be: He is a ‘manly man.’“ The niceties over with, they get down to business. (Of course, their estimate of my influence is grossly exaggerated, but that seems to serve their purposes.) Neuhaus dares to “issue an ultimatum” to the pope, they say. Others have it that I have “thrown down a gauntlet” to the pope. This is very odd. I point out that some prominent Catholic leaders have very publicly challenged the instruction, issued by the pope’s authority, on not admitting homosexuals to the priesthood and suddenly I am the one challenging papal authority. The editors say that the “Truce of 1968,” having to do with the widespread rejection of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, is a “neoconservative myth.” They write that many Catholics, placing their “trust [in] their own moral experience,” were using artificial contraception well before the encyclical was issued. Just as many gay Catholics today say they have no moral problem with homogenital sex. Of course the editors are right. Then and now and always, there are many who are not faithful to the Church’s teaching. The question in 1968 and the question now is whether official teachers in the Church—as distinct from lay-edited publications such as Commonweal—can with impunity publicly reject what the Church teaches. If the answer is yes, it seems inevitable that the conclusion will be drawn that the Church does not mean what she says—about this or perhaps anything else of moral consequence. The editors do not explicitly reject the teaching that homosexual acts are intrinsically immoral and therefore the desire to engage in such acts is objectively disordered. Neither do they affirm the teaching. They write, “It is true that, like many Catholics, Commonweal is engaged in the difficult task of discerning whether new understandings of homosexuality are compatible with the gospel and the Church’s moral tradition. We look first to the Church for guidance and instruction. But since God’s presence in the world is not confined to the Church, we also look to the lives and testimony of our friends and neighbors. . . . Neuhaus, on the other hand, argues that the Church’s teaching about homosexuality is not open to debate or evidently to any further development. The debate, however, is taking place, and Catholics betray no disloyalty or impiety by participating in it.” I would go further: Faithful Catholics should participate in the debate—on the side of the Church’s teaching. As for the possibility of doctrinal “development,” if there are “new understandings” of homosexuality that contradict the unanimous and unbroken moral tradition from ancient Israel and the early Church up to the present, they are, by definition, misunderstandings. The Church’s understanding can always be refined and deepened, as can our sympathy for those afflicted by same-sex desires, as can our awareness that we all depend more on the forgiveness of sin than on the perfection of virtue. But with respect to “the gospel and the Church’s moral tradition,” it would seem that Commonweal‘s “difficult task” is not to discern what they think the Church’s teaching should be but to assent to what the Church’s teaching is. It is not always easy. It is made still more difficult when dissent is presented as discussion and debate.

• Some Vatican diplomats have been made uncomfortable by Benedict XVI’s candor with respect to the religious dimension of the threat posed by terrorism. In his annual message to the gathering of diplomats from the many countries with which the Holy See has official relations, the pope spoke of the imperative of securing safety for Israel and of developing “democratic institutions for a free and prosperous future” for Palestine. He then said: “The same considerations take on a wider application in today’s global context, in which attention has rightly been drawn to the danger of a clash of civilizations. The danger is made more acute by organized terrorism, which has already spread over the whole planet. Its causes are many and complex, not least those to do with political ideology, combined with aberrant religious ideas. Terrorism does not hesitate to strike defenseless people without discrimination or to impose inhuman blackmail, causing panic among entire populations in order to force political leaders to support the designs of the terrorists. No situation can justify such criminal activity, which covers the perpetrators with infamy, and it is all the more deplorable when it hides behind religion, thereby bringing the pure truth of God down to the level of the terrorists’ own blindness and moral perversion.” The use of the phrase “a clash of civilizations” is telling. On several other occasions in the past year, the pope has explicitly called on Muslim leaders to accept their responsibility to recognize and counter the use of Islam in support of actions incompatible with peace and development.

• It is widely reported that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger was, along with others, made nervous at times by John Paul the Great’s propensity for offering apologies to any and all who might ever have been offended by what Catholics have done. This does not mean that, now that he is pope, he is denying the need for honest self-examination. In the same address to the diplomatic corps, he reflects on historical wrongs in which Catholicism was complicit and says: “This is undeniably true, but in every case it was the result of a series of concomitant causes that had little or nothing to do with truth or religion and always, for that matter, because means were employed that were incompatible with sincere commitment to truth or with the respect for freedom demanded by truth. Where the Catholic Church herself is concerned, insofar as serious mistakes were made in the past by some of her members and by her institutions, she condemns those mistakes and she has not hesitated to ask for forgiveness. This is required by the commitment to truth.”

• Herewith the headings of a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal: “Wealthy Kingdom: With Elite Backing, a Catholic Order Has Pull in Mexico: Legion of Christ Targets Rich and Has Friend in Rome; Priests as Society Stars: 1,000 ‘Consecrated Women.’“ Well, you get the idea. Written by Jose de Cordoba, the story is what is known in the business as a hit job. Imagine another way of putting the story: “Catholic Success Story: With Influential Backing, Order Makes a Big Impact in Mexico: Legion of Christ Recruits Business Leaders to Serve Poor; Was Loved by John Paul II; Priests Have Great Popular Support: 1,000 Women Give Lives in Service.” That would be what is known in the business as a puff job. But the second set of headings would have been, all in all, more accurate. There is nothing new in the Journal story. It notes that Legion schools have in many places displaced the leading role of Jesuits in educating the children of the wealthy. Jesuit hostility to the Legion, in Mexico and elsewhere, is no secret. Mr. Cordoba apparently thinks there is something sinister about Legion-inspired business leaders posting on their message boards “Moral Value of the Month.” And he sneeringly refers to young Legionaries teaching poor village children about the sacraments and rewarding a little girl who had the right answers with a lollipop. Oh, those devious Legionaries. Of course he tries to make what he can of the charge that forty or fifty years ago Father Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legion who is now eighty-five years old, sexually abused young men. I’ve discussed those charges in some detail in First Things (see Public Square, March 2002 ), explaining why I think they are false. In any event, there is no court, ecclesiastical or civil, that could justly adjudicate them at this late date. I have known the Legion of Christ for about ten years. The Legionary priests I know are admirable in their orthodoxy, their devotion, and their manifest joy in being engaged in a great cause. I also know people who have had unhappy experiences with the Legion, and some of them are very bitter. The Legion is not for everybody. I’m not at all sure I would have made a good Legionary priest. Every order or movement has its own charism. I expect St. Francis would not have been so happy as a Dominican, or St. Dominic as a Franciscan. Our Lord said, “By their fruits you shall know them.” By the measure of results in advancing the mission of Christ and his Church, the Legionaries of Christ are very impressive indeed. It is a pity that the Wall Street Journal gave so much space to a reporter who, for whatever reason, obviously does not like them.

• Michael Joyce has died at age sixty-three. He was a dear friend and indispensable helper in the launching of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the publisher of this magazine. For fifteen years, Mike headed up the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation and there he gave the world a new definition of creative philanthropy. Bradley had and has but a small part of the resources of such philanthropy giants as Gates, Ford, Johnson, Lilly, Packard, Rockefeller, and MacArthur. Among U.S. foundations, Bradley is way down the list in ninety-first place. But Mike, backed by the Bradley board, had the imagination and guts to see where a little help could make a big difference. He had a particular passion for parental choice in education. In Milwaukee and the nation, the cause of parental choice—through vouchers and other means—is already making a huge difference for poor children, especially those otherwise condemned to disastrous government school systems in the cities. In 1984, we launched the Center on Religion in Society here in New York in partnership with a small Illinois-based think tank. It was a fine arrangement for a few years, but then there were personnel changes at the Illinois office, and we ran into fundamental disagreements. I sought a peaceful parting of the ways in which we would establish the New York enterprise on an independent basis. As it happened, the parting was distinctly unpleasant. I won’t go into the details, as they are available in several articles and books. Without the help of Mike Joyce and Bradley in 1989, it is quite possible that the Institute on Religion and Public Life would not have gotten off the ground. Never once did Mike or Bradley attempt to interfere with or direct even the smallest part of our work. Mike was—by no means incidentally—a devout Catholic and very convivial company. In an interview a couple of years ago, he spoke of his work with Bradley: “Our overarching purpose was to use philanthropy to support a war of ideas defending and helping to recover the political imagination of the nation’s founders, the self-evident truth that rights and worth are a legacy of the Creator, not the result of some endless revaluing of values.” Firmly devoted to the permanent things, he took delight in demonstrating, and helping others to demonstrate, their exciting possibilities for a more humane future. Michael Stewart Joyce. Requiescat in pace.

• We apologize for a number of proofreading errors in the March issue. Heads have rolled. In particular, my discussion of the black underclass should have said that Glenn Loury’s essay favored the proposed solutions of Booker T. Washington over those of W.E.B. DuBois, as I hope was evident from the context.

• When it appeared in January, I opined that Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), would not likely generate much media interest. “Pope Says God Is Love,” I suggested, is less than a zinger of a headline. I underestimated the Washington Post, which carried the story under the headline “Pope Encyclical Mandates Love.”

• According to a Zogby poll, 89 percent of Catholics in the United States think their parish pastor is “doing a good job,” and Pope Benedict gets the vote of 75 percent. Presented as good news but somewhat more worrying, 64 percent think their bishop is “doing a good job.” That figure was 83 percent just before the sex-abuse crisis broke, and at one point sank to 57 percent. Sixty-four is still a long way from 83. Of course, some bishops might take comfort in the admonition “Woe to you when 83 percent speak well of you.” Assuming, as some apparently do, that the decline in ratings is the result of their doing what they ought to do.

• Joseph Frank, the biographer of Dostoevsky whose work has been discussed in these pages, reviews in the New Republic Jean-Luc Barré’s Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven. He writes: “Many turned to Maritain for spiritual consolation, and he and Raïssa became famous (or infamous, depending on the point of view) for having converted Cocteau, the novelist Julien Green, and a number of others to Catholicism. Included in this company was the unsavory and totally unscrupulous Jewish convert Maurice Sachs, who even studied to become a priest. Raïssa was justly suspicious of Sachs (though serving as his godmother at conversion), who had some literary talent and left a book of steamy memoirs published posthumously, Le sabbat, which disclosed the largely homosexual underside of the drug-filled and alcoholic escapades of so many of the luminaries of this period who turned to the Maritains for comfort and support. The memoirs amply cited by Barré contain many descriptions of the peculiar sympathetic radiance that emanated from Maritain’s personality, often described as ‘saintly,’ and as seeming ‘to have stepped down from the porch of a cathedral.’ It is this aura that allowed him to exercise so powerful an influence on so many diverse and fiercely independent figures. Maritain himself was soft-spoken, reticent, and even hesitantly awkward; there was nothing at all commanding, impressive, or even self-assured about him. I know this from my own experience, having met him several times during the later years of his life. But there was an all-embracing quality irresistibly conveyed by his personality that I had never encountered before and have not encountered since.” What a beautiful thing to be able to say of a person. Maritain died in 1973 and it is one of the regrets of my life that I never met him. Later, I hope.

• The postal service willing, most subscribers will be receiving this issue while anticipating the Feast of the Resurrection. Herewith from a catechetical discourse by the fourth-century St. John Chrysostom: “Where is thy sting, O death? Where is thy victory, O hell? Christ hath risen, and thou art overthrown. Christ hath risen, and the demons have fallen. Christ hath risen, and the angels rejoice. Christ hath risen, and life reigneth. Christ hath risen, and not one dead resteth in the grave. For Christ having risen from the dead became the first fruits of them that slept. To him be glory and majesty to ages of ages. Amen.”

• Christ is risen! And let the people say, “He is risen indeed, Alleluia!”

Sources:

Air Force Academy brouhaha, New York Sun, February 10. Stanley Fish on religious dialogue, New York Times, February 12. Leon Wieseltier on Daniel Dennett, New York Times, February 19. Amir Taheri on depictions of Mohammed, Wall Street Journal, February 8. Gerald Russello on Todd Gitlin, New York Sun, January 23. Zogby poll on bishops, Religion Watch, December 2005.