While We’re At It

• In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, federal agencies, the Red Cross, and various charities granted more than $300 million for psychological help to New Yorkers in the form of grief, stress, and trauma therapies. To the amazement of the experts, there were few takers for the proffered help. At mental health clinics, fewer people showed up than at the same time the year before. Sally Satel, a psychiatrist, comments: “The vast majority of people-especially those whose lives are not endangered and who do not suffer profound losses in the wake of catastrophe-get better on their own. The ethos of the mental health profession overstates people’s psychological fragility and too readily confuses pathos with pathology. A professor of epidemiology at Columbia University recently pressed for a ‘determined effort to help the population withstand such attacks on the psyche.’ But such sentiments imply we must rely on professionals to prop up our psyches. They raise doubt when confidence is what we need.” Well, they get better not quite on their own, I expect. Families, friends, voluntary associations, and churches do their part. But these agencies of effective support and healing do not get hundred million dollar grants. Of course, another explanation for people not availing themselves of professional help is that New Yorkers are too disoriented to know they’re disoriented. Anyway, and to the distress of those selling therapy, they don’t want the therapy, even when someone else is paying. A measure of generalized craziness is what makes New York New York. There are no doubt better ways to use that $300 million. Given the track record of government programs and large philanthropies, the best thing might be to return the money to taxpayers and donors. Although I expect a sizable chunk of it has already been spent on an advertising campaign to persuade New Yorkers that they really do need expert help. And another chunk on therapy for the injured self-esteem of therapists.

• I don’t know who wrote it. These things come in over the Internet transom, so to speak. But the following science report may possibly be pertinent to matters governmental, educational, corporate, and even ecclesiastical. “A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science, with an atomic mass of 312. This new element has been tentatively named ‘Administratium.’ Administratium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 111 assistant deputy neutrons. These particles are held together by a force called morons which is surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since Administratium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take only a few minutes. Administratium has a normal half-life of three years; it does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization, in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons and assistant deputy neutrons exchange places and additional peons are added. In fact, Administratium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization causes some morons to become neutrons forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Administratium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as ‘Critical Morass.”

• The ELCA Lutheran church council has finally come out with its long awaited statement, Message on Commercial Sexual Exploitation. At the risk of spoiling the suspense, they’re against it. But Richard O. Johnson, associate editor of Forum Letter, thinks they may be against it for the wrong reasons, or at least not for the most crucially right reasons. He writes: “We’re not in favor of lust, either, but its traditional place among the seven deadly sins suggests that in the Christian view, lust is sinful in and of itself, and most of us are guilty. The penitent doesn’t generally come to the confessor and say, I’ve sinned by looking at pornography, and thereby I’ve exploited women and children and magnified social injustice.’ No, the penitent has the good sense to know there is sin here, much deeper than exploitation. It is the sin of lust, ‘the desire of the flesh.’ It stands on its own two feet, thank you, and doesn’t really need a train of social and economic consequences to make it evil. Hidden in the middle of the message is a statement that we at the ELCA teach the difference between loving sexuality and sexual violence and exploitation. One would hope we do. But if that is all there is at the heart of this church’s teaching on human sexuality, we have missed the boat entirely. What if the church council’s message had been something like this: We are to fear and love God so that in matters of sex our words and conduct are pure and honorable, and husband and wife love and respect each other’ (Small Catechism). It would have left out a lot of psycho-social rhetoric, to be sure, and perhaps it would be too simple in a complex world. But it would have saved a lot of paper, it would have been read by a lot more people, and it would have had, one thinks, a lot more staying power.”

• “Cutting Icons Down to Clay Feet.” The heading of the review signals that Ben Brantley, theater critic of the New York Times, has found another “transgressive” work to celebrate. This one is by Jean Genet, the French writer, pedophile, sadomasochist, and homosexual prostitute who was jailed not for buggery but for burglary. Lionized bad boy of the literary elite, Genet had a long list of degradations to his credit, including having sex with the Stalinist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The play, written in the 1950s, was titled Saintette, which Alan Cumming-on whom Brantley also did a fawning profile—adapted as Elle. It is about a pope (not this one, Brantley assures us) who knows that “she” is faking it but feels compelled to go through the motions of the Catholic thing. Darie non? The message is simple-minded and repetitive, Brantley admits, but the presentation is “richly theatrical entertainment” and goes beyond “homosexual campiness” to reach new heights of “the impeccably vulgar.” While Mr. Brantley finds decadence and blasphemy entertaining, when well done, he is by no means indifferent to the question of “redeeming social merit,” to use the legal phrase for tolerable obscenity. “What Elle makes of the themes of sacrificial celebrity and the world’s hunger for human gods,” he writes, “seems painfully pertinent just now!” That is undoubtedly meant to mean something.

Perhaps that Jean Genet’s and his pleasure in mocking the pope is not unmixed with pain. It is a sad duty, but somebody has to do it. Giggle, giggle.

• John Gross is an eminent man of letters and author of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. He was also for four years editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He has now written a winsome memoir about growing up in wartime London, A Double Thread (Ivan R. Dee). He writes that “for many Jews, whatever the larger historical balance sheet, anti-Semitism is the heart of the matter, the only significant reason why they still feel Jewish.” That is not the case with John Gross. “To have had a religious upbringing at least assures that in your own mind you are a Jew first, and the object of other people’s dislike second.”

• John Cornwell, author of the discredited and defamatory book on Pius XII, Hitler’s Pope, subsequently published Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Future of Catholicism. The gist of the argument is that, unless the Church revolutionizes itself along the lines prescribed by John Cornwell, it will not likely last out the century. This essentially silly exercise in megalomania has been almost universally ignored, but here it appears as the long lead review in the Times Literary Supplement. The review by Rupert Shortt bears the heading, “The Papacy of John Paul Il: A Case for the Prosecution,” and Mr. Shortt pretty much agrees with Cornwell the prosecutor, except for suggesting that the Church is adept enough to accept the prescribed changes and therefore may last a while longer. The review is almost as biased and ignorant as Cornwell’s book, which is somewhat disconcerting since Mr. Shortt is now the religion editor of the TLS. Consider but a couple of dozens of examples that might be cited. “The Vatican was defending slavery as recently as the 1860s, and did not acknowledge the principle of the freedom of conscience for a further century after that.” Come again? The Christian challenge to slavery goes back to St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, and is underscored in New Testament passages such as Galatians 3:28, 1 Corinthians 12:13, and Colossians 3:11. With Constantine, the institution of slavery, everywhere practiced until then, was sharply mitigated under the Church’s influence. When European conquerors introduced slavery in the New World, the institution was explicitly condemned by Paul III in 1537, by Pius V in 1567, and by Urban VIII in 1639. And, of course, slavery was made illegal in Britain in 1808 and the slave trade abolished in 1833 as a result of the very explicitly Christian campaign of Wilberforce and others. As Thomas Sowell and other scholars have definitively demonstrated, slavery was an almost universal institution until Christianity, and continues in parts of the world today, notably under Muslim auspices. Does Mr. Shortt not know this elementary history and, if not, why? As for the freedom, rights, and obligations of conscience, Philosophy 101 might have introduced him to the Greek notion of syneidesis, a quiet conscience, which, under Christian influence, was transformed into the right and obligation to obey the truth, even against all earthly authorities. The reviewer might at least have a vague remembrance of having heard “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” (Luke 20) or St. Peter’s answer to the authorities, “We must obey God rather than man” (Acts 5). Where does Mr. Shortt think the idea of the freedom and obligations of conscience comes from? There is no denying that advances in understanding are often painfully slow, marked by fits and starts, and frequent regressions. One can find innumerable dumb things said and done by Christians in the name of Christianity, both in the past and at present-perhaps especially at present. The propensity to say and do dumb things, and even wicked things, is simply part of human nature. One can blame the Church or Christianity for such things only on the thoroughly unwarranted assumption that Christianity claims to have abolished human nature. The truth is that Christianity, and the Catholic Church in particular, is the mother of Western civilization, with all its strengths and weaknesses, including its frequently exaggerated penchant for self-criticism. Like others who know what it is to be a mother, she is not surprised, although sometimes disappointed, when she is blamed for everything and thanked for nothing. One is not surprised by the ignorance and spite of thankless children such as John Cornwell. But from the TLS one has come to expect better, much better.

• With every day’s mail, e-mail, and faxes there arrive dozens of statements issued by sundry groups. Most of them don’t get read; those that do usually have a short shelf life. “Reflections on Covenant and Mission” certainly got read, and as a consequence had a very short shelf life. It was issued by the Catholic bishops’ Committee for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, along with four of the largest rabbinical organizations in the country. Criticizing efforts to convert Jews to Christianity, it declared that “campaigns that target Jews for conversion to Christianity are no longer theologically acceptable in the Catholic Church.” One can quibble over what is meant by “target,” but evangelical Protestants and Catholics who protested the statement thought it was saying that Christians should no longer share their faith with Jews or pray for their conversion. The statement was issued on August 12 and hastily withdrawn on August 20. Speaking for the bishops’ committee, William Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore said the statement does not represent the position of the U.S. bishops conference and that, while respecting the lasting covenant that God has made with the Jewish people, “the faithful should be open to the action of God’s grace to bring people to accept the fullness of the means of salvation which are found in the Church.” So it is again the official position that interreligious dialogue and its attendant etiquette are not incompatible with the freedom and responsibility to bear witness to the truth as one has been given to know the truth. It is not clear how the foul-up happened, but it is gratifying that it was so promptly remedied. Except, of course, for all those people who read the press reports that the Catholic Church teaches that Christians should no longer share their faith with everyone. Most of them will not likely hear about Cardinal Keeler’s retraction.

• You know the old—very old—one about the fellow taking the Rorschach test who is told by the psychiatrist that he has a dirty mind, and he responds, “You’re the one showing the dirty pictures.” Well, it seems the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) was sponsoring a workshop on “Great Sex” as part of a Stop AIDS Project. CDC promised the event would provide “some fun interactive intimacy games to help you keep sex safe and hot!” People sending e-mails to protest the program discovered that their messages were never received. CDC computers were blocking the messages because they contained “obscene” materials that violated government decency standards. The obscene materials in question were the materials used by CDC to publicize the workshop. Your government at work. Against itself.

• I wouldn’t go so far as to say that James Skillen is a Calvinist of the strict observance, but he is a Calvinist in the Abraham Kuyper tradition, and his Washington-based Center for Public Justice is usually a font of Christianly informed wisdom about the right ordering of our life together. But he has taken a wrong turn, I think, in urging that the U.S. should endorse the International Criminal Court. By rejecting the ICC, he says, “the U.S. has all but thumbed its nose at those nations, including all of its European allies, who want to strengthen the international rule of law.” I don’t know anybody who does not favor the international rule of law. The rule of international law is a different matter: International law, apart from certain cooperative agreements deemed to be in the interest of all participating nation states, has a very dubious standing in both theory and practice. There is, for instance, the very big problem that the U.S., as the world’s only effective peacekeeper at present and for the foreseeable future, may be cited for crimes against humanity by the ICC simply because judges and administrators, who are accountable to no one but themselves, may politically disagree with a particular policy. Hundreds of civilians, to take but one example, were inadvertently killed in the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It is no secret that some in the “international community” think that the U.S. action there was a crime against humanity. That complaint will undoubtedly be heard more loudly if and when the U.S. takes action to replace Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Skillen offers the reassurance that “the ICC will have no authority to take on cases handled by national courts, nor may it begin a trial before a pretrial chamber has shown that there is a reasonable basis for action. That reassurance is not very reassuring. The U.S. is not likely to take itself to U.S. courts, charging that the U.S. is guilty of a crime against humanity in Iraq. As for the “pretrial chamber,” it is part and parcel of the ICC itself. Skillen writes that the U.S. rejection of the ICC “contradicts the very principles that Americans say they stand for. If the rule of law and equal treatment under the law should be universal, then the U.S. cannot ask others to do what it will not do.” Just a minute now. When Americans speak of their universal hope for freedom, democracy, equality, and related good things, another key principle comes into play. As stated in the Declaration of Independence, just government is derived from the consent of the governed. The very legitimacy of the ICC, and of much that passes as international law, is thrown into question by the fact that it is not accountable to the governed-either through direct relationship to any representative democratic process or to the nation-states that govern by consent. On the other hand, the regimes that do not govern by consent—a majority of states in the world-have a big say in the ICC and similar institutions of international “law.” “The second big mistake” in the U.S. rejection of the ICC, writes Skillen, “is its lack of realism about balance-of-power politics.” He notes that the U.S. will not always be in the driver’s seat of world affairs, and that its present supremacy invites envious challenges from other powers. That empires rise and fall is a truism. That the ICC and other challengers such as the European Union are themselves largely driven by the desire to counter the supremacy of the U.S. should be obvious to all. The argument that it is prudent, never mind morally imperative, for the U.S. to join in supporting movements and institutions aimed at countering and undermining its own understanding of its responsibilities in the world is less than persuasive. Since Kuyper died in 1920, I can’t claim to know what he would think, but I very much doubt that Jim Skillen would have him on his side on this one.

• Sarah Lyall reports in the New York Times on a Turkish immigrant in Sweden who killed his twenty-six-year-old daughter because she “dishonored” the family by adapting to Swedish mores. Ms. Lyall observes that this is a “tragic emblem of a European society’s failure to bridge the gap in attitudes between its own culture and those of its newer arrivals.” Laws against murder are so ethnocentric.

• Articles and books beginning with a reference to September 11 must now number in the tens of thousands. The historian George McKenna, a frequent contributor to these pages, begins his article on “the Puritan origins of American patriotism” in the current Yale Review with the inquisition of Mistress Anne Hutchinson in Puritan New England, and goes on through world wars, the Great Depression, and Vietnam, ending with September 11. Note that, about some things, even the great Tocqueville didn’t get it quite right. McKenna writes, “Then, literally out of the blue, came the events of 11 September. The shock not only jolted the two major parties into a consensus on foreign policy; it seemed to close the book on the ‘American issue.’ Not just liberal politicians but liberal writers and artists rushed to declare their support for the Bush Administration’s ‘war on terrorism.’ Sometimes they sounded more patriotic than the conservatives, or at least more puritanical. They chided Bush for not demanding more sacrifices from Americans: less spending on consumer baubles, driving less, getting rid of their SUVs. (Recalling John Winthrop: “We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities.”) They even signaled their obeisance to religion, the inextricable part of American patriotism. God knows how many unbelievers stood with heads bowed during all the prayerful assemblies that followed the disaster. The gesture had to be made. Everyone was in a foxhole now, so nobody was an atheist, at least not publicly…. So the Puritan legacy, the myth of America as a people sent to do justice and assured of some kind of collective salvation by their fidelity, was still intact after all. How long would this revival last? It was hard to say. The flags were still waving defiantly as the new year began, signaling Americans’ determination to stay the course, yet there were also indications that Americans wanted their President to talk less about the war and more about curing the ailing economy. But that is more or less beside the point. The point is this: when the chips are down, when the stakes are high, Americans go back to their imagined community of ‘visible saints.’ They start talking about grace and consecration and sanctification, language found nowhere in the Constitution or even in the Declaration of Independence. It is biblical, prophetic language, the language of sermons and jeremiads. It reappears each time the nation needs to gird its loins, concentrate its mind, and throw itself against whatever threatens its life: a foreign foe, a domestic rebellion, a Great Depression, a conspiracy of terror. After the crisis has passed, ‘normalcy’ eventually returns, and a new generation may even wonder what the fuss was all about. More than half a century after the American Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville worried about the tendency of modern democracy toward a kind of collective amnesia. In the modern age, he wrote, ‘the prestige of memories has passed’ and people ‘find their country nowhere.’ Tocqueville died in 1859. Had he lived a few years longer, he would have seen the revival of old memories and new homage paid to the imagined community where American patriotism was born.”

• I’m not sure he got it entirely right, but it bears more than a moment’s thought. The philosopher Roger Scruton is writing about Great Britain, but his point likely has wider application: “Traditional societies divide into upper, middle, and working class. In modern societies that division is overlaid by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies, and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer’s turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable.”

• Taking a “character education” course is not necessarily the same thing as having character. Philip Rieff, author of the 1965 classic, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, wrote: “Character was once understood as graven, deeply etched, changeable rarely and least of all in extreme situations, when the resistances against quick change were mobilized most compellingly.” Sociologist Alan Woolfolk cites that in his discussion of James Davison Hunter’s The Death of Character: Moral Education Without Good or Evil, an excerpt from which appeared in these pages (“Leading Children Beyond Good and Evil,” May 2000). Hunter contends that even conservative Christian proponents of moral education succumb to the therapeutic in the long run. Writing in Society, Woolfolk says: “In the case of moral education, this lack of resistance is stunning, given the lack of evidence supporting the basic premise of this regime that personal psychological well-being is the foundation of moral conduct, and given the ineffectiveness of specific programs in drug and sex education. ‘There is little or no association, causal or otherwise, Hunter summarizes, ‘between psychological well-being and moral conduct, and psychologically oriented moral education programs have little or no positive effect upon moral behavior, achievement, or anything else.’ Evangelical Protestants are singled out in particular because of their failed attempts to co-opt secular psychology for religious purposes. After reviewing prominent works of evangelical guidance by James Dobson, Kenneth Erickson, Charles Gerber, and Neil Mohney, Hunter concludes that it is popular psychology that frames the discussion of biblical morality, not the other way around, despite the harsh criticism of secular public education and defense of character education by conservative Protestants.

Likewise, neoclassical and communitarian defenses of moral education, exemplified respectively in the efforts of William Bennett and Amitai Etzioni, have inspired programs of character education that have not so much challenged the dominant psychological approach as repackaged the language of self-esteem and personal well-being into a more traditional format.

After reviewing studies of such programs, Hunter concludes that ‘the newly revived character education programs favored by neoclassical and communitarian educators appear no more likely to have an enduring effect on children than those in the psychological strategy Hunter does find an exception to this pattern of accommodation among children raised within the ‘theistic’ and ‘conventionalist’ moral cultures: they are more likely to show altruism and self-restraint against temptation. But as they grow older they ‘let go’ of their moral cultures, becoming ‘less altruistic in their disposition toward those in need and more willing to fudge the boundaries of moral propriety, succumbing to the therapeutic ethos.” The god of a therapeutically defined sense of well-being can be effectively countered, it appears, only by those who have the nerve to contend for truth, as in “the way, the truth, and the life.”

• Here comes everybody (as James Joyce, it seems, did not describe the Catholic Church), and Pius X Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, does mean everybody. I snitch from Martin Marty’s Context the ad that Pius X ran, urging people to “come home” to the Church. The ad includes a special welcome to “single, twice-divorced, under thirty, gay, filthy rich, black and proud, poor as dirt, can’t sing, no habla Ingles, married with pets, older than God, more Catholic than the pope, workaholic, bad speller, screaming babies, three-times divorced, passive-aggressive, obsessive-compulsive, tourists, seekers, doubters, bleeding hearts… oh, and you.” The call to holiness, said Vatican Council II, is universal, and everybody has to begin somewhere.

• In the absence of an argument, change the subject. Peter Singer of Princeton, writing in Free Inquiry, the secular humanist publication, responds to my commentary on our debate at Colgate University (“A Curious Encounter with a Philosopher from Nowhere,” FT, Public Square, February 2002). After offering his idiosyncratic-and, if I may say so, lamentably ill-informed and literalistic-view that the Scriptures have nothing to say about abortion or the creating and destroying of embryos for research purposes, and may, in fact, approve of suicide, he changes the subject to Matthew 19 and Jesus’ counsel to the rich young man to sell all he has and give the money to the poor. Professor Singer exults, Gotcha! It has come to his attention that most Christians do not sell all they have and give the proceeds to the poor! He also notes that FT carries an advertisement for a Catholic investing service, in clear violation of the words of Jesus to “take no thought for the morrow.” Gotcha again! Prof. Singer writes, “Father Neuhaus denies that the Christian ethic tells us to share extensively with the poor.” That, of course, is nonsense. Singer writes, “I have advocated, without any appeal to religion, that those of us who are sufficiently comfortably off to be able to spend much of our income on frivolities like restaurants, the theater, fashionable clothes, and vacations abroad should give a substantial proportion of our income to organizations working to assist the world’s poorest people.” On that we are in complete agreement, and I am glad to be assured that Prof. Singer, who is very comfortably off indeed, does that. I also agree that such generosity need not be religiously motivated but can be in response to a sense of natural justice. What I do deny is that Prof. Singer’s laudable concern for world hunger is relevant to his support for creating and destroying human life in the laboratory, for the unlimited abortion license, and for a policy permitting the killing of children who are already born but because of some defect, are no longer wanted. The debate is not about whether Peter Singer is in some respects a nice person, nor is it about whether all Christians live in a manner consistent with the Christian ethic (however he misconstrues that ethic). He is and they don’t. The debate is about this “philosopher from nowhere” and his advocacy of the morally monstrous. Were I in Prof. Singer’s position, I, too, might want to change the subject. Much to be preferred, of course, is that he would change his mind.

• It is the exaggeration that offends, and the self-pity that galls. Rod Dreher of National Review has played a prominent role in publicizing Catholic scandals, and has made valuable contributions along the way. He writes about the difficulty in getting his family through the present storm with its faith in Catholicism intact.” For instance: “You try-humiliatingly-to figure out how to tell your little boy that it can be dangerous to his body and soul to trust priests, the foremost icons of Christ in the daily lives of Catholics.” He should stop figuring. He should not tell that to his little boy. Sexual abuse, in the vast majority of cases, is perpetrated by relatives and by friends and members of the immediate family. Should a father tell his little boy not to trust his uncles or, for that matter, his teachers? A sensible parent who has any reason to believe that his child may be endangered by a particular adult has ways to make sure that the child is never alone with that adult. It is a cruel thing needlessly to instill in a child distrust toward those whom they admire. It is a scurrilous thing to suggest, as Mr. Dreher does, that priests in general, as distinct from the one or two percent who stand convicted or in any way accused, are to be suspected of abusing children. In the same article, Dreher blames John Paul II, who “retains in office a host of American bishops defiled by their indifference to the victims of depraved priests under their authority.” He is wrong again. Many bishops did not do all they should have done or did what was then, but is not now, thought to be the right thing to do. But “a host” of bishops “indifferent” to the sexual abuse of children? That is not true. The Pope could, says Dreher, remove such bishops “with a stroke of his pen.” That, too, is not true. Then the “host” of wicked bishops becomes a “legion.” The scandals, we are given to understand, have been very difficult for Rod Dreher. “Unless [the Pope] takes dramatic action to restore the Church to holiness-starting with deposing this legion of bad bishops-his criticism of modern society will ring hollow in the heart of this faithful American Catholic. And that is painful beyond words to say.” Does Mr. Dreher really mean to say that the heroic life and witness of John Paul has been for naught? What the Pope says, for instance, about the culture of life vs. the culture of death rings hollow to Rod Dreher, faithful Catholic. Or, as he puts it, faithful American Catholic. So very American. Of John Paul he writes, “I find it impossible any longer to give him the benefit of every doubt, as is the custom of many papal loyalists.” If there really is doubt, one might think that faithful Catholics would give the Pope the benefit of it. Dreher, on the other hand, appears to have no doubt about the charges he levels against the Pope and a host of bishops, nor about the distrust deserved by priests in general. We know that Mr. Dreher has had a difficult year. A lot of people are hurting, some even more than Mr. Dreher: It should not be denied that Rod Dreher is on many matters a talented and very professional journalist. Loyal friends-Dreher loyalists, so to speak-should give him the benefit of the hope that he will in the future write more honestly, informedly, and responsibly about the Church that he undoubtedly loves.

• Professor David J. O’Brien of Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, is not at all sure that groups such as Voice of the Faithful are really serious about, as they put it, “taking back our church.” Writing in the Boston Globe, he asks, “Will they come up with the funds, $1 million to begin with, needed to turn a protest movement into an organization that can give the laity a genuine voice in the decisions that will shape the future of American Catholicism?” “Many Catholics,” he writes, “are too poor, too busy, or too beset by life’s trials to join a group. Those who have resources of time, money, and education have to act…. The future is, as it should be, in the hands of ordinary Catholics.” The good news is that ordinary Catholics are not poor, busy, or beset by life’s trials.

• “I think atheists tend to be pretty individualistic people and when people tell them what to do they might go the other way,” says Dave Anderson, director of the Washington State branch of American Atheists. That fierce individualism may keep down the numbers showing up for the “Godless Americans March on Washington,” scheduled for November 2. The communitarian spirit seems to be storming a final redoubt. “We’re here, and we want to share the country with everybody else,” says Mr. Anderson. There’s a need for fellowship amongst atheists. God might not be part of it, but I think it’s important to meet people who have similar beliefs.” Even atheism is going wimpy.

• It was our great good fortune to have Midge Decter on staff here for a number of years, and I’ve already written about her latest book, An Old Wife’s Tale (While We’re At It, August/September 2001). I should have included this piece of Midgean wisdom noted by Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard. Discussing her trepidation as her teenage daughters faced the sexual regression of the sixties, Midge wrote: “Lust as an independent value divorces itself from institutions, personal relations, and travels with utter unconcern from creature contact to creature contact. This is, as a matter of fact, exactly how the Puritans understood the matter, and they were right. We understand it, too, in the pits of our stomachs if not in our minds, and we scurry about to improvise our excuses.” The scurrying goes on.

• “I spent twenty years looking for a government to overthrow without being thrown in jail,” says Frances Kissling of Catholics for a Free Choice. “I finally found one in the Catholic Church.” Of course everyone knows, or should know by now, that CFC is a completely fraudulent organization, run by an anti-Catholic and funded by those who see the Catholic Church as the chief obstacle to their ambitions to redesign the world in their image. According to a recent report, that funding includes $375,000 from billionaire Warren Buffett, $600,000 from the Hewlett Foundation, $1.6 million from the MacArthur Foundation, $3.8 million from the Packard Foundation, $4.4 million from the Ford Foundation, plus generous support from Ted Turner, the Playboy Foundation, and the Sunnen Foundation, the last being a manufacturer of contraceptive foam. CFC joins with Catholic organizations demanding an expansion of the “voice of the laity” and calling for an “open church.” Fox News says Ms. Kissling would only agree to be interviewed if CFC was portrayed in a “positive” light. “The demand was rejected,” Fox reports. Now I’ve mentioned it again, and will likely get the usual messages saying we should not waste ink on such obvious phoniness as Kissling and CFC. Along with other messages from those who say we should not neglect the obvious.

• It has outraged those who think Christian teaching should be changed, but few dispute the scholarship and conclusions of Robert A. J. Gagnon’s The Bible and Homosexual Practice (Abingdon). Gabriel Fackre of Andover Newton Theological School takes a somewhat different tack, reviewing the book in Pro Ecdesia. “It should be an indispensable resource for dialogue and decisions,” he writes. “Especially so because it casts the issue in theological terms rather than in culture-war categories. A caveat, however, is in order. The case Gagnon has made for the normativity of male-female conjugal union can be affirmed (as this reviewer does) while recognizing a place for pastoral as well as legal judgment, and the treatment of aspects of this issue as a disputed question’ rather than as a church-dividing issue…. The Church has a history of wrestling with controverted questions, and as a company of forgiven sinners knows of a divine grace that may translate into an exception to a rule as well as to its upholding.” One may sympathize with Professor Fackre’s pastoral sensitivity while respectfully disagreeing. It is precisely as a company of forgiven sinners that the Church is not permitted to teach that sin is not sin.

• For the record: the editor of Books & Culture and the editor of Crisis say the subscription figures I gave recently are somewhat on the low side. Books & Culture reports eleven to thirteen thousand subscribers and Crisis a little over twenty thousand. I am pleased to stand corrected.

• The handful of cells, certain advocates of cloning like to say, is no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. So also says Cass R. Sunstein in his review of Francis Fukuyama’s worrying new book, Our Posthuman Future. “If scientists will be using and cloning embryos only at a very early stage when they are just a handful of cells (say, before they are four days old), there is no good reason for a ban,” writes Sunstein. “It is silly to think that “potential” is enough for moral concern. Sperm cells have ‘potential’ and (not to put too fine a point on it) most people are not especially solicitous about them.” Heh, heh. That Sunstein is one smart law professor. Well, not really. Sperm cells, even under optimal conditions, will never, never ever, become a human being. But that earliest embryo will, barring natural disaster or lethal human intervention, become what everybody recognizes as a human baby on its further way to becoming a fully developed human being. Contra Sunstein, potential is enough. The truth is so blindingly obvious that many are blind to it: nothing that is not a human being has the potential of becoming a human being, and nothing that has the potential of becoming a human being is not a human being. Or, to revert to the favored image of the cloners and eugenicists, all of them, including Cass Sunstein, were once no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. Many years ago, a person looking at such a tiny dot through a microscope might have said, “That is going to be, and therefore that is, Cass Sunstein.” One wonders if Mr. Sunstein really believes that that observation would have been “silly.” Such an observation would have required supra-human prescience, to be sure, but can it be silly if, in indisputable fact, it is true?

• Patrick Walsh of Quincy, Massachusetts, sends along some letters he wrote to the Boston Globe which, unsurprisingly, were not published. In one he is responding to a column by James Carroll (he who committed Constantine’s Sword) complaining about the Pope’s supposed promotion of “creeping infallibility.” Mr. Walsh includes the sage observation by George Bernard Shaw that I had read many years ago but had quite forgotten: “George Bernard Shaw had a better understanding of the subject-T had better inform my readers that the famous dogma of papal infallibility is by far the most modest profession of its kind in existence. Compared to our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before God.”

• Two years ago I opined in this space that there was in sight a corner of cultural turning, and last December I wrote that we were almost there. Sure enough, this summer the New York Times announced that its wedding announcements will from now on include same-sex relationships. The section is now called “Weddings/Celebrations.” I expect there was a good deal of editorial discussion about just what term to use. “Celebrations” might include birthdays, anniversaries, and births, but that’s what the editors settled on, although it’s not the term used by people availing themselves of the new policy to date. I hope you will not think less of me if I say that I do not usually read wedding announcements, but I did notice the section in the paper of Sunday, September 8. I see that Sara Falkenberry and Eric Ridder III got married, as did Rachel Zimmerman and Seth Teller, Anne Carey and Michael Kelly, George du Pont (yes, of those du Ponts) and Julie Bauman, along with a dozen or so others. Smack in the middle of the page is a picture of two guys with this information: “Thomas William Leonard and Ralph Christopher Lione will declare their commitment today in a ceremony aboard the Yankee Ferry, a floating museum, docked at Pier 25 in Lower Manhattan. A group of six friends, led by Cherrene Horazuk, executive director of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, or CISES, will present a series of readings and personal observations about the couple. Mr. Leonard (above right) is the fundraising director for CIPES,” etc. With the other pictures accompanying announcements, there is of course no “above left” or “above right” to specify who is who. Explication is made necessary by the denial of the obvious. We are told they “will declare their commitment,” which, in addition to their commitment to the leftist rebels in El Salvador, presumably means their desire to be known not just as a couple of guys but as guys who are a couple. The other announcements are about two people entering the institution of marriage defined by centuries of public custom and law entailing promises, obligations, property rights, and, at least implicitly, the next generation of families-including, in this instance, at least two dynasties. Mr. Leonard and Mr. Lione, on the other hand, “declare their commitment.” Presumably they are friends who really love one another, are homosexual, are living together, and want everybody to know about it. Well, good for them. No, I don’t mean good as in good. I mean that, since I don’t know them and have no direct responsibility for their spiritual welfare, I don’t think their feelings or living arrangements or sexual practices are any of my business. Not very long ago, such publicity would have been condemned as an invasion of privacy. People who publicize the private details of their lives used to be called exhibitionists. Mr. Leonard and Mr. Lione, along with the editors of the Times, seem to think that an item about two gay guys living together, when it appears in a section that used to be called “Weddings,” is about something other than two gay guys living together. It is very poignant.

• The inimitable Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete puts the sex abuse scandals very nicely into perspective: “IE, in addition to all the terrible things we have learned, it was revealed tomorrow that the Pope had a harem, that all the cardinals had made money on Enron stock and were involved in Internet porn, then the situation of the Church today would be similar to the situation of the Church in the late twelfth century when Francis of Assisi first kissed a leper.” In short, the Church will only be renewed by saints, meaning sinners-bishops, priests, and all the faithful-responding to the universal call to holiness.

• This morning, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and First Avenue, I turned around to look again at where the towers were. It was exactly a year ago, on a Tuesday morning of such beauty as inspires songs about autumn in New York, that on the way to say the nine o’clock Mass we saw the first plane strike, and then the billowing clouds of desolation appealing to the skies. A small crowd had gathered at the corner, looking up in the curiosity that preceded shock. “There must be thousands of people in there,” I said. “Pray for them.” Then I went in to the altar of God to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacrifice of the cross that anticipated, caught up, and mysteriously redeemed all the desolations of time. After Mass, when we learned the full horror of what had happened, I went to the hospitals in this part of the city to do what a priest does. The emergency rooms were empty. After a while, we knew that the few who were found were being sent not to the hospitals but to the morgue. There are usually about a hundred people at the nine o’clock; this morning there were several times that. The first lesson was St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7: “For the form of this world is passing away.” The gospel reading was the beatitudes from Luke. “Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.” There was in the congregation a palpable hunger, and there was weeping, and there was faith, in the painful awareness of a form of the world that had passed away. The papers contained little else this morning. At a loss for what to do on momentous occasions, the Times, as is its custom, published a thick special supplement with second-rate writers repeating third-rate thoughts about “what has changed,” the usual babble by which we ward off silence. At Ground Zero this morning they are reading the Gettysburg Address—a spiritually, ritually, and rhetorically deprived society reaches back to a time when we knew how to speak in public about dedication, sacrifice, judgment, and the purposes of God. Not everything was so embarrassingly inadequate. On Frontline the other night, PBS showed the two-hour documentary produced by Helen Whitney, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero.” Get a tape of it if you can. It has been many years since I have seen anything on television that caught the significance of a solemn moment so exactly right. The pollsters debate whether there has been a “spiritual renewal” since September 11. How little of the truth is accessible to their methodologies. You should listen to those with whom Helen Whitney spoke. You should have been at Immaculate Conception—or, I expect, at thousands of other parishes across the country-this morning. I thought it jarring at first when an elderly priest said afterwards, “They chose exactly the wrong time to try to take out the Church.” He was referring to this year’s media storm over priestly scandals, believing, as he does, that it was mainly a scheme to destroy the Catholic Church, or at least to eliminate its public influence. I think he is wrong. The crisis was not and is not mainly about that. But he is right about the indomitable strength of the community gathered by the only hope that endures. “For the form of this world is passing away.” “Blessed are you who weep…” Such were my thoughts this morning as I turned back at Fourteenth and First to look once again at the bright sky where the towers used to be.