While We’re At It

♦ The German government has formulated a National Security Strategy. Its Asian dimension will “prioritise gender-transformative projects,” along with green energy development. The idea seems to be that windmills festooned with rainbow streamers will provide collective defense.

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♦ The New York Times recently ran a long piece by Nicholas Confessore. “‘America Is Under Attack’: Inside the Anti-D.E.I. Crusade” informs readers that—gasp!—some people seek to break the grip of DEI ideology on our institutions. (First Things is mentioned as part of the “crusade.”) Lefty socialist Freddie deBoer was unimpressed:

Confessore treats all of the described efforts as straightforwardly malign without bothering to really make the case for why. The piece does not really bother advocating for DEI, makes a remarkably limp attempt at defining what conservatives (and others) are mad about, and clearly proceeds from the assumption that the majority of its readers will recognize everything that’s being described as wicked without argument.

Sadly, Confessore is right about New York Times readers. DeBoer: “The problem with the New York Times [sic] in 2024 is that their business model entails selling affluent urban liberals their own assumptions about the world back to them.”

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♦ After the release of Fiducia Supplicans last December, Anglican theologian (and First Things regular) Hans Boersma penned an editorial in Touchstone magazine. He pulled no punches:

December 18, 2023, will go down in history as the date on which the die was cast: the date on which the church renounced the gospel’s right to call us to repentance; the date that, more than any other, signals the church’s implosion in the West.

He goes on to write, “When the church refuses to teach the truth, when she fails to call sinners to repentance, and when she blesses homosexual unions, it is the prince of darkness she follows, not the God of the Scriptures.” That’s not Protestant gloating. “The moral collapse of Catholic sexual ethics concerns every one of our ecclesial communities, for the entire Christian world has for many years been inspired by the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.” Everyone, not just Catholics, suffers from “the loss of the Catholic Church as a moral compass for Western Civilization.” As I note above, however, “implosion” oversells papal authority. The Catholic Church is gathering herself to recover her voice as steward of the apostolic inheritance.

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♦ A woman is sitting at her husband’s wake. A man leans over and asks, “Do you mind if I say a word?” “No, go right ahead,” she replies. He stands, clears his throat, and pronounces, “Plethora.” The gathered friends are baffled. He sits down and the woman says to him quietly, “Thanks, that means a lot.”

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♦ Writing on X, a priest reports: “A bit of good news . . . I’ve had more confessions of the ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it’s been 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 years since my last confession . . .’ sort this year than I ever remember. I’m seeing more people at Mass than I ever remember.”

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♦ Bowling Green State University associate professor of philosophy Kevin Vallier has recently published All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism, a book defending liberalism against its religious critics. A précis of his brief against Catholic integralism (“The integralist crusade”) appeared as the 11 January 2024 feature of The Tablet. I was struck by the closing exhortation: “Liberals should ensure that the state strives to remain neutral between belief systems and moral doctrines, and allow social and political space for communities who do not share their values to experiment with their own forms of life.” It’s hard to know where to begin. The liberal state as neutral? Isn’t the liberal state’s vaunted neutrality based on liberal “belief systems and moral doctrines,” in particular the belief system wherein the individual choice of values is the supreme value? And the moral doctrine that any and all obligatory moral doctrines are violations of the highest good, which is personal autonomy? Vallier would be less self-deceived if he had written the following: “Liberals should ensure that the state strive to remain liberal,” which is to say under the dominion of liberals—or, put differently, integrally liberal.

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♦ Another sentence in Vallier’s article struck me: “In the US, Catholics have enormous intellectual influence among right-wing elites: if integralists can convert them, they can rule.” Enormous influence? That’s likely news to the leadership team at the Club for Growth, the Bush family political mafia, and the Trump campaign. But there’s something to Vallier’s observation, hyperbole aside. Among young conservatives engaged in politics, Catholicism has cachet, and this in spite of the hostility of Pope Francis toward anything related to American conservatism. To some degree, the rich tradition of Catholic social doctrine explains the appeal, as it allows Christian wisdom to inform political judgment in nuanced ways. But I would not discount the image (and reality) of Catholicism as the most imposing anti-modern institution in the West. Intransigent opposition to abortion, a celibate clergy, governance without obeisance to the democratic ethos, unrepentant ritualism—the Catholic Church limns a world antithetical to that imaged by progressivism and Whiggery.

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♦ And then there’s Catholicism’s clarity about the priority of prayer and contemplation over politics and action (an emphasis by no means unique to Catholicism). Hans Urs von Balthasar, writing in Love Alone Is Credible: “Whoever does not come to know the face of God in contemplation will not recognize it in action, even when it reveals itself to him in the face of the oppressed and humiliated.”

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♦ Whenever I book a plane ticket, I’m reminded that, beginning on May 7, 2025, I will be required to present a REAL-ID compliant license—that is, a technically advanced form of identification that is more secure. Meanwhile, TSA has implemented a policy of allowing illegal immigrants to pass through airport security checkpoints without identification. Xenophobia would dictate a lax law for citizens and a severe law for foreigners. What do you call the reverse? Roger Scruton proposed oikophobia: fear of home, or self-contempt.

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♦ In January, the European Parliament voted to make hate speech a “cross-border” crime, as are terrorism, arms trafficking, and money laundering. This measure allows Brussels to define what counts as hate speech and to stipulate minimum penalties. The main target is social media, the content of which the European establishment would like to control after the fashion of the American regime. Jacob Siegel’s 2023 essay in Tablet magazine, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” remains the definitive account of our domestic censorship regime.

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♦ Covid lockdowns, the Russian collusion hoax, the Great Reset, anti-Trump hysteria, the green transition, uncontrolled migration—a number of my friends look at these and discern an elite conspiracy to override popular sentiment and suppress dissent. What else could explain that dark turn of events in recent years? I counsel them against false optimism: “No, no, it’s much worse than a conspiracy; it’s a consensus.”

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♦ Pascal on the danger of satiation: “It is not good to be too free / It is not good to have all one needs.”

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♦ Elite media are finally waking up to the fact that “evangelical” supporters of Trump are often EINOs, Evangelicals in Name Only. A January 8, 2024 New York Times article (“Trump Is Connecting With a Different Type of Evangelical Voter”) acknowledges that polling shows that Trump’s deepest support comes from self-identified evangelicals who don’t go to church. A 2021 Pew report indicates that Trump’s political popularity may have fueled an increase in self-identification as evangelical. A 2016 survey recorded that 25 percent of all white adults identified as born-againor evangelical Protestants. That cohort grew to 29 percent in 2020, even as church attendance declined. Takeaway: Religion in American public life is complicated, often paradoxical.

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♦ In mid-January, I met a friend at the rock climbing gym. She’s Chinese-American, born to parents who fled the Mao-led communists in the 1950s. I was taken aback to find that she had bitter words to say about the fact that New York City has housed and supported illegal immigrants, giving them hotel rooms, cell phones, and spending money. Even more striking: She reported that her boyfriend, a retired Wall Street guy, speculates that the Catholic Church is conspiring to bring in as many people as possible from Latin America. My policy is to avoid basing judgments about the public mood on anecdotes. But I’m also aware that it’s wise to pay attention to what people say.

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♦ Speaking of which: I often buy a cappuccino from a small proprietor down the street from my apartment. His parents fled Tibet with the Dalai Lama after the Chinese invaded in 1950. Born in southern India, he came to the United States as a teenager. He, too, was angered by the influx of migrants: “We’re putting them in the Roosevelt Hotel while our own people are homeless and living on the street.”

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♦ “Our own people”—it warms my heart to hear a man whose English is accented speak so warmly of his fellow citizens.

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♦ I’ve long thought that the mid-twentieth-century hostility to theological manuals was mistaken. As I was catching up on my reading, I was therefore pleased to read Brian Besong’s 2015 essay in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, “Reappraising the Manual Tradition.” In the Catholic tradition, the term “manual” refers to instructional textbooks used in seminaries before Vatican II. Of their nature, these volumes have limitations. Primary sources offer a richer experience than a history textbook, and just so, reading St. Thomas’s Summa enriches theological understanding more than a Thomistic manual, however well done. Yet as Besong notes, textbooks play an important role in any educational system. They provide an overview, a general orientation to the subject matter. Manuals in moral theology also give illustrations of moral principles as applied to particular cases. Taking students through these cases anchors their moral imaginations in the complex particularity of human life, an invaluable lesson not just for a priest in training, but for anyone who must exercise moral responsibility.

The theological manuals certainly have limitations. But Besong is right to defend their virtues. However limited and unimaginative these textbooks might be, they provide a foundation upon which talented and creative minds can build. Mid-century Catholic theological “giants” such as Yves Congar, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and others derided “manualism.” They were blind to the fact that their own innovations and developments would be unintelligible to (and often misused by) those without solid training in the manual tradition. And, of course, most seminarians do not aim to become theological giants. They want to be good, well-formed priests. The demise of the manual tradition has deprived them of coherent, graspable, and reliable intellectual formation.

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♦ Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”

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♦ Seán Cardinal O’Malley spoke at the student-organized annual Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life. “There’s no doubt,” O’Malley observed, “that the next major assaults in the next twenty-five years are going to come from those pushing physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.” He pointed to present practices in Canada, where young people and the mentally ill are considered legitimate candidates for “assisted death.” He warned, “A society that allows parents to kill their children will eventually allow children to kill their parents.”

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♦   The ROFTers group in Albuquerque, New Mexico is looking for new members. If you’d like to meet monthly with First Things devotees, get in touch with Michael Sides: msides1947[at]comcast.net.

Rev. Wally Mees and Rev. Ken Frese of West Los Angeles, California would like to form a new ROFTers group. To become a founding member, contact Mees at wmeesjr[at]gmail.com.