Posted on

On the Fear of Hell

Bad Catholic for the win, as the kids don’t say anymore:

Unless we have an assurance that the people we love will never suffer and die, to accept an invitation to love is to accept an invitation to fear. Love does not comfort, then, but “ups the ante” of human existence, making higher the highs and lower the lows. It makes life ginormous. It widens our capacity for sorrow just as it widens our capacity for joy. It increases our possible pain just as it increase our possible pleasure. It broadens the total scope of existence.

…

The person who fears Hell, then, has opted for the largest life, the broadest possible scope of feeling, the highest high and the lowest low. He accepts the invitation to the greatest possible love and thus the invitation to the greatest possible fear.

Something something unexamined life something something.

 

Posted on

The Pope is Not a Communist

So Sayeth Thomas Williams over at Breitbart.

Rather, the Pope is a critic of the spiritual malaise involved of the worship of Mammon. As he should be. But he never has said, or even suggested, that the free market be replaced with another economic system.

Francis’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, famously distinguished between capitalism as an ideology of lawlessness and capitalism as a system that promotes free exchange and creativity.

“If by ‘capitalism’ is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative,” he wrote.

This is a summary of how Pope Francis thinks.

Read the whole thing, and observe the regularity with which the progs who write for the mainstream media shoehorn papal statements into things which confirm their bias.

Because the media – especially the American media – do not understand Catholicism. They never will.

Posted on

A Sane, Sensible Discussion of Laudato Si, the Pope’s Environmental Encycical.

Over at Ace of Spades.

To summarize:

  1. The Pope is not infallible on matters of science. Anyone, even Catholics, are free to disagree with his assessment of scientific knowledge. The Holy Spirit does not assist with that.
  2. The Pope’s theology in this encyclical is solid. Ultimately, we cannot damage the earth without damaging ourselves, and our relationship with God. We are of the earth: “Dust thou art, and to dust thous shalt return.” That remains true even if everything an AGW skeptic says is true.
  3. The Pope is Catholic. In the encyclical, the Pope points out that “abortion, “coercive means of population control, experimentation on embryos, and other offenses against the sanctity of life are part of the very same callous stance towards the natural world that the environmentalists deplore.” So everyone who got themselves excited about the Environmentalist Pope should take these words seriously, and not just relegate them to a paragraph that starts with “The document isn’t perfect….”, right?

Best part of this post:

This is really the basic point about this faith — you can’t pick and choose what bits of it you like to believe. Catholicism is a faith that generally takes the middle path. This is why the sophomoric “What would Jesus do?” rejoinder to any political argument is laughable. Jesus wasn’t a politician. Jesus would forgive sin…then he would tell you to go forth and sin no more. See? The touchy-feely Jesus co-exists with the judgmental Jesus. It’s not like Highlander. People are quite fond of confirmation bias when it comes to Jesus Christ.

Everyone loves the Sermon on the Mount. Everyone ignores the parts about cutting off your left hand to avoid sin and coming not to bring peace but the sword.

Posted on

Pope Suggests Military Action Necessary Against ISIS

Deus Vult:

Archbishop Tomasi also complained that a “certain indifference” to Christian suffering in Iraq existed in the international community.

“It is difficult to convince—because of false modesty, I would say—the Western powers to take a strong stance in defense of the Christians,” Tomasi said.

That’s the polite way of putting it.

 

Posted on

The Return of Meat Thursday

You know how it is. You bounce back from a day of fasting and abstinence, and then you’ve got another day of abstinence staring down at you.

The natural response:

So Happy Meat Thursday, everyone. Now if you’ll excuse me, this chicken cordon bleu is not going to ravenously stuff itself into my mouth.

Posted on

Kermit Gosnell and the Holy of Holies

Abortion is not new. It did not spring fully-formed from the head of the Supreme Court in 1973. It is as old as civilization itself, and the controversy surrounding it is just as old:

“Why sow where the ground makes it its care to destroy the fruit? Where there are many efforts at abortion? Where there is murder before the birth? For even the harlot thou dost not let continue a mere harlot, but makest her a murderess also. You see how drunkenness leads to whoredom, whoredom to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather to a something even worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevent its being born. Why then dost thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with His laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter?”

That’s St. John Chrysostom, one of the Doctors of the Church, writing in the 4th century AD, damning men for seducing women and abandoning them, forcing abortion upon them (just in case you thought that those old unmarried men had no idea what made babies happen). This argument has been going on for a very long time, and it’s going to keep going on. Nothing that has happened recently is going to change that.

It’s safe to say that the dam is bursting on the Kermit Gosnell story, as it inevitably must have. Nothing as lurid and horrifying as the prosecution alleges could have truly failed to escape the public consciousness, no matter how much certain circles would have preferred it.

I am late to this story, not because I didn’t know about it, and not because I haven’t been reading up on it (Stacy McCain in particular has been all over it from the beginning). I haven’t wanted to write about this for the same reason Megan McArdle didn’t: sheer revulsion and horror. What this bland, grandfatherly-looking man of 72 – a poster-boy for “the banality of evil” if ever one existed – created in his Philadelphia clinic amounts to an infant-sized Auschwitz, a crime against humanity. And even generically pro-life people like myself dont’ want to realize that it exists, for to do so would be to violate a polite taboo.

In ancient Israel, the sanctorum at the center of the Temple in Jerusalem was called the Holy of Holies. As the home of the Ark of the Covenant, it made incarnate the presence of God in Israel. Only one man – the High Priest – on only one day – Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement – could ever enter the Holy of Holies. Anyone else (such as the sons of Aaron in Leviticus 10) who entered died. The presence of God was not for the unworthy to look upon.

If modern feminism’s obsession with “reproductive freedom” has something of a religious character (and there are those that say so), then the birth control pill is its Eucharist, and abortion its Holy of Holies. It is Between a Woman and Her Doctor: mere mortals are not supposed to know what goes on. When anti-abortion activists take to the streets with pictures of mutilated fetuses, we are angry at the makers of the pictures, not the makers of the content. This is true even of pro-life people, such as myself. We don’t want to see this. We don’t want to know. Witness Roger Simon:

The trial of Dr. Gosnell is a potential time bomb exploding in the conventional liberal narrative on abortion itself.  This is about the A-word.

No feeling human being can read this story or watch it on TV without being confronted with the obvious conclusion — like it or not — that abortion is murder.

It may be murder with extenuating circumstances (rape, survival of the mother, etc.) but it is murder nonetheless.  Dr. Gosnell — monster though he is — has accidentally shoved that uncomfortable truth in our faces.

Pushing this case front and center in the media would change the national narrative on this subject.  (The current stats are here, via Rasmussen.)

I can give you two guinea pigs to prove this point — my wife Sheryl and me.  We were in the kitchen last night, preparing dinner, when we saw a short report of this story on the countertop TV.

Both lifelong “pro-choice” people, after watching only seconds, we embarked in an immediate discussion of whether it was time to reconsider that view.  (Didn’t human life really begin at the moment of conception?  What other time?) Neither of us was comfortable as a “pro-choice” advocate in the face of these horrifying revelations.  How could we be?

Yes, Dr. Gosnell was exceptional (thank God for that!), but a dead fetus was a dead fetus, even if incinerated in some supposedly humane fashion rather than left crying out in blind agony on the operating room floor, as was reportedly the case with one of Gosnell’s victims. I say blind because this second-trimester fetus did not yet have fully formed eyes. (Think about that one.)

So I don’t think I’m “pro-choice” anymore, but I’m not really “pro-life” either.  I would feel like a hypocrite. I don’t want to pretend to ideals I have serious doubts I would be able to uphold in a real-world situation.  If a woman in my family, or a close friend, were (Heaven forbid) impregnated through rape, I would undoubtedly support her right to abortion.  I might even advocate it.  I also have no idea how I would react if confronted by having to make a choice between the life of a fetus and his/her mother.  Just the thought makes my head spin.

And there it is. We are compromised. We see murder and we pretend not to. We call it something else. We treat it as magic, as though a first-trimester abortion mystically removes the unwanted-abstraction-which-is-not-alive-shut-up, transubstantiates the woman from “pregnant” to “not pregnant” and sends her heroically on her way. The death, the blood, the humanity-reduced-to-laboratory-specimens (I have seen them), we doublethink these messy realities away. And we tell our young (and ourselves, truth be told) that they may fornicate freely, without consequence, because “protection” exists, and if “protection” fails (or they fail “protection”) we have this Serious And Important Issue to Pontificate and Philosophize About, which will unmake the the consequence.

We call this “Love”. We call it “Modern.” We call it “Necessary.” We call it “Woman Retaking her Power from the Patriarchy.” We call it “Free of Medieval Moralizing.” We call it “Rational”. We don’t call it “Infant Girl Decapitated With Scissors.”

We don’t want to see it. We don’t want to know.

Posted on

Happy Meat Thursday!

If you are Catholic, and like me, you ended yesterday, shall we say, gastronomically unsatisfied. Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, is a day both of abstinence and fasting. Abstinence means refraining from something, and Lenten Abstinence is the “no meat Fridays” rule that Catholics routinely remember to forget to remember. But fasting? That brings up a whole new set of images….

“My abs are rockin’…”

Canon law defines fasting as eating the equivalent of one full meal over the course of the day. You can either space out small snacks over the course of the day or have one meal all at once. I chose the latter out of simple convenience: had a cup of coffee to power me through the day, and then fasted until I got home from work, when I made myself an open-faced tuna sandwhich on toast, which was the greatest tuna sandwhich I had ever eaten.

That’s the beauty of fasting and abstinence, it makes you appreciate things more. On your average day, stuffing a hamburger into my mouth would have been a nothing; I’d chorf it down and forget about it five minutes later. But after a day of not eating, and specifically avoiding meat, a Five Guys burger would cause tears of joy. Which makes today — the Thursday after Ash Wednesday — a special opportunity for us carnivorous types.

Because Lent ends on Easter Sunday, it always starts on a Wednesday. But the no-meat-on-Fridays rule kicks in immediately. Thus, two days after a day of fasting and abstinence, we have another day of abstinence. So today, the Thursday between – is a day to get some meat-eating in.

Obviously we shouldn’t gorge ourselves. That’s what Mardi Gras is for, and feasting rather violates the Lenten spirit. But we should think of today as a day of appreciation for meat, the pleasure it brings us, the way that it satisfies, the blessing that there are so many animals out there which are so delicious.

This may sound silly, but it’s a plain fact that most of us eat meat at least once a day. We come to think of it as normal, and not as the result of numerous people working very hard at jobs most of us would blanche at. So today, tip your cap to the beef rancher, the hog farmer, the butcher. And appreciate, in the most humble and devout of ways, the repast which appears at your table. Be thankful for all who had a hand in it, especially Him to whom the breath of cattle and the breath of men alike return.

[Dear Vegans, Locavores, and Others Who Are Offended: I respect your right to eat what seems the most healthful diet to you, and your not entirely unjust call to reconsider how food is raised, grown, and sold. So please don’t pester me with comments about how I’m killing myself or ruining the environment or causing human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, etc. I’m not interested in having that argument today and will studiously ignore it.]

So, Happy Meat Thursday everyone! (Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day, too, which you may enjoy without guilt.)