Freedom and relationships

Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

—    Bl. John Paul II[1]

The five weeks or so between Memorial Day and Independence Day, which also embraces Flag Day, could be designated the “Patriotic Season”. It makes for an especially appropriate time to reflect on liberty, what it means, how it can be defended or delineated.

Over the last few days, Mark Shea, the Anchoress, Stacy Trasancos and I have all commented on the scurrilous “Foreskin Man” cartoons published by the “intactivist” group behind the San Francisco circumcision ban initiative. I respect all three writers, who have all been at the apologetics game longer than I have, but Stacy I find most simpático.

But in her remarks, Stacy made a statement I had to read twice:

Much of the debate over homosexual marriage has turned from the fact that marriage has a meaning regarding families and the foundation of society, a good meaning — good for all — and instead become rhetoric about religious ideas oppressing homosexuals from exercising their freedom. That is a distorted view of the issue. Real freedom comes from defining your own relationships without depending on the government to do it for you [emphasis mine — TL]. That is the essence of personhood — freedom to exist.

Ah. Er. Hmm. Is that really true? On the face of it, it almost seems that Stacy grants precisely what gay-marriage activists want: the ability to define their relationships as they see fit. [That isn't what she was going for, though; see our discussion in the comments below.—TL] The opposing argument, which we Catholics back, is that the essence of marriage is an objective, immutable fact, not open to redefinition.

Apologetics toolbox: Communion of saints III

First, let me apologize for the little hiatus in my posting. Actually, I’ve posted almost as much in the last three months as I did in 2008, 2009 and 2010 combined, so I’m happy the “writer’s block” lasted no longer than it did.

In Part I, we argued that God does make saints, and that we’re all called to sanctity as part of our call to faith. In Part II, we tackled the “praying to saints is necromancy” argument; as Jesus told the Sadducees, “The Lord is God of the living, not of the dead” (Mk 12:27).

So okay, there are saints that are already with God in the heavenly kingdom. That doesn’t mean they can hear our prayers, though, right? In the last post, I dismissed the question out of hand. Frankly, there’s no good Scriptural argument to say saints can’t hear prayers; one passage — Revelations 5:8 — tells us that they pass on prayers meant for God, which argues that they can hear prayers, even when the prayers aren’t directed to themselves.

Jesus the “One Mediator”

Given the lack of Scriptural arguments against saints hearing prayers, there’s an indirect approach to the matter: Jesus is the only mediator between God and man (1 Tim 2:5). We can even back this up with another freebie proof-text: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Ac 4:12).

Apologetics toolbox: Communion of saints II

In Part I we looked at sainthood and sanctity as part of justification. We had to do this because we needed to establish that God can and does make people holy, and that we are all called to that holiness as part of our life in Christ. Sainthood is the result of justification through God’s sanctifying Grace.

Now we look at saints and their role within the Christian community. As I said before, the Church doesn’t make saints; rather, saints make the Church. And this is a wholly orthodox position:

After confessing “the holy catholic Church,” the Apostles’ Creed adds “the communion of saints.” In a certain sense this article is a further explanation of the preceding: “What is the Church if not the assembly of all the saints”(Nicetas of Remesiana, Explanation of the Creed 10)? The communion of saints is the Church (CCC 946).

We see in the New Testament that St. Paul addresses his letters to those “called [to be] holy [hagiois]” (Rom 1:7; cf. 1 Cor 1:2, 2 Cor 1:1, Eph 1:1, Phil 1:1, Col 1:2). In narrow scope, the communion of saints is the communion of Christians as the Body of Christ (Rom 12:4-5; cf. 1 Cor 6:15, 12:20-27; Eph 5:30). But that’s the horizontal axis; the vertical axis is through time: We are bound not only with Christians today but with Christians throughout history.

Apologetics toolbox: Communion of saints I

“Only God can make saints!”

Yes, indeed. To deny the need for God’s grace for sanctification is heresy. The Catholic Church doesn’t even claim to be the primary agent for the transformation; the best the Church can allege in any particular case is an “assist” or a “save”.

By canonizing some of the faithful, i.e., by solemnly proclaiming that they practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God’s grace, the Church recognizes the power of the Spirit of holiness within her and sustains the hope of believers by proposing the saints to them as models and intercessors (cf. Lumen Gentium 40, 48-51). “The saints have always been the source and origin of renewal in the most difficult moments in the Church’s history” (John Paul II, Christifideles Laici 16:3). Indeed, “holiness is the hidden source and infallible measure of her apostolic activity and missionary zeal”(CL 17:3).[1]

In fact, it would be truer to express the dynamics the other way around. The Church doesn’t make saints; rather, saints make the Church.

Defending the communion and intercession of the saints takes some work, especially if you’re doing it “on the fly”. There are several related issues: How do we know that the Blessed Mother, saints and angels can “hear” our prayers?  Are they omnipresent?  Isn’t our prayer supposed to be directed to God alone?  Is there Scriptural evidence to back this up?  What about proofs from the Fathers?

Protecting the myth of childhood

When the John Jay report came out Tuesday, I sat back for a day or so, assessing the reactions. However, since the blogosphere shows all the ADHD tendencies of the MSM — just think of the dog in Up (“Squirrel!”) — by the time I was ready to write anything, the new focus was Harold Camping and his Apocalypse Not.

However, Mark Shea wrote a bit on Friday in his personal blog that bears some further comment. A reader had sent him a link to George Weigel’s National Review post, “Priests, Abuse and the Meltdown of a Culture”, with the subjoined comment:

Forgive me, though, for thinking that the author’s objecting to the term “pedophilia” as “malicious” where “ephebophilia” is the correct term seems a laugher. As a daddy to two boys that are 11 and 13, they still seem like children to me if technically they are no longer “pre-pubescent”. Get a grip.

Shea agrees, and I can’t say I blame him:

The whole “it wasn’t pedophilia, but ephebophilia” thing seems like the sort of pettifogging distinction without a difference that butt-saving bureaucrats like to make. Let me put it this way: if some priest laid a hand on my 15 year [old] kid, I wouldn’t stand there parsing distinctions about pedophile vs. ephebophile. I’d call the cops. I’d also engage in intense interior debate about the morality of beating the living daylights out of the priest who harmed my kid.

Some dim errors of Brights

Very strange ... I made a couple of minor corrections, and it re-published. This is probably due to the issues Blogger was having last weekend (5/13/11). Ah, well, here it is again:

Do enough reading around the Catholic blogosphere, and you’ll see some anonymous “Bright” who’s left a sneering comparison between belief in God and belief in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, flying spaghetti monsters, what have you in the combox. Such a person may be very intelligent indeed, although he’s left us no way to be certain of that; all he’s left us with are signs of immaturity and depressing rudeness.

Back in February, I wrote of flying spaghetti monsters and invisible pink unicorns as weak analogies whose true purpose is to appeal to the auditor’s pride (argumentum ad superbiam) by making belief in God look ridiculous. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, however, don’t even rise to the level of “boggart-Gods”, because they were never meant to be taken as gods in the first place.

In fact, if our sophomoric Bright were to actually use his superior intelligence, he might start by asking himself why people believe in God when they don’t believe in “equally obvious” imaginary beings such as jolly old Saint Nick[1] and Peter Cottontail. It might even be profitable to explore the reason behind perpetuating a fictional character like the tooth fairy to act as a mask for parental gifts when eventually the child must be disabused.

Apologetics toolbox: Did the Church Fathers believe in sola scriptura?

A correspondent sent me a post written by “Tur8infan” of Alpha & Omega Ministries (James White — yes, I believe, that James White — Director). This writer takes a Catholic apologist named Bryan Cross to task for this paragraph, which occurs in the combox discussion of his article:

The term “refute” means “shown an argument to be unsound”. The bishops did not “refute” Arianism; they condemned it, by defining the Faith by way of an extra-biblical term: homoousios. They were unable, by Scripture alone, to refute Arianism. The Arians could affirm every single verse of Scripture. That’s precisely why the bishops had to require affirmation of the term homoousios. So if the bishops had no authority by way of apostolic succession, then their requirement of affirming homoousios would have had no more authority than its denial by the Arians. Scripture alone was insufficient to resolve the dispute, precisely because both sides could affirm every verse in Scripture. And since sola scriptura denies the transfer of authority by way of apostolic succession, therefore the Council of Nicaea and the Creed, given sola scriptura, only have authority if you agree with its interpretation of Scripture.

“Tur8infan” then proceeds to beat Cross over the head with citations from the Fathers, in a fantastic display of the straw-man fallacy (Cross was not disputing whether the Fathers ever argued homoousios from Scripture, or whether Arian bishops were apostolic successors). In doing so, he misses Cross’ point: that the argument wasn’t truly settled until the Council of Nicaea.

Now if that were the only problem, I wouldn’t bother you with it. But “Tur8infan” wraps up with this stunning claim: “The Scriptures are our rule of faith, as was the case in the time of the early church.

“Orth.— Do not, I beg you, bring in human reason. I shall yield to scripture alone.

“Eran.— You shall receive no argument unconfirmed by Holy Scripture, and if you bring me any solution of the question deduced from Holy Scripture I will receive it, and will in no wise gainsay it” (Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Dialogues 1).

(*whistle*) Personal foul! Fifteen yards and loss of down for Quoting Out of Context!

Teachers are not welfare recipients

Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Doctor John Zmirak, writing for the resurrected Crisis, has proposed an interesting fallacy for our use in pro-life apologetics: Frédéric Bastiat’s “broken window”.

The “broken window” fallacy fixates on the more obvious, concrete aspects of a problem and asks us to ignore or discount the less obvious, more abstract aspects. For instance, an example would be the pro-choice demand that we focus on the pain, outrage and trauma suffered by the victim of rape or incest; by the light of what we can see (the suffering of the mother), the claims of what we can’t see (the unborn child) appear to be so much theoretical fluff. And yet the suffering and death of the unseen, unborn victim of abortion is just as real; if Johnny Unborn’s claim to a right to life is so much ivory-tower blather, so is his mother’s.

But in the process of making this excellent argument, Dr. Zmirak passes through economic territory, using the plight of the Wisconsin teachers as an example of the seen/unseen problem:

We can see the bedraggled, outraged schoolteacher picketing the statehouse, and hear his concrete, specific claims of why he needs more money. To quote former President Bill Clinton, we can feel his pain. We do not typically see the millions of taxpayers who share the cost of employing these teachers [emphasis mine] and literally can’t imagine what else they might do with the money the government didn’t confiscate.

An exercise in logic by a stupid old faith-head—UPDATED

Yesterday, in a fit of pure mischief, I did what I normally don’t — I tossed a couple of hand grenades in a combox full of New Atheists. Since the combox belonged to a regular journal article and not to a specific writer’s blog (where you would expect people of similar minds to hang out), I didn’t feel too bad about it.

One reply I got, from “Dave”:

The problem basically is, you and all the other believers in all the diverse religions in the world will shut your ears to the logic that says for a start, two religions cannot be correct because they contradict each other.  For example, the gods of Islam and Catholicism are not the same god, no matter how you try and make it so.  So we see convinced passionate faith from both and yet a Hindu knows with equal certainty both are wrong.

Now it’s time to play “Spot the Fallacy”! A believes p; B believes q (not-p); C believes r (not-p and not-q); therefore, p, q and r are all false? Aren’t we missing just a few steps between premises and conclusion?

Our Lady of Good Counsel

Pasquale Sarullo, Our Lady of Good Counsel

In some ways, this is the toughest subject I've ever tackled.

You see, for many years my prayer life was exiguous at best. Occasional mental quips or comments directed at God, formally praying the three or four times a year I actually went to Mass, and saying grace at dinner was the extent of it. I had forgotten the mysteries of the rosary; I'd never properly learned more than a few proper prayers (and even now there are many traditional prayers I haven't memorized).

My road back to the Church has been, for the most part, an intellectual journey. By that, I'm not making any claims to Deep Thought; I stand in awe before such illumined minds as Thomas Merton and St. John of the Cross, not to mention the inexplicable riches of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. But it's been difficult for me to pick up the habits of a life of prayer now that I'm somewhere beyond the midpoint of my life.

Where is Our Lady in all this? As I explained about a year and a half ago (you have to go to the end of the post to see it), there were things about the Blessed Mother I didn't get. Only once I started looking at the faith through the eyes of an apologist were those issues resolved. But on the visceral level, where faith truly lives … well, I already have a mother, whom I love, cherish and respect.