29th Monday in Ordinary Time, Cycle I (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop & Martyr)

Sorry this is running late, but that’s been the story of my day.

*          *          *

Luke 12:13-21 is one of my favorite passages, for it contains the parable of the Rich Fool.

Jesus continually tells us not to place our trust in riches: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:19-21). Everything mortal passes away; everything material is subject to entropy, to the slow process by which the universe breaks down everything from the complex to the simple.

So it is here: Jesus first refuses to act in a dispute between two brothers squabbling over their inheritance from their father; his rhetorical question “Who made me a judge or arbitrator over your claim?” is as much a reference to the purpose of his earthly mission as it is a rabbinical legal point. He then warns the crowd, “Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”

Finding the Least Objectionable Republican Shmo

Yeah, it's late, and it's long, and it's mostly about practical politics. Tomorrow—er, later this morning, I'll be down in Fort Worth as part of a Forty Days for Life group; perhaps I'll have a bloggable experience there. See you Monday.

*     *     *

A friend of mine sent me an email today. Among other things, Steve said:

I agree with [James Carville] that [Jon] Huntsman and [Newt] Gingrich may be the most qualified, but neither stands a chance.  Shame, I kind of like Huntsman.  I would like to have an alternative to consider, and I know that Romney is really a moderate temporarily trying to pander to the right, but if any of the current crop of GOP contenders … gets the nomination, there will be no need for deliberation and I will vote again for Barry.

I find myself longing for the old days of machine politics, which — as corrupt as the system could be — deliberately produced candidates who could win, rather than finding them by guess and by gosh. My theory of politics is very Irish: you can’t get anything done if you can’t get your people into office; you can’t get your people into office unless you can get Joe Schmuckatelli down at the meat-packing plant into the polling place to vote for them.

People may sniff and gripe about the “astroturf” that bought Our Glorious Leader his waves of pre-election adulation. However, it was a direct throwback to the ward politics of the machine days, different only by the social media used to execute it. It should have been a lesson to the Republicans. But instead of actively co-opting the Tea Party – a real, honest-to-goodness grass roots movement – and learning from their playbook, they’re busy helping the Democrats marginalize them.

28th Thursday in Ordinary Time, Cycle I

Today’s Gospel reading is from Luke 11:47-54 NAB:[*]

  

[Jesus said:] “Woe to you! You build the memorials of the prophets whom your ancestors killed. Consequently, you bear witness and give consent to the deeds of your ancestors, for they killed them and you do the building. Therefore, the wisdom of God said, ‘I will send to them prophets and apostles; some of them they will kill and persecute’ in order that this generation might be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah who died between the altar and the temple building. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be charged with their blood! Woe to you, scholars of the law! You have taken away the key of knowledge. You yourselves did not enter and you stopped those trying to enter.”

When he left, the scribes and Pharisees began to act with hostility toward him and to interrogate him about many things, for they were plotting to catch him at something he might say.

What does this mean?

Lord Acton vs. the Chesterbelloc

Note: "Chesterbelloc" was a term coined by George Bernard Shaw, who dabbled in Socialist politics, to describe distributism as a "fantastical beast" ... not to mention poke fun at both his friend G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

*     *     * 

So I ran late with what was supposed to be yesterday’s post. I hadn’t intended on following it up with another post on distributism.

However, the springboard for “yesterday’s” post was Richard Aleman’s story in The Distributist Review on handing out flyers at Occupy Wall Street. Kenneth Spence of the Acton Institute Power Blog picked up on the flyer and produced a flip, dismissive riff off of Jeff Foxworthy and Dave Letterman titled “10 Signs You May Be a Distributist”.

In two more serious articles (“Distributist Fantasies” and “Distributists Ignore the Lessons of History”), Spence shows more quietly that what he assumes about distributism is more extensive than what he actually knows. The articles are serious only so far as he doesn’t attempt to be funny; his analyses are as shallow and offhand as his satire. In fact, he pretty much writes off distributism as misguided nostalgia backed by papal encyclicals.

But there are a couple of other lines of attack worth exploring as well. For capitalists, at their core, are conservatives, only willing to change so long as they can see a payoff for doing so and only so far as it benefits them personally. It’s not enough merely to make a forensic case for change: one must make a business case for it. My purpose here isn’t to make the business case for distributism but only to answer some objections.

Selling distributism as a fairer system

Click for full-size view.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is into its fourth week. While copycat protests have sprung up in over two dozen cities, according to Reuters correspondent Lauren Tara LaCapra, Wall Street denizens are nervous but not exactly on the edge of panic, far less surrender (surrender to what? he wondered).

For one thing, despite the heavy presence and influence of anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist radicals in the core of the movement (according to one observer — see the comments in this post), the participants themselves seem to have no particular goals in mind, showing up mostly to eat free cookies and express their displeasure with the masters of Corporate America. They’re having their Howard Beale moment, and enjoying the fact that they’re with others who are “as mad as hell and not gonna take this anymore”.

They don’t necessarily want an anarcho-syndicalist commune or a socialist workers’ state … they just want somebody to do something, to fix the rotten situation we’re in. The focus of their anger is on the top one percent, partially because of envy, but also because of the increasing income inequality that’s sapping the middle class and which compares unfavorably to such third-world economies as Cameroon and Uganda.[1] But that doesn’t automatically translate into a populist desire either to surrender everything to a “nanny state” or to chuck State powers altogether.

Come now, let us reason together

On October 1 on The Impractical Catholic I posted the news out of Rockford, Illinois that the state Department of Public Health had suspended the license of the Northern Illinois Women’s Center, an abortion mill most notable for the anti-Catholic antics of its owner and employees, and now established as completely uncaring of their patients’ health. After making some grimly celebratory remarks, especially on how access is far more important to the hard-core pro-aborts than is women’s health, I added a YouTube clip of Queen’s video “Another One Bites the Dust”.

The only comment I got was this piece of whiny snottiness:

I find it quite ironic that you use a song that was written and performed [by] a *gasp* HOMOSEXUAL to celebrate this.

Why do I even waste my time, we all know you are going to keep on trying to keep others down ....

I no longer make any attempts to prove I’m a nice guy with plenty of friends both straight and gay, conservative and liberal, Catholic and non-Catholic. For one thing, people like “Poosy” don’t listen, don’t care, and won’t believe me anyway. For another, it reminds me too much of the old Jewish joke about anti-Semites: “Some of my best friends are Jews.” So of course “Poosy” finds it ironic: in the cramped, angry little box of her ideology, I’m not allowed to have gay friends or to appreciate good music performed by homosexuals because it would detract from my all-encompassing homophobia.

Moral math and sadistic choices

In the path of a runaway train car are five railway workmen who will surely be killed unless you, a bystander, do something. You are standing on a pedestrian walkway that arches over the tracks next to a large stranger. Your body would be too light to stop the train, but if you push the stranger onto the tracks, killing him, his large body will stop the train. In this situation, would you push him?[1]

Okay, the first response that pops into my mind is: “I’m too light to stop the train car by flinging myself in front of it, but I’m strong enough to push a man that large over the rail? We’re talking a railcar weighing thousands of pounds here! What were you on when you thought of this question?”

But that’s not the point, is it? The point is, the large man isn’t the one posing the threat to the workmen’s lives … but his death can save them, so would you deliberately cause an innocent by-stander’s death to save the lives of five other innocent people?

According to a utilitarian, your answer should be “yes”; if not, you’re making a wrong moral choice. After all, to quote Mr. Spock, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” right?[*]

But the choice as given above demonstrates one problem with utilitarian ethics: it presumes that all moral choices can be boiled down to numbers with which you can do some simple math.

Cherry-picking the Word of God

“You Christians point to the Bible as the Word of God. But then you engage in a bunch of hand-waving about allegories that allow you to pick and choose what you believe and what you don’t. Well, you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s all literally true or it’s all baloney. I say it’s all baloney.”

Really? Including the statement, “In those days there came a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled”? You mean there wasn’t a king of Persia named Artaxerxes? No Antiochus Epiphanes?

Of course, the position in the first paragraph is an extreme position, taken by someone who has never really read the Bible — just lists of apparent Scriptural contradictions and horrific commands God gave that get passed around the Internet like the Demotivational Images you see on Facebook — and who has not even a passing acquaintance with classical history. But even a non-Christian who is well-read in classical history and gives a passing grade to most of the Bible is liable to pick and choose what she wants to accept as true.

And why shouldn’t she? After all, she’s not bound to accept it as the Word of God. But it’s still a little hypocritical to chastise Christians for cherry-picking Scripture to fit their needs and then go and cherry-pick it to suit your own materialist biases, no?

But I didn’t get you this far merely to hit you with a tu quoque fallacy. The point of bringing non-Christian selectiveness up is to point out the “all true or all hogwash” argument is a false dilemma.

A small matter of good will

Come inside my mind and see the kind of minutiae with which I concern myself.

I love looking at words and their meanings, and I get impatient with people who don’t watch their use or who dismiss language analysis as “semantic games”. Unable to meld minds, and not being telepathic, we’re forced to use words; so it’s crucial for us to say what we mean and mean what we say, to make sure we understand and are understood. Otherwise, all attempts at spreading ideas are hopeless — communication is defeated.

Here’s the springboard: “Vatican Diary/Not All Bishops Are of Good Will”, in yesterday’s Espresso Online, by Sandro Magister. (I love that name, by the way: Sandro = Alessandro = Alexander, as in “the Great”; Magister = Latin master or teacher.) Most of the column concerns itself with the reluctance of the Italian bishops to use per molti (“for many”) to translate the Latin pro multis in the words of the Consecration — does this sound familiar to you, too?

But near the end, Magister reports that the bishops voted to use Gloria a Dio nell’alto dei cieli e pace in terra agli uomini che egli ama (“Glory to God in the heights of heaven and peace on earth to the men whom he loves”) to translate Gloria in excelsis Deo et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. He also notes that the new English text will say “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.”

Okay, what gives here?

Why is the “old Church” coming back?

This is a "test chapter", if you will, of a book I'm in the early stages of writing, with the working title The (New & Improved) Catholic Why? Book (after a book written in the early 1980s by Andrew M. Greeley). The target audience of the book are Catholics in the middle ground between the "spirit of Vatican II" Church they grew up in and the resurgent "old Church" growing back up around them. I'd appreciate any constructive feedback.

*     *     *

There are two competing stories — meta-narratives, if you will — about the Second Vatican Council, the changes it made, and the main body of Catholic beliefs and practices that came from those changes.

One story has it that Vatican II made many substantive changes that led to a completely new and different Church, or would have if traditionalists hadn’t started pushing back. Oddly, this meta-narrative (the “hermeneutic of rupture”) is favored not only by liberal Catholics but by sedevacantists and many traditionalists as well.

The other story is that, while the Council authorized some changes in discipline, they made no substantive changes in doctrine but rather re-presented traditional teachings in more modern, more affirmative language. Many other unauthorized and unwanted changes were snuck into the life of the Church using “the spirit of Vatican II” as a Trojan horse, changes prompted by secular political and social theories dressed up in Scriptural language. This is the meta-narrative (the “hermeneutic of continuity”) favored not only by conservatives and most traditionalists but by Pope Benedict, who coined the phrases.