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Learning to Pay Attention: Why Go To Church

September 16, 2011

Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura, Rome

A church like Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls) vibrates with intentionality. It is meaningful — absolutely nothing in it is without significance. Even if something is inadvertently included that has no meaning to start with, a meaning for it will be found, inevitably. A church stands in total opposition to the narrowing and flattening of human experience, the deviation into the trivial that follow from antipathy towards meaning, and especially meaning held in common. Meaning is intentional: this building has been made in order to communicate with the people in it. A church is no place to practice aesthetic distance, to erase content and simply appreciate form. The building is trying to speak; not listening to what it has to say is a form of barbarous inattention, like admiring a musical instrument while caring nothing for music.

The building “refers” to things beyond itself, and it deliberately intends to be a setting where spiritual knowledge receives explicit recognition and focal attention. Sometimes the meanings are highly specific and complex; for the sake of clarity they may even be explained in inscriptions. Other meanings are more general: the nave is “like a ship” (which is what “nave” means), or windows let in light (a symbol of God). But these meanings also engage in intricate play among themselves, arouse further associations, and end up offering some of the most complex meanings of all. And always — silently, intently — the building points at once both to the individual’s own inner being and to the things commonly done in the company of other people in the church: the place where “the Word” is read, for example, and the site of baptism, or Christian initiation. The altar table is usually given centre stage, for at the heart of Christianity is a shared meal, together with everything meant by sharing a meal.

Contemplating all these meanings, even when you are alone in a church and there is no performance going on, is intended to help focus your mind and soul. You go into a church to exclude the extraneous, to get away from noise and distractions, to go back into yourself and take a good look at what is there. You go because you want to restore and enrich your relationship with God, by participating in a religious ceremony, by praying, or by just sitting alone in silence. All of the church’s “language” exists to help you do this, to get your mind humming and to make you receptive.

It is also supposed to help you keep in good spiritual shape. For one of the central tenets of Christianity is that belief and love and trust and insight, like mystical experience, are given to you. You can’t cause a gift such as belief or trust or love — whether felt or received — to be given, although a longing for what is called “grace” will surely be satisfied. Only, when the gift comes, you have to be ready. (Longing for it is part of being ready; Christians say even that to long is already to have received.) It is entirely possible to be so distracted that you don’t notice the gift at your doorstep, or to be in such poor shape spiritually that you do not recognize or cannot accept what is being offered. God comes “like a thief in the night.” (Notice that in this biblical simile, when God “breaks in” the person is thought of as like a house, a building.) All that a human being can do is be vigilant, notice what is happening, and then respond. A church is there to remind you, to teach you to pay attention, and to awaken the poetry in your soul. It gives you exercise in responding.
From The Geometry of Love by Margaret Visser

Posted in Commentary | Tagged Church Architecture, distractions, intentionality, paying attention | Leave a Comment »

Examining The Decay of A London Undone – Derek Jeter

August 24, 2011

London Turns Orange

Lord Sacks, the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, wrote a perspicuous essay published over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal. It concerned the events of the London Riots. It was almost impossible, wrote the Chief Rabbi, to regard those happenings in the same context as the recent royal wedding: “the eyes of the world were on London as a dashing prince and a radiant princess, William and Kate, rode in a horse-drawn carriage through streets lined with cheering crowds sharing a mood of joyous celebration.” “Same city, different planet,” he concludes after having lived through this:

It looked like a scene from Cairo, Tunis or Tripoli earlier in the year. But this was no political uprising. People were breaking into shops and making off with clothes, shoes, electronic gadgets and flat-screen televisions. It was, as someone later called it, shopping with violence, consumerism run rampage, an explosion of lawlessness made possible by mobile phones as gangs discovered that by text messaging they could bring crowds onto the streets where they became, for a while, impossible to control.

While it seemed to take everyone by surprise, The Chief Rabbi thought it shouldn’t have. These events have been preordained, in a sense, since the 1960’s when one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West occurred.

“In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in “The Closing of the American Mind”: “I am the Lord Your God: Relax!”

He continues to paint a picture of what he sees:

You do not have to be a Victorian sentimentalist to realize that something has gone badly wrong since. In Britain today, more than 40% of children are born outside marriage. This has led to new forms of child poverty that serious government spending has failed to cure. In 2007, a UNICEF report found that Britain’s children are the unhappiest in the world. The 2011 riots are one result. But there are others.

Whole communities are growing up without fathers or male role models. Bringing up a family in the best of circumstances is not easy. To try to do it by placing the entire burden on women — 91% of single-parent families in Britain are headed by the mother, according to census data — is practically absurd and morally indefensible. By the time boys are in their early teens they are physically stronger than their mothers. Having no fathers, they are socialized in gangs. No one can control them: not parents, teachers or even the local police. There are areas in Britain’s major cities that have been no-go areas for years. Crime is rampant. So are drugs. It is a recipe for violence and despair.

That is the problem. At first it seemed as if the riots were almost random with no basis in class or race. As the perpetrators have come to court, a different picture has emerged. Of those charged, 60% had a previous criminal record, and 25% belonged to gangs.

The UK is a society in collapse and it has left in its wake an unsocialized group of young people, deprived of parental care who don’t do well in school are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, less likely to find stable employment and more often than not (as the figures show above) more likely to wind up in jail. Then comes a painful recognition, one you won’t find in the conservative press or the liberal policy blogs:

The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.

What has happened morally in the West is what has happened financially as well. Good and otherwise sensible people were persuaded that you could spend more than you earn, incur debt at unprecedented levels and consume the world’s resources without thinking about who will pay the bill and when. It has been the culture of the free lunch in a world where there are no free lunches.

We have been spending our moral capital with the same reckless abandon that we have been spending our financial capital. Freud was right. The precondition of civilization is the ability to defer the gratification of instinct. And even Freud, who disliked religion and called it the “obsessional neurosis” of humankind, realized that it was the Judeo-Christian ethic that trained people to control their appetites.

While the abandonment of the Church by the European cultural elites is clearly apparent, you can see the same phenomena in my neighborhood of the Archdiocese of Boston: masses held where the largest group of attendees is the elderly. This despite the presence next door of a parish school that seems reasonably well attended. It is a well-off parish that regularly contributes in the top five to its Archdiocese. Yet there is little in the way of fellowship. The bible study group closed down after enduring Jerome as its leader for six months.

In 1983 one of the great American men of political theory, and an unrelenting observer of his country’s social, moral and political life, Russell Kirk wrote the following:

And as literature sinks into the perverse, so modern civilization falls to its ruin

This “diabolic imagination” dominates most popular fiction today; and on television and in the theaters, too, the diabolic imagination struts and postures. The other night I lodged at a fashionable new hotel; my single room cost about eighty dollars. One could tune the room’s television set to certain movies, for an extra five dollars. After ten o’clock, all the films offered were nastily pornographic. But even the “early” films, before ten, without exception were products of the diabolic imagination, in that they pandered to the lust for violence, destruction, cruelty, and sensational disorder.

Apparently it never occurred to the managers of this fashionable hotel that any of their affluent patrons, of whatever age and whichever sex, might desire decent films. Since Eliot spoke at the University of Virginia in 1933, we have come a great way farther down the road to Avernus. [vocab: Avernus was believed to be the entrance to the underworld, and is portrayed as such in the Aeneid of Virgil. The name comes from the Greek word άορνος, meaning "without birds", because according to tradition, all birds flying over the lake were destined to fall dead] And as literature sinks into the perverse, so modern civilization falls to its ruin:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….

If a public will not have the moral imagination, I have been saying, then it will fall first to the idyllic imagination; and presently into the diabolic imagination — this last becoming a state of narcosis, figuratively and literally. For we are created moral beings; and when we deny our nature, in letters as in action, the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return. I attest the moral vision of men like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; some have begun to make a stand, in the republic of letters, against the diabolic imagination and the diabolic regime. A human body that cannot react is a corpse; and a body of letters that cannot react against narcotic illusions might better be buried. The theological virtues may find hardy champions in these closing years of the twentieth century: men and women who remember that in the beginning was the Word.
From The Moral Imagination by Russell Kirk

I’ve been reading this sort of commentary all my life. It took me way too long to choose sides but in 2006 I finally became a convert and believer of the Catholic faith.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged deferring gratification of instinct, Russell Kirk, the diabolic imagination, The Judeo-Christian moral code, UK society in collapse | Leave a Comment »

On Conservative Catholics

June 7, 2011

Our Lady

I have a public confession to make. And that is, that while I run a conservative Catholic website, I occasionally find myself in great opposition to those conservative Catholics whom I seem to favor, if not wish to become. In some ways this harkens back to an article (Tsunami and Theodicy) I read a few years back by David Bentley Hart on the 2004 Tsunami that decimated the shores and villages of South Asia. It is a timeless reflection and you could rename it Tornadoes and Theodicy, reprint it again today and not miss a beat.

At that time Hart observed that when confronted by such enormous suffering, “Christians have less to fear from the piercing dialectic of the village atheist than they do from the earnestness of certain believers, and from the clouds of cloying incense wafting upward from the open thuribles of their hearts.” These are the ones who invoke the Holy Innocents and advance “the venerable homiletic conceit that our salvation from sin will result in a greater good than could have evolved from innocence untouched by death.” Providence, in their hands, begins to sound like karma and God begins to function as a “balancer of accounts,” and “that we must suppose that the suffering of these innocents will bear “spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind.” Or suffering is a lesson on how to embrace holiness from a benevolent God. It’s “good for you,” but you just don’t “get it.”

This time my particular ire is focused upon Leif Erikson of Catholic Answers, a forum where I usually enjoy dialoguing with fellow Catholics. Leif and his buddies however congregate to sandbag the faithful, as it were, with their canned topics and pages upon pages of prepared quotes from the Saints. These are twenty-something Catholic bigots with their “cloying incense,” this time in the form of teachings by the Saints.

So, suffering, we are told, is the only way to holiness. In fact, young Leif has this whole spiraling series of if-then statements that leads him along the merry brick road of salvation and the cross: “If we understood holiness, we would understand suffering. If we sought holiness, we would come to seek suffering. For suffering is the way to holiness. Therefore, those who do not care about becoming holy often reject both suffering and Catholicism.”

One thing Leif doesn’t understand is that these teachings of the Saints lie at the pinnacle of a Catholic theology and theodicy that in many ways present great truths that are simply ineffable. Unfortunately, for these religious earnest, the ineffable becomes transformed by their twenty-something blabbermouths into lessons for the rest of us.

I can’t think of any situation where I would gratuitously tell a fellow sufferer that “suffering is the way to holiness.” It’s only when you touch holiness in some way that you may have such an epiphany. It’s something sufferers may reflect upon in some way but it cannot be TOLD TO THEM. We can listen to the Saints and urge others to, but oh the line we cross when we gratuitously begin instructing others on the path to Sainthood. Leif crossed that line so long ago the notion anyone could take exception to his spiritual guidance caused him to come out swinging. Christ, what a flaming asshole.

My little attempt to introduce him to the thoughts of Monsignor Albacete’s went up in smoke. Albacete’s co-suffering is still one of the most profound statements on the nature of dealing with suffering that I have ever come across and is the perfect recipe for both the secular and religious. The former are guilty of “managing depressions” with a regimen of happy pills while the latter are the Leifs of the world who want to instruct the sufferer on how to grow in holiness.

Leif felt Monsignor Albacete’s methods were alright for HIM but, as he confided, “some priests and bishops prefer to read the writings of liberal theologians to reading the writings of the saints. I’m not saying Monsignor Albecete is one of these, but I suggest the possibility, in my ignorance…” No, No, for the spiritually pure Leif, he prefers to wrap himself in a gauzy biography of Padre Pio who knew all the Church answers and leave Albacete to his own ways: “I’m not saying that the Monsignor is entirely wrong (and I don’t judge him to even be partly wrong on the basis of my unworthy opinion, but on the basis of the practice and teaching of the saints). The Monsignor has his own method of helping those who are suffering, and he’s recommending it, as well as cautioning people to be sensitive around those who are suffering. That is all good. And co-suffering through co-questioning is good if one doesn’t believe one knows any answers to the questions. He doesn’t believe he knows, so his approach is the best for him.”

There is no “co-suffering through co-questioning” in any of the Albacete piece, by the way. “Authentic suffering, then, is a dialogue, not only with God but also among humans. To co-suffer is to share the question “why,” to be a companion, and to walk together toward transcendence.”
Lorenzo Albacete, God At The Ritz

In fact, if you think of it, the only adequate response when confronted with another person’s suffering is co-suffering. It is the only way to respect the suffering of another. Co-suffering affirms the wounded personal identity of the sufferer through our willingness to expose our identity to the questioning provoked by the sufferer’s pain. This willingness to share suffering is an act of love. Co-suffering is the way we love the one who suffers.

Leif blows by all of that. Don’t you love that “I’m not saying…” while saying? No, to introduce Monsignor Albacete’s thoughts here is to question the Church Fathers and Saints whose teachings are RIGHT and I am mistaken and should acknowledge Leif my spiritual guide to the holiness of Catholic true North.

He leaves me with this overwhelming ennui and weariness I face when dealing with Catholics of this stripe. They have all the teachings on 3X5 cards and their hands are the first to shoot up in a catechesis class. No one seems to have pointed out to them that Saints lived and died for these thoughts and that we would be LUCKY to have learned one of them in our lifetime.

And to someone in deep suffering, how dare you mouth off about things you know nothing about? I cringe in the same way David Bentley Hart did above. Pardon my frustration, I’ve had a difficult couple of days with this nitwit. It’s a theme I’ve explored before (Shades of Jerome) but it never gets easy with these people. And I never learn to be with Mary and let these moments of rage simply pass. Forgive me, I’m the asshole here.

Posted in Commentary, Understanding Fellowship | Tagged God At The Ritz, Monsignor Albacete | 5 Comments »

Atheist Red Sox Nation At Home

April 9, 2011

Atheist Red Sox families raise the next generation. Caution: this film is disturbing.

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Medicine And Spirituality

January 6, 2011

A report by the Catholic News Service at the time of a 2005 Catholic Medical Association educational conference in Portland, Oregon. Catholic doctors from 43 states and Canada discussed the relationship of spirituality to physical health and medicine. I found it informative and curiously uplifting, representative of a lot of what I post on Paying Attention To The Sky.

Daniel Siegel, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles, kicked off the conference by looking at the physical development of the brain in light of attachment psychology, or what he called interpersonal neurobiology. The development of the mind and brain in children begins in the womb, Siegel said. He defined the mind as “a process that regulates the flow of energy and information.”

Unborn children can remember beginning as early as the seventh month and perhaps even earlier, he said. After birth, their brain development begins in the brain stem and works from there to the higher functions. In the first three years, “a million synapses are being made every second,” he said. At puberty, he said, “the prefrontal cortex (where higher functions take place) becomes a major reconstruction site.” The connections in the brain begin to be remade at this time and this goes on into the 20s. That’s why, he said, it is so dangerous to introduce drugs into the body in adolescence.

David Fagerberg, a liturgist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, said physicians should look beyond just the physical ailments of their patients to the whole person, including the spiritual. “We have too puny a notion of Christianity,” he said. As ancient Christian writers taught, “God became man so that man might become divine,” he added. “We wear faces that have been wounded by the world and by self-mutilation from sin,” he said, but the physician also has to see his patients, made in the image of God, “on the way to transformation.”

Dr. Kenneth McElynn, a physician who works with Spanish immigrants in North Carolina, spoke of the relation between physical health and factors that are more of a spiritual than physical nature. He described what has been called the Rosetto Effect, named after a southeastern Pennsylvania town founded by Italian immigrants.

He said scientists found that this town, which was rich in religious, ethnic and community tradition, had practically no deaths from heart attacks in the 1940s and ’50s, despite residents’ fat-heavy diets and frequent smoking. The residents’ life at that time was centered on the church — with a lot of the glue supporting their lives provided by local businesses as well as time spent on front porches and a rejection of outward displays of wealth.

But in the 1960s, church life diminished, people began to build patios and decks on the back of their homes, displays of status became prominent and local businesses folded. By the 1970s, the town’s rate of death by heart attack matched the rest of the country, he said. One way to change that outcome, argued McElynn, would be to bring back traditions and communal life that revolve around people rather than around commercial success.

At a Mass for the association board, meeting before the conference, Bishop Robert F. Vasa of Baker, Ore., compared the role of Catholic physicians to the saints who pursue truth regardless of consequences and public opinion. “The Catholic Medical Association is a witness to the world that there are physicians and other medical personnel committed to the right and true, the good and beautiful, who will not turn aside no matter the perils,” said Bishop Vasa, who is Episcopal adviser to the association.

He cited an early second-century bishop and martyr, St. Ignatius of Antioch, who after his arrest, as he was being taken to Rome to be thrown to the lions for his faith, said he would gladly be Christ’s wheat, “ground by the teeth of beasts to become pure bread.”

Posted in Commentary | Tagged Catholic Medical Association, medicine, physical health, spirituality | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections from “The Weight of Smut” by Mary Eberstadt

September 24, 2010

Mary Eberstadt is a contributing writer to First Things, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death, and Atheism. The full article was printed in First Things this past June.

Sexual Obesity
[T]he emerging social phenomenon of what can appropriately be called “sexual obesity”: the widespread gorging on pornographic imagery that is also deleterious and unhealthy, though far less remarked on than that other epidemic — and nowhere near an object of universal public concern. That complacency may now be changing. The term sexual obesity comes from Mary Ann Layden, a psychiatrist who runs the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She sees the victims of Internet-pornography consumption in her practice, day in and day out. She also knows what most do not: Quietly, patiently, and irrefutably, an empirical record of the harms of sexual obesity is being assembled piecemeal via the combined efforts of psychologists, sociologists, addiction specialists, psychiatrists, and other authorities.

Young people who have been exposed to pornography are more likely to have multiple lifetime sexual partners, more likely to have had more than one sexual partner in the last three months, more likely to have used alcohol or other substances at their last sexual encounter, and—no surprise here—more likely to have scored higher on a “sexual permissiveness” test. They are also more likely to have tried risky forms of sex. They are also more likely to engage in forced sex and more likely to be sexual offenders.

The Numbers
Parallels between the two epidemics are striking. Much like the more commonly understood obesity, the phenomenon of sexual obesity permeates the population — though unlike regular obesity, of course, pornography consumption is mostly (though not entirely) a male thing. At the same time, evidence also shows that sexual obesity does share with its counterpart this critical common denominator: It afflicts the subset of human beings who form the first generation immersed in this consumption, many of whom have never known a world without it — the young.

The data about the immersion of young Americans in pornography are startling and disturbing. One 2008 study focused on undergraduate and graduate students ages 18 to 26 across the country found that more than two-thirds of men — and one out of every ten women in the sample — viewed pornography more than once a month. Another study showed that first-year college students using sexually explicit material exhibited these troubling features: increased tolerance, resulting in a turn toward more bizarre and esoteric material; increased risk of body-image problems, especially among girls; and erroneous and exaggerated conceptions of how prevalent certain sexual behaviors, including risky and even dangerous behaviors, actually are.

In 2004, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reported that 65 percent of boys ages 16 and 17 reported having friends who regularly download Internet pornography — and, given that pornography is something people lie “down” about in surveys as well as in life, it seems safe to say those numbers underestimate today’s actual consumption, perhaps even significantly….

Even young people who don’t go looking for pornography are now routinely exposed — largely through incursions into popular media, including on phones (the “sexting” phenomenon), in video games, in pop music, and on television. A Kaiser Family Foundation study from 2005, for example, revealed that the number of sex scenes on television doubled between 1998 and 2005. The Foundation had previously noted that some 70 percent of youths aged 15 to 17 accidently came across pornography online. Even more startling, a 2006 Youth Internet Safety Survey of 1500 youths showed that one in seven reported unwanted sexual solicitation, and one in eleven reported being harassed online.

So What
Why should people who are not part of that consumption even care about it? The varieties of the libertarian shrug extend even to those averse to it. Pornography indeed may be morally wrong, many of those people would also say (and of course major religions would agree); but, apart from the possible damage to the user’s soul, if you believe in such a thing, what really is the social harm of smut?

This lackadaisical attitude — this entrenched refusal to look seriously at what the computer screen has really wrought — is widespread. Religious people, among other people simply disgusted by the subject, understandably wish to speak in public of almost anything else. Closet users, and they are apparently legion, will probably already have stopped reading these words — or any others potentially critical of pornography — for reasons of their own; such complicity is probably the deepest font of omertà (vocab: popular attitude and code of honor conspiracy of silence, common in areas of southern Italy) on the subject. And chronic users above all have their own fierce reasons for promoting the anything-goes-as-long-as-it’s-private patter — an interesting phenomenon about which more will be said further on.

And yet this hands-off approach to the matter of sexual obesity — this unwitting collusion of disparate interested parties masquerading as a social consensus — remains wrong from alpha to omega, as a new document signed by fifty experts from various fields and distilling just some of the recent empirical evidence (: “The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations,” just published by the Witherspoon Institute of New Jersey), goes to show…

Bursting through the academically neutral language, the studies, the survey data, and the econometrics were the skin and bones of the very human stories that went into it all: the marriages lost or in tatters; the sexual problems among the addicted; the constant slide, on account of higher tolerance, into ever edgier circles of this hell; the children and teenagers lured into participating in various ways in this awful world in the effort to please romantic partners or exploitive adults. This report, in sum, like the conference that preceded it, answers definitively the libertarian question of “So what about pornography?” with a solid list of “Here’s what” — eight documented findings about the manifold risks of warping the sexual template with pornographic imagery.

Pornography Use Is A Private Matter.
Perhaps the queen bee of lies about pornography, this is also the easiest to take down. For while consumption of the substance may be private (or not, as airline travelers and library patrons and others in the public square have lately been learning), the fallout from some of that consumption is anything but.

Consider just a few examples from recent studies on people younger than eighteen. Adolescent users of pornography are more likely to intend to have sex and to engage in more frequent sexual activity. They are more likely to test positive for Chlamydia. Three separate studies have found among adolescents a strong correlation between pornography consumption and engaging in various sexual activities.

The exceedingly well-documented social costs of adolescent sexual activity, alongside the health costs now accumulating, alone torpedo the refrain that Internet pornography use today is “private.” Now consider a few more findings concerning adults rather than kids. At a November 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers (comprising the nation’s top 1600 divorce and matrimonial-law attorneys), 62 percent of the 350 attendees said the Internet had played a role in divorces during the last year. In especially germane research not yet published, economists Kirk Doran and Joseph Price are examining data from the General Social Survey (GSS) to assess the negative impact of pornography on other aspects of marriage. They report that, among individuals who have ever been married, those who say they’ve seen an X-rated movie in the last year are 25 percent more likely to be divorced and 13 percent less likely to identify themselves as “very happy” with life in general.

Divorce, as everyone knows by now, is associated with a variety of adverse financial and other outcomes as well as with problems for children and adolescents affected by it. Here too, private behavior is clearly exacting public costs.

Yet with all due respect to the social science, not everyone needs it to know that pornography is more than just a private thing. Imagine your teenage daughter walking down the beach. Half the men on it have been watching sex on the Internet within the last few days, and half have not. Which ones do you want watching her? How can their “private” behavior possibly be said to be confined to home, when their same eyes with which they view it travel along with them everywhere else?

Pornography Use Is A Guy Thing
It only bothers women. In fact, some of the saddest and most riveting testimony on this topic concerns exactly this: the harm that pornography consumption can do to men immersed in it.

Consider the insights of Pamela Paul, a reporter for Time magazine, who interviewed in depth more than 100 heterosexual users of pornography, 80 percent of them men, for her 2005 book Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. This book — the best yet written in laymen’s terms about the impact of Internet pornography on users themselves — is remarkable for several reasons. Just one is the unforgettably sad portrait that emerges, sometimes unwittingly, from habitual users themselves. “Countless men,” she summarizes from the interviews, “have described to me how, while using pornography, they have lost the ability to relate to or be close to women. They have trouble being turned on by ‘real’ women, and their sex lives with their girlfriends or wives collapse.”

The same point has been echoed by medical authorities including Norman Doidge, a doctor specializing in neuropsychiatry and author of The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Treating men in the early to mid-1990s for their pornography habits, he found it a common refrain that many were no longer able to have intercourse with their own wives. “Pornographers,” he concludes, “promise healthy pleasure and relief from sexual tension, but what they often deliver is an addiction, tolerance, and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn’t like it.”

Habituation And Tolerance
Just as heavy drinkers and drug users over time require higher doses of substances to achieve the same effect, so apparently do some chronic users of pornography come to require harder-core and edgier material. From another of Pamela Paul’s descriptions: “Men . . . told me that they found themselves wasting countless hours looking at pornography on their televisions and DVD players, and especially online. They looked at things they would once have considered appalling — bestiality, group sex, hard-core S&M, genital torture, child pornography.”

This same descent into the particular pit of knowing that one is doing something wrong, and still being unable to stop oneself, echoes through other accounts by clinicians of what they hear from some patients. In a widely read article in the London Spectator in 2003, British writer Sean Thomas courageously catalogued his own such descent, including into terrain that will not be described here. As he concluded, Internet pornography “revealed to me that I had an unquantifiable variety of sexual fantasies and quirks and that the process of satisfying these desires online only led to more interest….”

A Spiritual Descent
As one military man put it with unusual candor in a particularly poignant (also anonymous) e-mail to the editor:

“I absolutely agree it is damaging. It damages my respect for my wife, and she has done nothing to deserve that damage. It damages my self-esteem and respect for myself, because I know it is not helpful to our life, to our marriage, to our love. . . . It reduces my satisfaction in a wonderful woman. It makes me yearn for things that I should not want. It is disruptive to my inner peace. I don’t like myself when I’m looking at porn. I don’t like the way I feel about myself when I’m looking at porn. . . . But I can only do without it about six months. . . . It has been an endless cycle.”

Or as Roger Scruton put it memorably at the Witherspoon conference, summarizing the philosophical aspect of this particular form of sadness that this new form of obesity can bring: “This, it seems to me, is the real risk attached to pornography. Those who become addicted to this risk-free form of sex run a risk of another and greater kind. They risk the loss of love, in a world where only love brings happiness.”

It’s Only Pictures Of Consenting Adults
Unless it is computer simulated, pornography is never only about pictures. Every single person on the screen is somebody’s sister, cousin, son, niece, or mother; every one of them stands in a human relation to the world.

The notion for starters that those in the “industry” itself are not being harmed by what they do cannot survive even the briefest reading of testimonials to the contrary by those who have turned their backs on it, among them Playboy bunnies (including Izabella St. James, author of Bunny Tales). It is a world rife with everything one would want any genuinely loved one to avoid like the plague: drugs, exploitation, physical harm, AIDS.

Nor can that defense survive the extremely troubling — or what ought to be extremely troubling — connections between pornography and prostitution.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has notably taken the lead in investigating and throwing light on the sordid phenomenon of “sex trafficking,” both here and abroad. Yet trafficking, as the Department of Justice and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have both noted, is often associated with pornography — for example, via cameras and film equipment found when trafficking circles are broken up. Plainly, the reality of the human beings behind many of those images on the Internet is poorer, dirtier, druggier — and younger — than pious appeals to “consenting adults” can withstand. Is this world really what the libertarian defenders of pornography want to subsidize?

Once again, who even needs all that social science? Perhaps the most telling response to the “pictures” defense is rhetorical. Ask even the most committed user whether he wants his own daughter or son in that line of work — and then ask why it’s all right to have other people’s daughters and sons making it instead.

Malice And Venom Unique
Several experts have also noted one more interesting phenomenon that most people who have ever written on this thankless subject will verify: Telling the truth about pornography is practically guaranteed to elicit malice and venom unique in their potency from its defenders.

This aspect of sexual obesity too, I believe, tells us something of note. Blogging recently about the subject on National Review Online, for example, Kathryn Jean Lopez remarked in public about the quality of the torrent of emotional e-mails her comments provoked. Many of them, she reported, were “terrifying.” Cathy Ruse, who worked on the issue of pornography during the mid-1990s for the National Law Center for Children and Families and again later for the Family Research Council, reports similarly: “I have been involved in various public policy debates in the United States for twenty years and I have never encountered anything like the pornography debates… I have never experienced attacks that were so abusive and personal, including angry ranting messages on my home telephone and horrible e-mails.”

Such unique vituperation, which has so far gone unremarked in any public discussion of pornography despite the fact that it is commonplace, demands inspection in its own right. In fact, it may be the surest proof altogether of just how addictive Internet pornography can be. Although academic experts may continue to battle over exactly what is meant by “addiction,” surely the tremendously defensive response in the public square by itself settles the question to any reasonable person’s satisfaction. What does it tell us that, when faced with any attempt to make the case that this substance should be harder to get than it is, some reliable subset of defenders can be counted on to respond more like animals than like people?

Addiction
All of which goes to show that there is nothing alarmist whatsoever in arguing that we ought to be alarmed about the first generation raised on Internet pornography. In speaking on college campuses about other issues lately, I have been struck by how many students — usually, though not only, girls — have come up afterward and confided their view that pornography use is the number-one factor warping relations between the sexes these days.

I have also heard at least a few boys confide that it’s hard to find girls on campus who have not themselves been drawn in to some form of the pornographic subculture — via “sexting,” say, or in the effort to please previous boyfriends, or in the deliberately provocative pictures of themselves on Facebook and elsewhere.

What, if anything, can be done about this other obesity epidemic? For starters, we could use a campaign that might promise to do to pornography what was ultimately done to tobacco — a restigmatization based on the evolving record of fact. What’s needed is nothing less than the kind of leadership that turned smoking, in the course of a single generation, from cool to uncool — one eventually summoning support high and low, ranging from celebrities, high-school teachers and principals, counselors, former users, and anyone else who knows they belong in the coalition of the willing on this wretched issue.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged internet pornograpy, Mary Eberstadt, Sexual Obesity | Leave a Comment »

The Abolition of Truth and Morality – Francis A. Schaeffer

June 24, 2010

Francis Schaeffer

The evangelical Protestant Francis Schaeffer (1912-1984) and the evangelical Roman Catholic Karol Wojtyla (1920- 2005) never met. Francis Schaeffer, founder of L’Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, was a Christian intellectual and cultural critic, practical theologian, author, noted speaker, and evangelist, whose ministry in the last half of the twentieth century incited worldwide study and discipleship centers. He has been credited with the founding of the evangelical Christian right in the United States.Karol Wojtyla is a philosopher, university professor, theologian, priest, bishop, cardinal, author, noted speaker, evangelist, and, last but not least, the man who became Pope John Paul II ago.

These two great Christian pastors probably would have liked each other as well as deeply appreciated each other’s vision of the Christian life, each marked by intellectual vigor, theological substance, doctrinal orthodoxy, compassion, and a love for people. For them, Christian spirituality is based on the biblical affirmation that “Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philemon 2:11) over the whole of life, including culture, and that the whole of life is under God’s blessing, judgment, and redeeming purposes. Both Michael Novak and James I. Packer have made comparisons between Schaeffer and Wojtyla and picking up on some of these comments I found this essay by Reverend Schaeffer prescient.

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals.

They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But they have not seen this as a totality — each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in world view — that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and view the world and life as a whole. This shift has been away from a world view that was at least vaguely Christian in people’s memory (even if they were not individually Christian) toward something completely different — toward a world view based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance. They have not seen that this world view has taken the place of the one that had previously dominated Northern European culture, including the United States, which was at least Christian in memory, even if the individuals were not individually Christian.

These two world views stand as totals in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results—including sociological and governmental results, and specifically including law.

It is not that these two world views are different only in how they understand the nature of reality and existence. They also inevitably produce totally different results, The operative word here is inevitably. It is not just that they happen to bring forth different results, but it is absolutely inevitable that they will bring forth different results.

Why have the Christians been so slow to understand this? There are various reasons but the central one is a defective view of Christianity. This has its roots in the Pietist movement under the leadership of P. J. Spener in the seventeenth century. Pietism began as a healthy protest against formalism and a too abstract Christianity. But it had a deficient, “platonic” spirituality. It was platonic in the sense that Pietism made a sharp division between the “spiritual” and the “material” world — giving little, or no, importance to the “material” world. The totality of human existence was not afforded a proper place. In particular it neglected the intellectual dimension of Christianity.

Christianity and spirituality were shut up to a small, isolated part of life. The totality of reality was ignored by the pietistic thinking. Let me quickly say that in one sense Christians should be pietists in that Christianity is not just a set of doctrines, even the right doctrines. Every doctrine is in some way to have an effect upon our lives. But the poor side of Pietism and its resulting platonic outlook has really been a tragedy not only in many people’s individual lives, but in our total culture.

True spirituality covers all of reality. There are things the Bible tells us as absolutes which are sinful — which do not conform to the character of God. But aside from these the Lordship of Christ covers all of life and all of life equally. It is not only that true spirituality covers all of life, but it covers all parts of the spectrum of life equally. In this sense there is nothing concerning reality that is not spiritual.

Related to this, it seems to me, is the fact that many Christians do not mean what I mean when I say Christianity is true, or Truth. They are Christians and they believe in, let us say, the truth of creation, the truth of the virgin birth, the truth of Christ’s miracles, Christ’s substitutionary death, and His coming again. But they stop there with these and other individual truths.

When I say Christianity is true I mean it is true to total reality — the total of what is, beginning with the central reality, the objective existence of the personal-infinite God. Christianity is not just a series of truths but Truth — Truth about all of reality. And the holding to that Truth intellectually — and then in some poor way living upon that Truth, the Truth of what is — brings forth not only certain personal results, but also governmental and legal results.

Now let’s go over to the other side — to those who hold the materialistic final reality concept. They saw the complete and total difference between the two positions more quickly than Christians. There were the Huxleys, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), and many others who understood a long time ago that there are two total concepts of reality and that it was one total reality against the other and not just a set of isolated and separated differences, The Humanist Manifesto published in 1933, showed with crystal clarity their comprehension of the totality of what is involved. It was to our shame that Julian (1887-1975) and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), and the others like them, understood much earlier than Christians that these two world views are two total concepts of reality standing in antithesis to each other. We should be utterly ashamed that this is the fact.

They understood not only that there were two totally different concepts but that they would bring forth two totally different conclusions, both for individuals and for society. What we must understand is that the two world views really do bring forth with inevitable certainty not only personal differences, but also total differences in regard to society, government, and law.

There is no way to mix these two total world views. They are separate entities that cannot be synthesized. Yet we must say that liberal theology, the very essence of it from its beginning, is an attempt to mix the two. Liberal theology tried to bring forth a mixture soon after the Enlightenment and has tried to synthesize these two views right up to our own day. But in each case when the chips are down these liberal theologians have always come down, as naturally as a ship coming into home port, on the side of the nonreligious humanist. They do this with certainty because what their liberal theology really is is humanism expressed in theological terms instead of philosophic or other terms.

An example of this coming down naturally on the side of the nonreligious humanists is the article by Charles Hartshorne in the January 21, 1981, issue of The Christian Century, pages 42-45. Its title is, “Concerning Abortion, an Attempt at a Rational View.” He begins by equating the fact that the human fetus is alive with the fact that mosquitoes and bacteria are also alive. That is, he begins by assuming that human life is not unique. He then continues by saying that even after the baby is born it is not fully human until its social relations develop (though he says the infant does have some primitive social relations an unborn fetus does not have).

His conclusion is, “Nevertheless, I have little sympathy with the idea that infanticide is just another form of murder, Persons who are already functionally persons in the full sense have more important rights even than infants.” He then, logically, takes the next step: “Does this distinction apply to the killing of a hopelessly senile person or one in a permanent coma? For me it does.” No atheistic humanist could say it with greater clarity. It is significant at this point to note that many of the denominations controlled by liberal theology have come out, publicly and strongly, in favor of abortion.

Dr. Martin E. Marty is one of the respected, theologically liberal spokesmen. He is an associate editor of The Christian Century and Fairfax M. Cone distinguished service professor at the University of Chicago divinity school. He is often quoted in the secular press as the spokesman for “mainstream” Christianity. In a Christian Century article in the January 7-14, 1981, issue (pages 13-17 with an addition on page 31), he has an article entitled: “Dear Republicans: A Letter on Humanisms.” In it he brilliantly confuses the terms “being human,” humanism, the humanities and being “in love with humanity.” Why does he do this? As a historian he knows the distinctions of those words, but when one is done with these pages the poor reader who knows no better is left with the eradication of the total distinction between the Christian position and the humanist one.

I admire the cleverness of the article but I regret that in it Dr. Marty has come down on the non-religious humanist side, by confusing the issues so totally it would be well at this point to stress that we should not confuse the very different things which Dr. Marty did confuse. Humanitarianisrn is being kind and helpful to people, treating people humanly. The humanities are the studies of literature, art, music, etc. — those things which are the products of human creativity. Humanism is the placing of Man at the center of all things and making him the measure of all things.

Thus, Christians should be the most humanitarian of all people. And Christians certainly should be interested in the humanities as the product of human creativity, made possible because people are uniquely made in the image of the great Creator. in this sense of being interested in the humanities it would be proper to speak of a Christian humanist, This is especially so in the past usage of that term. This would then mean that such a Christian is interested (as we all should be) in the product of people’s creativity. In this sense, for example, Calvin could be called a Christian humanist because he knew the works of the Roman writer Seneca so very well. John Milton and many other Christian poets could also be so called because of their knowledge not only of their own day but also of antiquity.

But in contrast to being humanitarian and being interested in the humanities Christians should be inalterably opposed to the false and destructive humanism, which is false to the Bible and equally false to what Man is.

Along with this we must keep distinct the “humanist world view” of which we have been speaking and such a thing as the “Humanist Society,” which produced the Humanist Manifestos I and 11(1933 and 1973). The Humanist Society is made up of a relatively small group of people (some of whom, however, have been influential — John Dewey, Sir Julian Huxley, Jacques Monod, B. F. Skinner, etc.). By way of contrast, the humanist world view includes many thousands of adherents and today controls the consensus in society, much of the media, much of what is taught in our schools, and much of the arbitrary law being produced by the various departments of government.

The term humanism used in this wider, more prevalent way means Man beginning from himself, with no knowledge except what he himself can discover and no standards outside of himself. In this view Man is the measure of all things, as the Enlightenment expressed it.

Nowhere have the divergent results of the two total concepts of reality, the Judeo-Christian and the humanist world view, been more open to observation than in government and law.

We of Northern Europe (and we must remember that the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and so on are extensions of Northern Europe) take our form-freedom balance in government for granted as though it were natural. There is form in acknowledging the obligations in society, and there is freedom in acknowledging the rights of the individual. We have form, we have freedom; there is freedom, there is form. There is a balance here which we have come to take as natural in the world. It is not natural in the world. We are utterly foolish if we look at the long span of history and read the daily newspapers giving today’s history and do not understand that the form-freedom balance in government which we have had in Northern Europe since the Reformation and in the countries extended from it is unique in the world, past and present.

That is not to say that no one wrestled with these questions before the Reformation nor that no one produced anything worthwhile. One can think, for example, of the Conciliar Movement in the late medieval church and the early medieval parliaments. Especially one must consider the ancient English Common Law. And in relation to that Common Law (and all English Law) there is Henry De Bracton. I will mention more about him in a moment.

Those who hold the material-energy, chance concept of reality, whether they are Marxist or non-Marxist, not only do not know the truth of the final reality, God, they do not know who Man is. Their concept of Man is what Man is not, just as their concept of the final reality is what final reality is not. Since their concept of Man is mistaken, their concept of society and of law is mistaken, and they have no sufficient base for either society or law.

They have reduced Man to even less than his natural finiteness by seeing him only as a complex arrangement of molecules, made complex by blind chance. Instead of seeing him as something great who is significant even in his sinning, they see Man in his essence only as an intrinsically competitive animal, that has no other basic operating principle than natural selection brought about by the strongest, the fittest, ending on top. And they see Man as acting in this way both individually and collectively as society.

Even on the basis of Man’s finiteness having people sweat in court in the name of humanity, as some have advocated, saying something like, “We pledge our honor before all mankind” would be insufficient enough. But reduced to the materialistic view of Man, it is even less. Although many nice words may be used, in reality law constituted on this basis can only mean brute force,

In this setting Jeremy Bentham’s (1748-1842) Utilitarianism can be and must be all that law means. And this must inevitably lead to the conclusion of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935): “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” That is, there is no basis for law except Man’s limited, finite experience. And especially with the Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest concept of Man (which Holmes held) that must, and will, lead to Holmes’ final conclusion: law is “the majority vote of that nation that could lick all others.”

The problem always was, and is, What is an adequate base for law? What is adequate so that the human aspiration for freedom can exist without anarchy, and yet provides a form that will not become arbitrary tyranny?

In contrast to the materialistic concept, Man in reality is made in the image of God and has real humanness. This humanness has produced varying degrees of success in government, bringing forth governments that were more than only the dominance of brute force.

And those in the stream of the Judeo-Christian world view have had something more. The influence of the Judeo-Christian world view can be perhaps most readily observed in Henry De Bracton’s influence on British Law. An English judge living in the thirteenth century, he wrote De Legibus et Consuetudinibus (c.1250). Bracton, in the stream of the Judeo-Christian world view, said:

And that he [the King] ought to be under the law appears clearly in the analogy of Jesus Christ, whose vice-regent on earth he is, for though many ways were open to Him for His ineffable redemption of the human race, the true mercy of God chose this most powerful way to destroy the devil’s work, he would not use the power of force but the reason of justice.

In other words, God in His sheer power could have crushed Satan in his revolt by the use of that sufficient power. But because of God’s character, justice came before the use of power alone. Therefore Christ died that justice, rooted in what God is, would be the solution. Bracton codified this: Christ’s example, because of who He is, is our standard, our rule, our measure. Therefore power is not first, but justice is first in society and law. The prince may have the power to control and to rule, but he does not have the right to do so without justice. This was the basis of English Common Law. The Magna Charta (1215) was written within thirty-five years (or less) of Bracton’s De Legibus and in the midst of the same universal thinking in England at that time.

The Reformation (300 years after Bracton) refined and clarified this further. It got rid of the encrustations that had been added to the .Judeo-Christian world view and clarified the point of authority — with authority resting in the Scripture rather than church and Scripture, or state and Scripture. This not only had meaning in regard to doctrine but clarified the base for law.

That base was God’s written Law, back through the New Testament to Moses’ written Law; and the content and authority of that written Law is rooted back to Him who is the final reality. Thus, neither church nor state were equal to, let alone above, that Law. The base for law is not divided, and no one has the right to place anything, including king, state or church, above the content of God’s Law.

What the Reformation did was to return most clearly and consistently to the origins, to the final reality, God; but equally to the reality of Man — not only Man’s personal needs (such as salvation), but also Man’s social needs.

What we have had for four hundred years, produced from this clarity, is unique in contrast to the situation that has existed in the world in forms of government. Some of you have been taught that the Greek city states had our concepts in government. It simply is not true. All one has to do is read Plato’s Republic to have this come across with tremendous force.

When the men of our State Department, especially after World War II, went all over the world trying to implant our form-freedom balance in government downward on cultures whose philosophy and religion would never have produced it, it has, in almost every case, ended in some form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism.

The humanists push for “freedom,” but having no Christian consensus to contain it, that “freedom” leads to chaos or to slavery under the state (or under an elite), Humanism, with its lack of any final base for values or law, always leads to chaos. It then naturally leads to some form of authoritarianism to control the chaos. Having produced the sickness, humanism gives more of the same kind of medicine for a cure. With its mistaken concept of final reality, it has no intrinsic reason to be interested in the individual, the human being. Its natural interest is the two collectives: the state and society.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged Francis A. Schaeffer, reality, spirituality, The Truth | Leave a Comment »

The Holy Shroud

May 12, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI comments on viewing the Holy Shroud of Turin, upon his visit to that city May 2nd. My parish priest was sufficiently moved to place this in the parish bulletin where I read it last week.

Dear Friends,

This is a moment to which I have been looking forward. I have stood before the Holy Shroud on various occasions but this time I am experiencing this Pilgrimage and this moment with special intensity: perhaps this is because the passing years make me even more sensitive to the message of this extraordinary Icon; perhaps and I would say above all this is because I am here now as the Successor of Peter, and I carry in my heart the whole Church, indeed, the whole of humanity. I thank God for the gift of this Pilgrimage and also for the opportunity to share with you a brief meditation inspired by the subtitle of this solemn Exposition: “The Mystery of Holy Saturday”.

One could say that the Shroud is the Icon of this mystery, the Icon of Holy Saturday. Indeed it is a winding-sheet that was wrapped round the body of a man who was crucified, corresponding in every way to what the Gospels tell us of Jesus who, crucified at about noon, died at about three o’clock in the afternoon. At nightfall, since it was Parasceve, that is, the eve of Holy Saturday, Joseph of Arimathea, a rich and authoritative member of the Sanhedrin, courageously asked Pontius Pilate for permission to bury Jesus in his new tomb which he had had hewn out in the rock not far from Golgotha.

Having obtained permission, he bought a linen cloth, and after Jesus was taken down from the Cross, wrapped him in that shroud and buried him in that tomb (cf. Mark 15: 42-46). This is what the Gospel of St Mark says and the other Evangelists are in agreement with him. From that moment, Jesus remained in the tomb until dawn of the day after the Sabbath and the Turin Shroud presents to us an image of how his body lay in the tomb during that period which was chronologically brief (about a day and a half), but immense, infinite in its value and in its significance.

Holy Saturday is the day when God remains hidden, we read in an ancient Homily: “What has happened? Today the earth is shrouded in deep silence, deep silence and stillness, profound silence because the King sleeps…. God has died in the flesh, and has gone down to rouse the realm of the dead” (Homily on Holy Saturday, PG 43, 439). In the Creed, we profess that Jesus Christ was “crucified under Pontius Pilate, died and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day, he rose again”.

Dear brothers and sisters, in our time, especially after having lived through the past century, humanity has become particularly sensitive to the mystery of Holy Saturday. The concealment of God is part of contemporary man’s spirituality, in an existential almost subconscious manner, like a void in the heart that has continued to grow larger and larger. Towards the end of the 19th century, Nietzsche wrote: “God is dead! And we killed him!”. This famous saying is clearly taken almost literally from the Christian tradition. We often repeat it in the Way of the Cross, perhaps without being fully aware of what we are saying. After the two World Wars, the lagers and the gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our epoch has become increasingly a Holy Saturday: this day’s darkness challenges all who are wondering about life and it challenges us believers in particular. We too have something to do with this darkness.

Yet the death of the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, has an opposite aspect, totally positive, a source of comfort and hope. And this reminds me of the fact that the Holy Shroud acts as a “photographic’ document, with both a “positive” and a “negative”. And, in fact, this is really how it is: the darkest mystery of faith is at the same time the most luminous sign of a never-ending hope. Holy Saturday is a “no man’s land” between the death and the Resurrection, but this “no man’s land” was entered by One, the Only One, who passed through it with the signs of his Passion for man’s sake: Passio Christi. Passio hominis. And the Shroud speaks to us precisely about this moment testifying exactly to that unique and unrepeatable interval in the history of humanity and the universe in which God, in Jesus Christ, not only shared our dying but also our remaining in death the most radical solidarity.

In this “time-beyond-time”, Jesus Christ “descended to the dead”. What do these words mean? They mean that God, having made himself man, reached the point of entering man’s most extreme and absolute solitude, where not a ray of love enters, where total abandonment reigns without any word of comfort: “hell”. Jesus Christ, by remaining in death, passed beyond the door of this ultimate solitude to lead us too to cross it with him. We have all, at some point, felt the frightening sensation of abandonment, and that is what we fear most about death, just as when we were children we were afraid to be alone in the dark and could only be reassured by the presence of a person who loved us.

Well, this is exactly what happened on Holy Saturday: the voice of God resounded in the realm of death. The unimaginable occurred: namely, Love penetrated “hell”. Even in the extreme darkness of the most absolute human loneliness we may hear a voice that calls us and find a hand that takes ours and leads us out. Human beings live because they are loved and can love; and if love even penetrated the realm of death, then life also even reached there. In the hour of supreme solitude we shall never be alone: Passio Christi. Passio hominis.

This is the mystery of Holy Saturday! Truly from there, from the darkness of the death of the Son of God, the light of a new hope gleamed: the light of the Resurrection. And it seems to me that, looking at this sacred Cloth through the eyes of faith, one may perceive something of this light. Effectively, the Shroud was immersed in that profound darkness that was at the same time luminous; and I think that if thousands and thousands of people come to venerate it without counting those who contemplate it through images it is because they see in it not only darkness but also the light; not so much the defeat of life and of love, but rather victory, the victory of life over death, of love over hatred.

They indeed see the death of Jesus, but they also see his Resurrection; in the bosom of death, life is now vibrant, since love dwells within it. This is the power of the Shroud: from the face of this “Man of sorrows”, who carries with him the passion of man of every time and every place, our passions too, our sufferings, our difficulties and our sins Passio Christi. Passio hominis from this face a solemn majesty shines, a paradoxical lordship.

This face, these hands and these feet, this side, this whole body speaks. It is itself a word we can hear in the silence. How does the Shroud speak? It speaks with blood, and blood is life! The Shroud is an Icon written in blood; the blood of a man who was scourged, crowned with thorns, crucified and whose right side was pierced. The Image impressed upon the Shroud is that of a dead man, but the blood speaks of his life.

Every trace of blood speaks of love and of life. Especially that huge stain near his rib, made by the blood and water that flowed copiously from a great wound inflicted by the tip of a Roman spear. That blood and that water speak of life. It is like a spring that murmurs in the silence, and we can hear it, we can listen to it in the silence of Holy Saturday.

Dear friends, let us always praise the Lord for his faithful and merciful love. When we leave this holy place, may we carry in our eyes the image of the Shroud, may we carry in our hearts this word of love and praise God with a life full of faith, hope and charity. Thank you.

Pope Benedict XVI

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Cultural Self-Confidence And Jihadism

May 10, 2010

George Weigel reflects upon the West’s confrontation with Jihadism in an age of the politically-correct atheist left:
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London’s Cabinet War Rooms, underneath Whitehall, are a splendid museum — and a reminder of the consequences that can follow when the political imagination of the democracies fails in the face of an existential threat. The Cabinet War Rooms are a monument to the leadership of Winston Churchill during the darkest days of World War II; but a visit there should also remind us of Churchill’s wry suggestion that that struggle should have been dubbed “The Unnecessary War,” as it could have been prevented by political wit and nerve in the 1930s. There is nothing “unnecessary” about the war against jihadism that has been declared upon us. Still, that Churchillian summons to political imagination and cultural nerve remains as salient as ever.

So does another Churchillian admonition from that period. The last time I visited the Cabinet War Rooms, I picked up a postcard copy of a British World War II poster, in which Churchill, looking very much the bulldog, points a stubby finger at you over the emblazoned slogan “Deserve Victory!” In democracies, in which the virtues of the citizenry are the foundations of national security, that is a motto for all seasons. It is a particularly apt one now.

What must we do to remedy our own incapacities, in order to deserve victory in the war against global jihadism? The first step is to recognize our most basic problems for what they are: problems in the order of ideas and of culture.

Marcello Pera is a former president of the Italian Senate, a philosopher of science in the line of Karl Popper, an agnostic — and a man with a penetrating analysis of the current crisis of civilizational morale that besets Europe. That crisis is not limited to Europe, however; elements of it can easily be found in the United States. Thus, what Senator Pera has to say about Europe’s incapacities in the face of jihadism should be taken to heart by Americans, too: “Europe is infected by an epidemic of relativism. It believes that all cultures are equivalent. It refuses to judge them, thinking that to accept and defend one’s own culture would be an act of hegemony, of intolerance, that betrayed an anti-democratic, anti-liberal, disrespectful attitude toward the autonomy of other populations and individuals”

These indicators suggest a culture far more given to self-deprecation than to critical self-affirmation. A culture addicted to self-deprecation is unlikely to be able to defend its commitments to, say, democracy and the rule of law. A culture in which the habit, the virtue, of self-critique and self-correction has deteriorated into self-contempt is a culture that is unlikely to be able to meet the challenge of a self-confident culture in the war of ideas — including moral ideas. A relatively coherent culture — a culture that we believe worth preserving, not simply a culture we accept because it validates our private interests — is a prerequisite for winning the war against global jihadism. We will neither deserve victory nor achieve it if we do not deem ourselves and our culture worthy of victory.

A culture addicted to self-deprecation is the kind of culture that produces what Christopher Hitchens has called “one-way multiculturalism,” which is not pluralism rightly understood but rather the domestic version of what political analyst David Kelly has styled the “preemptive cringe.” Genuine pluralism — Richard John Neuhaus’ “engagement of differences within the bond of civility” — requires mature self-confidence; genuine pluralism cannot be built on a foundation of self-contempt.

The second half of Pope Benedict XVI’s September 2006 Regensburg Lecture (which in fact occupied far more than half of his text) was a sober reminder to the West that, if irrational faith poses one grave threat to the human future, so, too, does a loss of faith in reason. For if the West loses its faith in the human capacity to know the truth of anything with certainty, it will have disarmed itself intellectually, culturally, and morally, unable to give an account of its commitment to civility, tolerance, the free society, and democratic self-government. Or, as Daniel Henninger nicely puts it, saying no to moral insouciance is very much part of “homeland security.” To which might be added the imperative of a “no” to the spiritual boredom and skepticism about our ability to know anything with certainly that inform moral insouciance.

The recovery of a mature cultural confidence in the West requires that we be able to defend western commitments to civil society and democracy philosophically; it also requires us to be able to defend those commitments historically. That is, we must reclaim the history of the West, including its modern democratic politics, as an outgrowth of the distinctive culture that was formed from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome: biblical religion, philosophical rationality, and law. The Whig theory of history — which tells the story of the West as if the freedom project in contemporary western public life only began with the Enlightenment — is mistaken, as a matter of the history of ideas. It also plays into the hands of jihadist ideologues, who are all too eager to claim that democracy, civil society, and the rule of law as we understand those terms are the byproducts of decadent, godless cultures. In the war of ideas that is a crucial front in the war against jihadism, that slander must be met — not only because it falsifies the historical record, but because tracing the religious roots of the contemporary West’s commitment to civility in society and the method of persuasion in politics builds a bridge of genuine dialogue to those Muslims who wish to resist jihadism, and who want for themselves political communities that respect the dignity of the human person — political communities in which government is both responsible and responsive.

What did Christianity, to take a case in point, contribute to the evolution of the freedom project in the West? Christianity taught that, while Caesar was to be given his due, so was God (see Matthew 22:2 1). And if there are things of God that are not Caesar’s, then Caesar’s power is, by definition, limited power. Augustus Caesar, John Courtney Murray reminds us, “was both Summus Imperator and Pontifex Maximus; the ius divinum [divine law] was simply a part of the ius civile [civil law]?’ Or, to put it a bit more simply, Augustus combined in himself both the fullness of political/legal authority and the fullness of spiritual authority, such that the things of God were simply a department of the political community. “The new Christian view,” Murray argues, “was based on a radical distinction between the order of the sacred and the order of the secular.” This was revolutionary. The empire, which would later evolve into what we know as the “state,” was forced to share “space” with another actor claiming real authority in important areas of life — the Church.

The Christian Church proclaimed a human dignity that was inalienable: a dignity that was neither the by-product of social status or wealth, nor a boon conferred by the state. That proclamation, in turn, dramatically changed the relationship of the individual to the political community. It also changed our ideas of what the political community is and what its boundaries are. As what we now know as the “state” evolved in a West that had broken from the emperor/high priest monopoly of power in the pre-Christian world, the state was not the sum total of “society.” The state was one set of functions within society, and the state came to be understood as the servant of society, not the other way around. By stripping political authority of the mantle of the sacred, Christianity helped create the possibility of what we know as “limited government”: government that has specific and enumerated powers, government that ought not reach into that sphere of conscience where, as Pope John Paul II used to put it, men and women are in conversation with God. The first of human rights in the West — religious freedom — is not, in a long view of history, a pragmatic accommodation; it is the statement of a fundamental truth about the human person that has profound implications for the limited state.

The Christian-influenced concept of the rights bearing individual as a member of a society that assigns certain limited functions to the state also implied a morally driven view of politics: politics is part of the moral universe, the universe of right and wrong, not simply an arena in which interests clash. There are truths built into the world and into us; we can know them by an exercise of reason—and thus the laws we make should reflect “the dictates of reason, not sheer will. The individual as bearer of rights in a limited state is also an individual in free association with others. Therefore, the state must respect the independence of families and of all those voluntary associations that human beings create to pursue legitimate economic, cultural, social, and religious purposes. The rich social pluralism of the West did not just happen. It emerged in a society formed by the biblical idea of the dignity of the human person and the culture that epic idea shaped.

The political thought that emerged from the Enlightenment had a profound effect in creating the political institutions of freedom in the West That thinking emerged from, and those institutions were subsequently built on, cultural foundations set much more deeply — foundations set long before the Enlightenment, in the history of a West profoundly shaped by a lakeside conversation about whether a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth ought to pay taxes to Caesar.

Then there is the intellectual curiosity that is a distinctive hallmark of western civilization. It, too, was shaped by religious conviction: in this case, the conviction (reiterated by Benedict XVI at Regensburg) that God created the world through his “Word,” through the divine reason — a theological idea that implies that the world can be understood by the arts of intelligence. It was not a fortuitous accident that the scientific method was developed in a culture that had long affirmed the intelligibility of the world, and had made that affirmation for the weightiest of reasons: the “reason” of God built things that way. This biblical conviction has, of course, been a tremendous material asset to the West, in terms of the technological accomplishments to which it ultimately gave birth. It is also the root of that unique western phenomenon, curiosity about other cultures and civilizations, which, as Bernard Lewis reminds us, led “to the discovery and decipherment of the monuments of the ancient Middle East, and the restoration, to the peoples of that region, of the great, glorious, and long forgotten past,” which had been largely ignored by the region’s Muslim rulers.

A little more than a year after 9/11, French prime minister Jean-Pierre Rafferin referred in the French National Assembly to Saladin as the man who had been able to “liberate Jerusalem” from. . . well, from Prime Minister Rafferin’s ancestors, the French Crusaders. One learned historian described Rafferin’s choice of verb as “a rather extreme case of realignment of loyalties: Less politely, this is bizarre. It is also very dangerous.

A West that sees in its past nothing but pathology — racism, colonialism, religious wars and persecutions, sexism, and all the rest — is a West that cannot, and almost certainly will not, defend its present. A West that can’t remember its past accurately will not be able to project itself imaginatively into the future. A West that has airbrushed from its collective memory the contributions of biblical religion to its present freedoms is a West that is in a poor position to meet the challenge of a religiously shaped alternative reading of the past, present, and future. As British philosopher Roger Scruton writes, the West must be able and willing to demonstrate to the rest of the world, and to Muslims who believe that “western success and prosperity [are] … the products of a purely secular, even atheistic creed,” that the greatest achievements of the West are not material but are, rather, “works of spiritual grace and high culture that transmit eternal meanings.”

Saying no to moral insouciance, then, means saying no as well to historical amnesia, and no to a crudely secular reading of the roots of the freedom project that is now under assault, and that we must defend.

Posted in Commentary | Tagged George Weigel, Jihadism, relativism | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections from “The Pill’s Deadly Affair with HIV/AIDS” by Joan Claire Robinson

April 26, 2010

HIV-AIDS Quilts in Washington DC

In a meticulously detailed report Joan Claire Robinson details the inherent dangers of a life of perceived sexual freedom versus the world’s deadliest virus. Attention Maureen Dowd: more evidence of a Catholic vindication. Needless to say, an article you will never find in the NY Times or the liberal media. Spread the word.

The world’s deadliest killer, HIV/AIDS, and the Birth Control Pill have been carrying on a secret and deadly “love affair” for decades. While women swallowed their “freedom” with the morning orange juice, studies that should have made global headlines yellowed in medical journals, unknown to the general public. Only doctors learned about the pills deadly affair with HIV/AIDS, and they were too busy writing prescriptions for hormonal contraceptives to talk.

More than 50 medical studies, to date, have investigated the association of hormonal contraceptive use and HIV/AIDS infection. The studies show that hormonal contraceptives — the oral pill and Depo-Provera — increase almost all known risk factors for HIV, from upping a woman’s risk of infection, to increasing the replication of the HIV virus, to speeding the debilitating and deadly progression of the disease. ( Baeten et al. 2003, “Hormonal Influences on HIV Disease and Co-Morbidites.” J Acquir Immune Def Syndr. 2005, Vol 38, Suppl 1: S19)

A medical trial published in the journal AIDS in 2009 — monitoring HIV progression by the need for antiretroviral drugs (ART) — saw “the risk of becoming eligible for ART was almost 70% higher in women taking the pills and more than 50% higher in women using DMPA [Depo-Provera] than in women using IUDS.” (http://www.iasociety.org/Article.aspx?elementId=11977; Stringer et al, AIDS. 2009, 23:1377-1382)

Studies aside, it is well known that HIV/AIDS strikes more women than men. Some would argue that this is a result of the desire of men for young — and presumably uninfected, sexual partners. Few are willing to discuss a more obvious explanation, namely, that the Pill and Injectables render women particularly vulnerable to HIV/AIDS.

How serious is the problem? Oral contraceptives and Depo-Provera are among the world’s most popular and prevalent contraceptive methods. According to one study, “Globally, at least 150 million women currently use hormonal contraceptive methods.”( Morrison et al., 2009, Best Practice & Research Clinical Obstetrics and Gynaecology 23 (2009) 264) In America, hormonal contraceptive rates are over 52% in unmarried women — those at greatest risk of HIV/AIDS. Moreover, in the interest of lowering the birth rate, the UNFPA and USAID continue unloading boatloads of hormonal contraceptives on Africa, Haiti and other AIDS-ravaged developing nations.

The best meta-analysis done to date, done by Dr. Chia Wang and her colleagues, surveyed the consensus results of the 28 best published studies since 1985. They found that the “significant association between oral contraceptive use and HIV-1 seroprevalence or seroincidence … increased as study quality increased.” In fact, “Of the best studies, 6 of 8 detected an increased risk of HIV infection associated with OC [oral contraceptive] use.”

On the National Scale
Moreover, Wang’s results showed even more of a Pill/HIV link when they limited studies to those conducted on African populations. This is significant for two reasons:

First, sub-Saharan Africa is home to the world’s earliest and largest heterosexual HIV/AIDS epidemic, which to date has infected an estimated 22.4 million5 people. This is two-thirds of the total number of infections worldwide.
Second, sub-Saharan Africa has endured decades of contraception-focused population control programs and countless hormonal-contraceptive trials. “Among the six [African] countries hardest hit by the HIV/AIDS epidemic … two in three users in the six countries rely on the OC (oral contraceptives) or injectables,” said Iqbal Shah of the World Health Organization.

Likewise, Thailand, praised for a contraceptive prevalence of 79.2% in 2000 and upwards of 70% today, is a land where, “More than one-in-100 adults in this country of 65 million people is infected with HIV.” (http://www.avert.org/thailand-aids-hiv.htm) Among Thai women, “Oral contraception is the most popular method.” (http://www.prb.org/Countries/Thailand.aspx; http://www.searo.who.int/LinkFiles/ Family_Planning_Fact_ Sheets_thailand.pdf)

On the other hand, Japan’s HIV rate is, at 0.01%, one of the lowest in the world. In this context, it is important to note that the birth control pill was illegal in Japan until 1999, and even today only 1% of Japanese women use oral contraception. (http://apps.who.int/globalatlas/predefinedReports/EFS2006/EFS_PDFs/EFS2006_JP.pdf. (Homosexual men account for just over half of Japan’s domestic HIV cases.))Similarly, the predominantly Catholic Philippines, with a longstanding popular resistance to contraception, boasts an HIV “prevalence rate of only 0.02%.”

Hormonal Changes Heighten HIV Risk
The studies that demonstrate a connection between hormonal contraceptives and HIV/AIDS infection postulate a number of mechanisms at work.

First, let’s review the basics. The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), is carried in warm blood or sexual fluids. It infects through fragile, inflamed, bleeding or needle-pricked tissue, attacks specific T-cells in the immune system, and causes the incurable, debilitating condition known as AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome).

Hormonal contraceptives increase almost all known risk factors for HIV infection.

Studies have found that hormonal contraceptives “alter the microenvironment of the female” (Prakash et al. 2004; Prakash et al. 2002; Furth et al., 1990) and boost the cell count of those specific cells that HIV uses to infect and proliferate (HIV co-receptor CCR5 in cervical CD4+ T lymphocytes).

What is more, a progesterone side effect known to American women as “breakthrough bleeding,” is caused when hormonal contraceptives excessively thicken the uterine lining. The large, bleeding surface of the uterus creates an ideal site for HIV infection.

Progesterone also has an immunosuppressant effect, which means that women using hormonal contraceptives have less in the way of natural defenses against HIV and other STDs, such as chlamydial infection or genital herpes (HSV-2). (Baeten et al. 2001; Cottingham et al. 1992; Avonts et al. 1990; Louv et al. 1989; Hunt et al. 1998; Zang et al. 2002; Gillgrass et al; 2003) In one study, “HSV-2 infection itself more than tripled the risk of HIV infection.”( http://www.iasociety.org/Article.aspx?elementId=10470; Baeten et al. 2007)

In the vagina, increased blood and the independent hormonal effects of the Pill eliminate the natural pH acid protection against infection. What is more, a famous study of rhesus macaques found that hormonal contraceptives thin the vaginal walls and markedly increase SIV infection (the monkey equivalent of HIV — Marx et al. 1996; Abel et al. 2004; Veazey et al. 2005) Vaginal dryness, another side effect of hormonal contraceptives, is not only painful but also makes one prone to tears and abrasions — fertile sites for infection.

One study points out, “On a cellular level, hormonal contraceptives have been associated with cervical and vaginal inflammation.” (Baeten et al. 2001; Ghanem et al. 2005)

Further, hormonal birth control causes the fragile cervical tissue to grow beyond its natural bounds and replace what would normally be thick, protective membrane. This “cervical ectopy” is dangerous because the cervix’s thin surface is the main site of HIV infection. (Baeten et al. 2007; Critchlow et al. 1995; Louv et al. 1989; Plourde et al. 1994)

Given all these different ways that hormonal contraception promotes HIV/AIDS infection, it is not at all surprising that several studies show women on the pill, Depo-Provera, etc., are more likely to be infected with not just one, but several variants or strains of HIV. This “in turn leads to higher levels of viral replication and more rapid HIV-1 disease progression.” (Beaten et al. 2003; Poss et al. 1995; Long et al. 2000; Furth et al. 1990; Baeten et al. 2007, Clinical and Infectious Diseases, 360-361)

Women on hormonal contraceptives are not only more likely to contract HIV/AIDS, they are also more likely to pass it along to their sexual partners. The three studies which focused on “the impact of hormonal contraception on cervical shedding of the cell-associated virus” (Stringer et al. 2008) all found that HIV-positive women on hormonal contraceptives are far more likely shed HIV in their body fluids. High-dose pill users were over 12 times more likely to shed the HIV virus than women not using contraception, low-dose users were almost 4 times more likely, and Depo-Provera users were 3 times more likely.( Wang et al. 2004; Mostad et al. 1997; Clemetson et al. 1993)

The Pill Pushers Push Back
Some dismiss out of hand the impressive body of scientific research demonstrating a Pill/HIV link. They quote from the handful of studies and highly selective trials which claim to find “no increase in HIV risk among users of oral contraceptives and Depo-Provera.”( Mauck, C. 2005, S11; Studies noted: Mati et al. 1995; Kapiga et al. 1998)

The problem with many of these studies, such as Mati et al. 1995, Kapiga et al. 1998, and Sinei et al. 1996 is that they were conducted with and through “family planning clinics.” Since the chief business of these clinics is the promotion, sale, and distribution of contraceptives, the possibility of bias is undeniable. Who would trust Marlboro to monitor a study on the link between cigarettes and cancer?

Moreover, the handful of studies that deny a link between hormonal contraception and increased risk of contracting HIV are dwarfed by the many studies that have not only found such a link, but convincingly explained precisely what it is about such contraception that contributes to the spread of the disease.

Yet population control groups continue to lobby for more contraception, not less. Take Dr. Willard Cates, president of the Institute for Family Health of Family Health International (FHI), one of the major purveyors of hormonal contraception to the developing world. Wrote Cates to the Journal of American Medical Association, “Preventing unintended pregnancies among HIV-infected women who do not currently wish to become pregnant is an important and cost effective way of preventing new HIV infections of infants. … More must be done to ensure access to safe and effective contraception for HIV-infected women.” (JAMA. 2006; 296:2802 )

Obviously, FHI’s concern here is less to prevent the infection of preborn infants, than to continue to contracept as many women as possible with your tax dollars and mine. What the organization refuses to admit, however, is that by doing so it is arguably contributing to the spread of the HIV virus.

How many lives are being lost because we continue to ship boatloads of hormonal contraceptives to a continent and to countries laboring under an HIV/AIDS pandemic? Isn’t it time that we stopped?

Posted in Commentary | Tagged Birth Control Pill, HIV/AIDS, Joan Claire Robinson | Leave a Comment »

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