JustFaith is JustCrap

So I'm supposed to be looking over the JustFaith program as part of my job. I hadn't heard of it, but I ask a buddy of mine if he had. He had. So I ask him for the book list and the videos and all the stuff that comes with the program, because JustFaith only gives that stuff to you piecemeal. I would have to wait until the end of the program to know all the stuff it uses. Anyway, I'm going over the stuff that JustFaith has you read and watch, and - holy mounds of crapola, batman - JustFaith is a mess.

There are some good, nay...there are some great parts of the program. Some of the videos are spectacular. A couple of the books I would recommend to friends and enemies alike. But most of the books and one of the videos range from muddy-thinking-bad to heresy-incorporated-bad.

Examples?

Take the video "Portrait of a Radical." This dude Richard Rohr - google him for a moment and you'll come up with all sorts of wonderful things - basically denies the divinity of Christ. Oh, and by "basically deny" I mean he says, "Jesus did not go around calling himself God. But it did not take us long before we made him into a God figure." Ahhhh. Or take this book by Walter Wink The Powers That Be. At one point Wink tries with all his might to avoid pantheism by saying that he believes in panentheism. Distinction? All the world is not god, but god is in all the world. We cannot say that any one thing is not part of god. Ahhhh.

If you are at a parish somewhere, and you are considering using JustFaith...just pass on it. Pass right on by.

I could give a myriad of examples, but it's late and I don't feel like it. Honestly, though; craptaculous.

St. Winifred

I am not left even this;
I all my being have hacked in half with her neck: one part,
Reason, selfdisposal, choice of better or worse way,
Is corpse now, cannot change; my other self, this soul,
Life’s quick, this kínd, this kéen self-feeling,
With dreadful distillation of thoughts sour as blood,
Must all day long taste murder. What do nów then? Do? Nay,
Deed-bound I am; one deed treads all down here cramps all doing. What do? Not yield,
Not hope, not pray; despair; ay, that: brazen despair out,
Brave all, and take what comes—as here this rabble is come,
Whose bloods I reck no more of, no more rank with hers
Than sewers with sacred oils. Mankind, that mobs, comes. Come!

Are you not familiar with this text? It is from Act II of Hopkins’ St. Winifred’s Well. It is all dark and brooding as it is part of a monologue by the evil Caradoc, responsible for the murder of Winifred, whose head was severed for the crime of refusing his advances. It is a Medieval story which Hopkins takes up, but it is a not too uncommon thing even in our day.

Think of this: Caradoc strides onto the stage, bloodied, his sword stained crimson with Winifred’s essence. For what? For chastity?

Who suffers now for chastity? Certainly women and men, save that now the bloodied are the children in the womb and the doctors who, well-paid, sever the bodies of these modern innocents. It is a horrid thought, I know. But there is just something about all this intellectualizing and distinction-making and rhetorical pap that makes my stomach turn. Honestly, is it so difficult to understand human speech?

Caradoc understood precisely what he did. All his life, all of him is now stained with murder. He did not shy, either, from the consequence. Mankind, that mobs, comes. Come! Today we hide behind the verbiage of civility. Doug Kmiec says in chapter four of his book, page 48,

“Senator Obama is not pro-abortion, but instead tolerant of an existing legal structure that permits the mother to make the decision, while further pledging to work toward a more just social system devoted to encouraging a culture that is welcoming to life.”

Obama is “tolerant.” That word suggest that the actor who is tolerating considers the thing being tolerated as something bad. One does not, after all, tolerate a good. And yet, this is what Obama said on July 17, 2008 in front of members of Planned Parenthood,

“I have worked on these issues for decades now. I put Roe at the center of my lesson plan on reproductive freedom when I taught Constitutional Law. Not simply as a case about privacy but as part of the broader struggle for women’s equality.”

The right to abortion is at the center of Obama’s notion of reproductive freedom and Constitutionality. It is a part of women’s very equality with men. And, yet, Professor Kmiec says that Obama is not pro-abortion, he is tolerant of it.

Despair, ay, that; brazen despair out; for if someone as intelligent as Doug Kmiec cannot see the gratuitously simple truth that Obama is devoted to abortion as a fundamental right for women’s equality, and not as something merely to be tolerated, then, yes, brazen despair out. Mankind, that mobs, comes. Come! And bring legion with you, so that we can confront the devil straightforwardly and not get lost in the ruin of rhetoric.

Are you that liar?

What hinders? Are you beam-blind, yet to a fault
In a neighbour deft-handed? Are you that liar
And, cast by conscience out, spendsavour salt?

So ends Hopkins’ poem “The Candle Indoors.” It has me thinking what it is that makes a man like Douglas W. Kmiec write such drivel as that which appears in his book Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barak Obama. In my previous post I listed some of the problems that exist in Kmiec’s arguments, not the least of which was the claim that the Republican Faith Partisans (insert ominous organ music here) aim to throw teenagers, priests, cabbage-patch dolls, and M. Night Shyamalan (what was “The Happening”…seriously?) into jail. This is why the RFP’s want to overturn Roe: to throw people in JAIL! (thunder claps echo and rattle over a desolate, dark plane)

In chapter two of the book, Kmiec continues with his word games and twisting, only at one point he actually comes very close to out and out lying. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Kmiec wants to make the argument that it is at least silly if not bordering on heresy for the RFP’s (shriek!) to suggest that the Church would ever tell someone how to vote. He writes on page 39, “The American Bishops properly remind us that the Church corporate never tells parishioners for whom to vote by name. Nor do they proclaim that one issue overrides all others in the proper discernment of the Catholic voter.” Hmmmm, “never”? “rightly”?

So let’s get this straight, Kmiec would say that if the bishops were to find themselves in a country where a single population was being rounded up for mass murder – this is just a hypothetical mind you – where this population was forced to wear a patch or something…umm…let’s just say…umm…a yellow star, and if there were two major candidates one of whom advocated for, wanted to increase funding to, and pledged to continue the process of deportation and the other one didn’t…well Kmiec says that the bishops would be right in refusing to condemn voting for this pro-deport-Jews-so-as-to-kill-them candidate. He says they would never proclaim that the issue of mass deportation of an entire ethnic population for the purpose of extinction outweighs… wait…“overrides all others in the proper discernment of the Catholic voter.” They just don’t do this.

To this, my question runs this way: If the bishops would rightly never proclaim that the issue of organized, government-sanctioned and funded mass murder overrides all others, then what in blazes are the bishops good for? What ought to bishops say in such a case? But I am getting far afield.

Professor Kmiec then invites us to read a 2006 statement by the Illinois Conference of Catholic Bishops of which Cardinal George is the president. Kmiec quotes it on page 39 and following:

Thus as Catholic citizens, we inform and form our consciences as citizens in accordance with the principles of Catholic social teaching. The first and most essential principle of our social teaching is the dignity of every human person and each one’s basic right to life from conception to natural death. Respect for human dignity is the basis for the fundamental right to life. This is a non-negotiable principle that is supported by our beliefs but is logically independent of our faith. Many non-Catholics think a society dedicated to the common good should protect its weakest members. Other principles include the call to community and participation, the centrality of the family, the dignity of work and rights of workers, the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity,and the commitment to stewardship of the environment.

Catholics should always vote for that person most committed to being a public servant dedicated to the common good. This being said, it should be noted that any candidate who supports a public policy where part of humanity (such as the pre-born, the elderly, the handicapped, or the sick) is excluded from the protection of law and treated as if they were non-persons is gravely deficient in his or her view of the requirements of a just society.

To this Kmiec then provides a gymnastical reimagining of the words of the Illinois Bishops and Cardinal George. He writes, “Fourth, it defines as a ‘suspect’ or ‘deficient’ candidates who disrespect life by excluding the most vulnerable from society, which might well mean the destruction of the unborn, but equally tragically, the marginalization of the poor, the handicapped, or the elderly.”

Why “equally tragically?” Is there a legal ruling on the books that makes it a Constitutional right to make people poor, a word that does not appear in the bishop’s text by the by? Or is this talk about the “protection of the law” meant to refer to those who are liable to being legally murdered in this country, i.e. the pre-born through abortion, the very old and demented, or the very ill through euthanasia? What is Kmiec getting at anyway?

Well the fog starts to clear in the next paragraph or two when Kmiec addresses what is generally considered to be a devastating argument against pro-choice adults. He quotes Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life. On page 41 we read Fr. Pavone’s argument as it is presented by Kmiec, “Suppose a candidate came forward and said, ‘I support terrorism.’ Would you say, ‘I disagree with you on terrorism, but what’s your health care plan?’ Of course not. Similarly, those who would permit the destruction of innocent life by abortion disqualify themselves from consideration.” In answer to this Kmiec brandishes this piercingly ridiculous commentary:

“With respect, Father Pavone’s statement, while memorable for its clever wit is also regrettable for its oversimplification of Catholic belief and its sweeping moral condemnation of the beliefs of other religions.”

Huh? How exactly did Fr. Pavone insult other religions by pointing out the Catholic position? Kmiec enlightens us,

In a free society made up of different religious beliefs, including religiousbeliefs that differ substantially on when life begins, it should not be easy to deny someone permission to believe differently than ourselves. More on this point of religious freedom in Part Two, but even accepting the Catholic view to be exclusionary of all others, Father Pavone’s summary of what counts as Catholicism is obviously far less full and comprehensive than that of Francis Cardinal George. The Bishops in their collective and separate statements have
sought to counter the misguidance that voting in a given way can be assessed as sin. For example, in “Voting for the Common Good,” the idea that one voter can judge whether another’s vote is a sin is rejected, “Any attempt to scare others into voting for or against a candidate violates Catholic teaching on conscience,prudence, and human freedom,” it says.

Wow…where to begin. All of a sudden the standard for assessing Fr. Pavone’s argument is not to actually address the point, the conclusion of the argument. Rather, it is dismissed as all too witty and downright offensive to non-Catholics. It is ecumenically obtuse because Fr. Pavone presumes to enforce the Catholic viewpoint on when life begins on the rest of society. Hmmm. What if Fr. Pavone had said, “The first and most essential principle of Catholic social teaching is the dignity of every human person and each one’s basic right to life from conception to natural death”? Isn’t this statement the principle upon which Fr. Pavones is arguing? Fact is, Professor, the Illinois bishops argue for the imposition of this “first and most essential principle” about when life begins. Somehow they are nuanced but Fr. Pavone is a kook? This is a double standard, if ever there was one.

And anyway, how is that Fr. Pavone is denying “someone permission to believe differently than ourselves”? I’m quite sure that Professor Kmiec would have studied this little factoid in law school, perhaps he might have even taught it, but the truth is that everyone is free to believe whatever they want. It is when their beliefs result in the dismembering of their neighbor that folks like Fr. Pavone and I get antsy. But anyway, the good Professor will explain this later in the section on religious freedom. You’ll just love it. Until then, we must mire through this quicksand of inanity, for it only gets worse.

Kmiec wrote that many bishops in their “collective and separate statements” have condemned the notion that a vote can be determined to be sinful. In the very next sentence he then writes, “FOR EXAMPLE, in ‘Voting for the Common Good’ etc.”

Now follow this closely. “Voting for the Common Good” is an example of what? Answer: of a “collective or separate” statement by the bishops, presumably. That is the obvious implication here as the words “for example” follow the claim about the bishops’ statements.

The problem is that “Voting for the Common Good” is not even remotely a statement by the bishops or of even one bishop or a bishop’s aid or a bishop’s conference committee. It wasn’t looked over by the bishops, or given an imprimatur, or a nihil obstat, or a “looks good to me.” It carries not the slightest whiff of approval from any one or all the bishops. “Voting for the Common Good” is a document put out by various Democratic PAC organizations in the efforts to undermine the influence of the pro-life movement on the Catholic electorate which has voted Republican more than it has voted Democratic in the past several elections.

The endnote which Kmiec has in the text directs one to the following: 16. Catholics in Alliance, Voting for the Common Good: A Practical Guide for Conscientious Catholics, available at http://www.catholicsinalliance.org/files/Voting-for-the-Common-Good.pdf.

Who is Catholics in Alliance? Their full name is Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. They were founded in 2005 by various Democratic individuals some of whom had worked for the Clinton administration. The list of their Board of Trustees is also available online, and it can be plainly seen by the list of names that they are not a bi-partisan alliance.

But all of this is not the point. Kmiec lies to us when he says that the “Voting for the Common Good” is an example of a statement of the bishops. It is no such thing. Indeed, what is so shame-making about this little slip of Kmiec’s is the fact that the Voting for the Common Good document is called Platform for the Common Good. In its tightly packed eight pages it does not once, not once call for the end of legalized abortion. It does not even mention embryonic stem cell research or euthanasia or the sanctity of marriage. None of these things are part of this “Voting for the Common Good” because all of these things are issues which divide the Platform of the Democratic Party from the teachings of the Catholic Church.

To my mind, Kmiec ought to answer for what is nothing other than a lie…and he should apologize to Fr. Pavone…and he should probably stop using the term RFPs. Otherwise he could turn into that liar, who, cast by conscience out, loses the grace of God and becomes like salt that has lost its taste. I know I have a bad taste in my mouth from reading this stuff.

Poor Margaret is weeping.

It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

So ends Hopkins’ poem on the inevitability of life’s sorrows. And it is what struck me while reading Professor Kmiec’s book, namely a deep sorrow for someone whose clearly expansive mind stretches and twists and aches to justify a position he must know is so fundamentally fallen.

I came to Kmiec’s Can A Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barak Obama with a sincere hope that this would be some seminal effort at creating a salve for the deep wounds that exist in our mother church, the Roman Catholic Church. I had the audacity to hope that some splinter of truth would shine forth from it and explain away all my nascent tendencies to dismiss and distrust those who would support the most actively pro-abortion candidate this nation has seen since the Roe decision of 1973. Against my baser inclinations I ferreted out a copy at the local library and poured over it in hope.

That hope, however, was dashed against the adamantine facts of reality and reason. I could barely read five paragraphs of Kmiec’s text without finding a glaring error, a straw man, a verbal bait and switch, a train wreck of argument and obfuscation and agenda.

Chapter One provides several examples, for in his attempt to discredit those he refers to as Republican Faith Partisans (RFPs), a ridiculous moniker that reeks of puerile name-calling, Kmiec lays out the RFP misleading and erroneous logic by writing,

“Correct Major Premise: Abortion is an intrinsic evil (in Catholic terms a'grave sin') to be discouraged.”

From the starting gate, Kmiec stumbles. He makes abortion something “to be discouraged,” as though it were poor manners akin to slurping your tea. No Mr. Kmiec. Abortion is to be outlawed. This is the point which the “RFPs” and the Vatican and the U.S. Bishops and your colleagues have been making for years now, for as Faithful Citizenship makes clear, any legal system that sanctions the killing of millions of human lives is “fundamentally flawed.” Such flaws, Professor, ought to be more than just “discouraged.” They must be firmly corrected by good law.

Next, Kmiec writes,

“Misleading Minor Premise: Obama doesn’t support reversing Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that leaves this decision to the potential mother. (Correct, but misleading and incomplete. Obama believes there is a better way to reduce the incidence of abortion than reversing a court decision that will do nothing other than toss the issue back to the states – namely, to improve the prenatal, maternity, and, if needed, adoption resources of expectant mothers and to better educate un-marrieds about the serious side of sexual intimacy and the importance of responsible parenting.)”

Laying aside for the moment the fantastical claim that first, Obama believes this and that second, what he believes is true, one ought to be struck by the astounding phrase “potential mother.” Perhaps Professor Kmiec is too strict in his definition of motherhood to see that there is nothing “potential” about the fact that every pregnant woman has a human life inside of her at the moment of conception, a life for which she is responsible the moment she becomes aware of it. Furthermore, the objection against Obama is not just that he does not support overturning Roe but rather the whole host of policy positions in favor of extending access to, funding for, and legal defense of abortion on demand. More on that later.

Lastly, Kmiec writes,

“Faulty Conclusion: Obama is ‘participating in or cooperating with’ evil and anyone voting for him is, too. (No, as the discussion in this book will reveal, this is not the teaching of the Catholic Church).”

Excuse me Professor but it is certainly the teaching of the Church that civic leaders who, like Obama, willfully extend access to, funding for, and legal defense of abortion on demand are participating and cooperating with evil. Anyone who votes for this leader, knowing full well of their position, is cooperating with evil, even if it is remote material cooperation.

In the end, Kmiec’s opening salvo falls well short of the standards of honest reason. The tragedy does not end there though. Speaking again about these RFPs, a dastardly collection of rabble-rousers no doubt, Kmiec writes that the performance of abortion is wrong and participating in it is never justifiable no matter what good may come of it. He continues,

“However, that does not mean that public officials cannot work to restructure, for example, tax or economic conditions that make abortion less likely. It would be absurd to call that ‘participating in or cooperating with’ abortion just because the public official thinks it unwise to overturn Roe for the purpose of then convincing the individual states to enact laws that would send the mother or doctor, and the father or clergy person if they were consulted by the mother, as co-conspirators to jail. It certainly does not mean that Catholic voters cannot make candidate choices that can reasonably be thought to establish social justice policies that advance the culture of life.”

Did you, dear reader, catch that? Of course you did. Kmiec states that it is absurd to claim cooperation with evil just because a public official wishes to care for the poor instead of throwing teenagers and their priests into jail, which is what would happen if Roe were reversed of course.

Does the good Professor really think us so dull witted? Does he really mean to say that those who wish to overturn Roe seek that Supreme Court decision “for the purpose” of throwing women and their priests into jail? There are straw men…and then there are straw men. And this straw man smothers a large swath of land when he falls in the next sentence, for Kmiec says that the choice is between those who would imprison wayward girls, impoverished mothers and well-meaning pastors and those who wish to “establish social justice policies that advance the culture of life,” indeed those who advance the cause of sugar and spice and everything nice.

Forgive me for the sarcasm. It is my effort at lightening the mood, for we have here a well respected and nationally recognized Constitutional lawyer who is falling faster than the leaves in Hopkins’ poem, falling far too quickly, for we are only on the third page of Kmiec’s argument. Poor Margaret is grieving.

A House Divided

After having read Doug Kmiec's book the third of fourth time, you know after having gone over the horrifically bad argumentation, the tricks of debate that include straw men the size of William Shatner's ego (I just had to with the new movie coming out, sorry), the basic errors in doctrinal understanding that he passes off as Gospel truth, and the out-and-out deception, after all of that there were a number of things that I came away with. One of them is that Professor Kmiec shouldn't have had communion denied him. It was against Canon Law, and anyway, he mentions it every time he speaks in public as something to hide behind instead of having to answer tough questions. But another thing I got from the book was just how close we are in this country to seeing a real break in the Church.

Now, I am not talking about the American Catholic Church, or the Catholic Church of America that threatened to emerge while I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. I don't mean any real schism by women in roman collars and men in leotards who want their own cosmic liturgies. That's not what I mean, and I want to make it clear that I don't think this is what Kmiec was striving for in his book.

What he accomplishes, however, and as Martin Sheen intimates in his little blurb on the back cover, is that this is the first great mainstream attempt by a well known and respected pro-life believer to justify a theology, a reasoning, a model of Church which is simply not supportable by the Magisterium, or to quote Sheen directly, this book "may very well become the most important comprehensive document written to date on American Catholics, abortion, and candidates for public office." Kmiec's book, even if unintentionally, is the manifesto for a progressivist, American Catholicism that sees virtue, actual virtue in the conversation between good and evil instead of in the effort by good to stand up to evil with force.

Now, while everyone and their brother has blogged on the issue of Obama's trip to Notre Dame, I would only want to add my two cents by positing that there will be a real and true exposition of the break that already exists within Catholicism. In one single event, in the kind of event that history professors require their students to remember for exams, American Catholicism will be on the national stage as a broken body that will force the country's Catholics and non-Catholics to actually ask the question: "What does it mean to be a Catholic?"

When the Pew Research Center, which has recently given us so many statistical insights into our religious experience here in the United States, tells us that self-identified Catholics are split down the middle on whether Obama should be honored by Notre Dame while it simultaneously tells us that the position on Obama's visit is directly proportional to weekly attendance at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, when the Pew survey tells us this, then we don't have to guess anymore at a break. It already exists. Will Catholics follow Kmiec's terrible reasoning? Or will they stay true to the opposition to abortion? Will they heed what John Paul II says in Christifidelis laici that all the other justice issues (health care, just wage, religious freedom) are "false and illusory" if the right to life is not defended with "maximum determination"?

The real question, though, the question the answer to which provides the answer to where Catholics will go, is what are the bishops going to do about it. At last count (the last figure I saw was from May 3rd) the number of U.S. Bishops who have spoken out against Notre Dame's decision is up to 68. That amounts to about 35% of the U.S. Bishops. Never in my adult life as a Catholic have I ever seen the Bishops of the U.S. so unified around a single issue like this where it was not in their monetary interest be so. And of course this is just the number of Bishops who have spoken out about it. How many agree with their brother bishops but simply can't speak out about it for fear of pissing off the presbyterate or the donors that help keep their schools open.

What is clear to me is that Kmiec's book exemplifies the good and bad of the liberal Catholic position. There is heart in it. There is a lived reality which is informing their theology, and however poor that theology is, charity demands we take account of that lived reality. But there is also deception, mostly self-deception, and there is obfuscation, and there is relativization. These things ought to be address honestly and forthrightly.

Perhaps we can do so here on this blog.

Ostrov

If you haven't see the Russian film "Ostrov," or "The Island," you must. You simply must. This not to be confused, mind you, with the 2005 film by the same name with Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson.

Ostrov is about...well...I won't say anything now. I'll wait a bit before posting on the movie, but it is a must see.

You can get it through Netflix. If you don't have Netflix, buy, beg, and/or steal to see this film. Find a friend who has Netflix and convince them to put it in their queue. Then convince them to put it at the top of their queue. And if they refuse, threaten to harm their pet. And if they don't have a pet, well you should feel free to call them "fatty" or something.

You must see this flick! See it!

The heresies I've known and loved to hate

Part of my job is to try to read some of the stuff that goes across the transom of the average lay person's field of knowing. Among these is the book The Challenge and Spirituality of Catholic Social Teaching by a fellow named Mich. I've read the entirety of the book and I think Mr. Mich a genuine individual, with a good head on his shoulders, and a great big heart. But I cannot deny my having nearly wanting to go bat shit angry when I read about a Sr. Elizabeth Johnson C.S.J. who argues, get this, that we need some humility as a species.


That's right, brother, there is no need for us to feel special about being human just because we can calculate the velocity and force of a large volume of Shakespeare released upon Sr. Johnson's head from a height of two stories. No, no. We're just another species on this great mother goddess earth of ours with nothing but death and destruction to add the great mix of things.


What was that? Oh, that was the sound of Sr. Johnson's cursing in a manner consistent with the highly developed language skills of a homo sapiens after having been struck by the weight of a single volume of one of mankind's greatest achievements. Oh, but I said "mankind." Sorry, sorry, I meant to say "humankind's."


Never mind the fact, of course, that the good Sister finds herself at a point in history where she, an educated woman, gets paid to spit out drivel at Fordham University. Last I checked there were no dolphins teaching courses on great porpoise literature. But I do believe there are several jackasses in the current administration in Washington, and some monkeys as well. But then again, progressive politics is supposed to be one step ahead of us all.