Are Catholics H8rz?

The blog is back, writing now from Bruno Saskatchewan on the great Canadian prairies. As mentioned earlier, I am here, doing this.

I have wanted to weigh in for some time on some of the explosive issues surrounding religious freedom, civil rights, wedding cakes and pizza (!) that have been generally blowing up social media over the past weeks, particularly in the USA where most of my readers are. As usual I have an aversion to the pack mentality where we all have to write about the same topic on the same week (I cannot stand that aspect of social media, truly). Unfortunately this means I’m usually weighing in with whatever I have to say after everyone else has grown bored with the subject and moved on to something quite different. Nonetheless, here are a few of my thoughts.

First, it is good to reflect that we live in a world where in some countries gay people are thrown off of high buildings or jailed, and where in some of those same countries or others Christians are hunted and gunned down on university campuses or shopping malls. I don’t provide links for these claims; if you don’t know that’s what is actually happening in the world in the year 2015, you really should inform yourself.

While questions of civil liberties and religious freedom are important in any context, it is good to get some perspective. Nobody is killing anybody over these matters in this country, barring the occasional random act of violence that can happen anywhere for any reason. I’m not trying to minimize the facts of the situation, but to situate them, perhaps.

Second, it is odd, isn’t it, that the corporations that are fuming and threatening about not doing business with Indiana or Arkansas don’t seem to have any problem doing business with China, Saudi Arabia, and the whole host of other countries where actual violence is being perpetuated, with the full force of the state, on LGBTQ men and women? Is that not hypocritical? Isn’t it a problem that corporations are using their vast wealth and power to subvert the political processes in these states, and doing so with a great deal of duplicity and cynical moral posturing? I realize I have readers of this blog who differ from me quite a bit on LGBTQ issues—that’s fine, but don’t be taken in by these corporations, and do be alarmed at the degree of political power they have displayed in these events.

What I really want to write about, though, is this whole question of ‘hate’, or ‘H8’ as the current spelling has it. Leaving aside what is actually a thorny question, capable of more than one answer, I believe—can a Christian vendor sell goods to a same-sex wedding service?—we can all agree that it is wrong to hate people and right to love people. Certainly, from a Christian perspective, this is beyond dispute, being the central commandment our Founder gave us, right?

But it is not hatred to say to someone, “I believe you are doing something wrong.” It is not hatred to say, “I believe God has revealed to us that this particular action is always wrong, so you really shouldn’t do that thing.” It is not hatred to say “I don’t think I can help you to do that thing, since I believe it is wrong.” It is not hatred to say, “I disagree with you.”

Hatred is saying, well, “I hate you. You disgust me. I want you to die a painful death and then burn in Hell for all eternity. I will do anything in my power to hurt you.” That is hatred. Personally, I cannot think of any human being on this earth who I hate, to be quite honest. Even people who I believe are doing terribly evil things—people who hurt children, traffic drugs, perform abortions, and so forth—I feel deeply sorry for these people more than anything, since I do believe that whatever harm they do to others, they do incomparably worse damage to themselves.

So I do say to any LGBTQ person who may read this blog that I love you, I wish you well, I want nothing for you but happiness and joy. And I firmly believe that to engage in sex with a person of one’s own gender is always a deeply wrong thing to do, that even though it may not feel like it, it is profoundly damaging to the human person, and that the true way to happiness and joy is the difficult practice of chastity and continence, the mastery of one’s sexual appetite so that it is only expressed in a morally right way. And that the only right way to engage in sexual intercourse is for a man and a woman to first wed each other (forging a bond that cannot be broken by any subsequent legal decree) and then come together in sexual union.

That is my belief, and I express it with love and affection and a great desire for all men and women to be happy and joyous in God who alone can make us happy. I would also say the same thing, then, to anyone else who is engaged in sexual activity outside of marriage. And I would say the same thing to those who are engaged in any other kind of practice that is against the moral law—violence, theft, lying, greed, and so forth.

But that’s quite enough for one blog post, and pretty much what I have to say on the matter. Let us love one another on this Mercy Sunday, and let us know that we are all sinners, all fall short of moral perfection, but that God’s mercy covers us all and calls us to rise from the tomb of our sins and offenses to live with the Risen Christ in truth and in love.

You Know, It Turns Out That We're NOT Supposed to Judge, After All!

O Lord, Master of my life, grant that I may not be infected with the spirit of slothfulness and faint-heartedness, of ambition and vain talking.

Grant instead to me your servant the spirit of purity and humility, of patience and love.

O Lord and King, bestow upon me the grace of being aware of my sins, and of not judging my brother. For you are blessed forever and ever. Amen.

O God be merciful to me a sinner, and purify me. (3 times)

Yes O Lord and King. bestow...

Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian

I made reference to this prayer on the blog yesterday. It is an integral part of our MH Lenten observance, incorporated into our daily morning prayer. We prostrate ourselves after each petition of the prayer, standing to make a metany during the three 'O God...' petitions.

There is much that can be said about this prayer (in fact, I did a whole series on it a couple years ago - if you're interested, you can search for 'Ephrem' in the little search box at the top bar and see what I said about the whole prayer. But today, in light of the new blog format and the 'Sunday Catechesis' slot I'm trying to fill, I want to talk about the last petition of the prayer and what the Church actually teaches about judgment and sin, moral truth and our relationship to it in regards to ourselves and others.

So often, of course, the Gospel passage in question (Matt 7: 1-2) is badly misinterpreted. It does not mean that we cannot say that a specific type of human action is morally wrong. It does not mean that we cannot know the truth about the moral law--both what we can reason our way towards and what God has revealed to us about these matters. If it meant that, then this one verse of the Sermon of the Mount would, among other things, contradict the rest of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus tells us all sorts of things that we should or should not do. It would also contradict the whole of Scripture which in its entirety reveals to us a God who is very concerned to tell us what sort of things we should or should not do, which is precisely what is meant by the phrase 'moral good or evil'.

So if Matthew 7 is not a prescription for moral agnosticism or relativism, then what does it mean? Well, it means quite a lot, actually. The Church has always maintained a strict distinction between the objective wrong of an action and the subjective guilt of the performer of that action. The former simply is what it is--certain things are wrong to do, and cannot become right to do through various circumstances: they are intrinsically evil deeds. And they are wrong because they damage us in some way, even if the damage is not immediately apparent, or is far outweighed in our minds by the immediate benefits or pleasures attached to the act.

The subjective guilt of the actor is determined by his or her knowledge of what the action is, that it is wrong, and his or her freedom in consenting to that action. And those things we can barely even know about ourselves, don't you think? How on earth can we know them about another person, even if we think we know the person very well?

So no, we cannot judge. Jesus--the same Jesus who condemned adultery (Matt 5:32, 19:9) and upheld the commandments of God (Matt 19:18)--has also commanded us not to judge one another. We can, and indeed must at the peril of our souls, teach what the moral law is, in general and in specifics. We can, then, by strict logical necessity say of this or that person doing such and such an action, 'They are doing something wrong, and this is truly a terrible state of affairs.'

But we cannot say, of another human being, 'this person has committed a sin'. Sin pertains to the subjective guilt of the person, and there is no way we can determine that, nor is it any concern of ours to do so. Absolutely not, and by doing so we become just as much law breakers as they are.

Not to mention that even if we see someone doing something terribly wrong, we must remember that's all we are seeing: we did not see, say, the terrible struggle with temptation beforehand, the deep darkness of mind and heart during, the grief and compunction afterwards. Of all of that, we know nothing. No, we are not to judge. Leave it to God. 

And for our own part, if we do indeed for various reasons have to take some interest or involve ourselves in the affairs and problems of other people, our clear call as Christians is to err profoundly and radically on the side of mercy, charity, assuming the best, always allowing for every possible extenuating and mitigating factor, quick to excuse, slow to criticize, never to condemn.

"O Lord and King, bestow upon me the grace of being aware of my sins, and of not judging my brother."

Dear Canada: Thou Shalt Not Kill. That Is All.

On Friday the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the section of the Criminal Code that outlawed physician assisted suicide. It is now up to Parliament to provide some kind of regulatory statutes to permit doctors to end the lives of their patients.

Simply, euthanasia has arrived in Canada—as always in these matters, not by a process of public consultation and the expression of democratic will, but by court fiat. And I have no great optimism that we will be able to turn back this tide or do much to roll back the inevitable progression every other country has experienced whereby it is applied to broader and broader categories of vulnerable people (children! infants! the clinically depressed! the lonely!) with less and less true consent involved.

It is difficult for me to write about these life issues, because of my passion for them. That fact is, if I said what I really thought about the Supreme Court and the general ‘progressive’ movement in society (why is it seemingly always a progress in finding more people to kill, or forcing more people to participate in the killing?), I would use language that is both unsuitable for a priest and, ummm, unhelpful for advancing public discourse.

No, it appears that euthanasia is a fact of life in Canada for the foreseeable future. May God have mercy on our souls. I will confine myself in this blog post, since it is Sunday and time for our weekly catechism lesson, to giving the Church’s teaching on the matter, so that Catholics at least may form their consciences accordingly and we ourselves may make the decisions that are in accord with God’s laws and right reason.

So here it is, the radical and bizarre Catholic teaching on end of life issues and care of the sick and dying: ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Wild, eh? Those wacky Catholics—where do we get this stuff? It is one the most tragic signs of our times that we need to state that it is wrong for one human being to take deliberate steps to end the life of another human being. That this has become an odd doctrine that needs some kind of intellectual defense, rather than the very underpinning that makes it possible for human beings to live together in any kind of social unity. If my doctor can legally kill me, how can I really trust myself to him or her at the time when I am most vulnerable and helpless, when I find myself in the situation where I most need to make that act of trust?

Human life is not given to human beings to end at will. The exceptions to this rule—immediate and necessary self-defense, the very specific cases of soldiers in a just war or the state executing criminals—are well established, rigorously limited, and not to be expanded. There is nothing new here—people have always grown old, become sick, and died—and the Church has never taught that we have the authority to either end our own lives or the lives of another because of that perennial fact.

What is new is the radical expansion of medical technology allowing the extension of old age and illness to hitherto unexperienced prolongation. And the Church does indeed offer a very careful and nuanced teaching here. We are not ‘vitalists’, believing that human life must be extended at all costs and no matter what the burden of suffering upon the patient. We do believe that human life has a beginning (conception) and an end, and this end is the naturally occurring death of the person. It is perfectly moral—in fact it may be in a specific situation immoral not to do so—to suspend further medical interventions in a case where the burdens these are imposing outweigh any possible benefit to the person.

The Church no longer uses the language of ‘ordinary vs. extraordinary means’, as this has not proven to be a helpful tool for moral medical decision making. Rather, it is a matter of ‘benefits vs. burdens’, always understanding that we are not doing anything to cause the death of the person, but rather choosing not to impede the actual dying process that is happening.

The Church also has no difficulty with the managing of pain and other symptoms that detract from the patient’s quality of life, even if the medical intervention has the effect of shortening the person’s life. Here we have the principle of double effect—a single action with two effects, one good and one bad. As long as the intention is to reduce pain and not to kill, this is a perfectly moral course of action.

So that is the basic moral doctrine of the Church: no direct killing of a person is ever permissible, but withdrawal of medical treatment may be, as is appropriate care to reduce suffering even if that hastens death. The application of this rather simple teaching to specific situations does get complex, because human life is complex, and it is wise to seek counsel in these matters.

So that is all I have to say on the subject, at least for now. Since our medical system is in the process of adopting an ethos so radically opposed to the sanctity of human life, it behoves us Catholics and other people of good will to at least know ourselves what our right relationship is to questions of life and death.

I ask my many non-Canadian readers to pray for my home country of Canada which is so in love with death, seemingly, and let us pray for the world which holds human life so cheaply, so much of the time. May our good and merciful God have mercy upon us all.

An Anatomy of Good and Evil

It is time for the Sunday Catechesis, that most popular of my columns, based on the stats. This week I would like to address something I have been aware of for quite a while, namely the very poor grasp many have of fundamental moral teaching – not just the different commandments and ‘shalt nots’ of the law, but an even more basic level – what is a moral act? What are we looking at when we are evaluating the morality of an action? The paragraphs in the Catechism of the Catholic Church where this material is found are pp. 1749-1756. I recommend reading them in full; here I will just give a précis. 

Incidentally, this is a genuinely nuanced and complex element of moral thought in our tradition, so of course in a blog post I can only sketch the outline of it for you.

First, if an act is not done as a free and deliberate choice, it is not an act subject to moral evaluation. This is why emotions in themselves are neither morally good nor evil. They are not voluntary in themselves (the actions we take that arise from our emotions, on the other hand, are). Neither is a sneeze, a cough, a fall down a flight of stairs. Once freedom has left the building, there is absolutely no discussion of moral good or evil—it is the absolute presupposition for morality.

This is why morality is concerned with what is called the human act. Human beings do all kind of actions, all the various actions of a human. But it only becomes a human act, and hence a moral act, if the rational will has deliberated and chosen to do it.

What makes that human act good or evil? There are three ingredients that each contribute to the evaluation of the action. Think of a human act as a cake. There are the basic things that make a cake a cake—flour, liquid, eggs, leaven. Then there are the additional ingredients that make it the kind of cake it is—fruit, chocolate, etc. And there is the frosting that augments the goodness of the cake. If any one of these three is all wrong—if you substitute arsenic for flour, thumbtacks for raisins, or roofing tar for frosting—you are not going to have a good cake, no matter how good the other ingredients are, right? It is the same with any human act—all the parts of it have to be free from evil.

First there is the object of the act. This is the immediate ‘good’ that is chosen by the rational will. I choose to drink a cup of coffee in the morning. I choose to take some money lying on a table that is not mine. I choose to give alms to charity—the immediate chosen act, in other words, considered apart from any further goals or details. The moral judgment made in regard to the object is whether or not this good is in conformity with the true good, an evaluation made by considering everything we know about the moral law revealed to us by God and by our own rational reflection. We can see from the examples I give that an object can be itself morally good, evil, or neutral.

Second, there is the intention of the act. This is the further goal, the reason why we are choosing the immediate good of the object. What am I working towards here? What is the ultimate purpose of doing this? And is this ultimate purpose in accord with the true good of my person?

Third, the circumstances of the action affect its moral evaluation. These circumstances include the consequences of the act, and a host of other surrounding elements—the time and place it is done, the manner in which it is done, and many other things.

All three of these have to be consonant with the true good of the human person for an act to be a moral good. To perform an objective act that contradicts this good (taking money that does not belong to you, inflicting physical or mental pain on a prisoner) for a good end (to pay a bill, to get information from them) does not make the action good. On the other hand, to perform an act that is morally neutral or itself good (spending hours listening to a lonely person) with an evil intention (so as to seduce them into fornication!) makes that good object an evil act.

The circumstances cannot make that evil act a good act, and normally (since they are outside the act itself) do not suffice to make a good act evil, but they do affect the relative goodness or evil of the act. Whether one steals five dollars or five hundred is a relevant consideration. Duress or deep emotional distress and anguish may also be a circumstance that mitigates guilt considerably. Other circumstances, by contrast, can make the act more evil (I already have lots of money, say, and the person I am stealing from is a pauper).

In rare cases, circumstances may be such that an otherwise unobjectionable action is rendered evil (I am eating some food, with the good intention of sustaining life and health, but it happens to be the last bit of food in the house and one of my housemates, I know, has done heavy physical labor that day and needs the food more than I do).

Anyhow, there are tremendous nuances and fine distinctions that enter in with all of these matters—the Church’s moral doctrine is not only the simplistic list of rules people think it is, although there most certainly are rules—but that is sufficient for the day. Summary: for a free act to be a morally good action, it must not be objectively contrary to the good of humanity, there must be some good intention in performing it, and the circumstances must not be such as to maker that action bad. In short, to make a cake you need all the ingredients to be what they should be, and if one of them is rotten and foul, the cake is rotten and foul. So it is with every free human act.

On The Other Hand, The Pope Is Pretty Important

Sunday Catechism time, and this week I want to follow up on yesterday’s post on the relative unimportance of the papacy in light of the bigger picture—our call to follow Christ, to believe and proclaim the Gospel and to become the saints God made us to be. Just in case you missed yesterday’s post (just scroll down – that’s how blogs work!), or have forgotten what I said, I pointed out that for the greater history of the Church, most of the faithful and even the clergy have barely known the name of the Pope, let alone intently followed every word he spoke (on airplanes or off them), and yet here we all are, Catholics, so somehow the faith has gotten passed down. Our modern Catholic obsession with the papacy and whoever its current occupant is, is not a sign of great spiritual maturity and health.

That being said, the Pope is important. The papacy was instituted by Christ in his commissioning of Peter as the rock on which He would build his Church, and clearly the Lord does not do things without good reason.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines it thus:

The Pope, Bishop of Rome and Peter's successor, is the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful. For the Roman Pontiff, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ, and as pastor of the entire Church has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered. (CCC 882)

The key word here is unity. This is the deep meaning and purpose of the papacy in the Church, to be the visible source of our unity. The invisible source of our unity is the Holy Spirit, of course, operating in our hearts through grace, but it is essential to our Catholic understanding of things that the invisible realities of grace always are expressed in the visible life of the Church.

The papacy has a sacramental quality to it, then. It is not itself one of the seven sacraments, of course, although the Pope is by definition the Bishop of Rome and thus derives his ministry from the Holy Order of the episcopacy. But it is a sacramental, a visible sign of invisible realities. As holy water is a sign of our baptismal seal, and our use in faith of it is efficacious in making that grace of baptism active and operative, so the papacy is a sign of our unity in Christ, in the Church, and our fidelity to that sign is efficacious is building up the unity in love of the Body of Christ, so that it be the sign of God’s presence and love in the world that it is meant to be.

In practical terms, this means constantly striving towards a unity of faith—unity of mind and heart—with Peter being the standard bearer of that unity. That which the Church, led in this matter by the Pope, defines as to be held dogmatically or definitively, we are to hold, or we must conclude that we are no longer part of the catholica, the communion of faith.

And that which the Church, led again by Peter, holds out for non-dogmatically or non-definitively we are to submit to with docility and a spirit of trust. It is the role of the Pope and the college of bishops in union with him to order all these matters; it is the role of the pastors of the Church to instruct the faithful as to that good order—catechesis. It is the role of the laity of the Church to do their best to understand the faith we have been given, according to their individual capacity and the needs of their state of life. A high school religion teacher may need to have a highly developed understanding of all of this; a subsistence farmer in central Africa may need somewhat less.

So the Pope has an important role in establishing what is, and what is not, the Catholic faith, what are the precise intellectual peripheries beyond which we cannot go without ceasing to be Catholic. He also has a governing role in establishing a proper unity-in-diversity of pastoral practice and liturgical norms, and of course of overseeing the good order of the household of the Church—a titanic administrative task in this global era, about which this poor little priest writing these words knows very little—the good Lord has spared me much exposure to that particular difficult work of service in the Church.

Besides striving for unity of faith under Peter’s leadership, I believe as Catholics we are called to safeguard the unity of charity of the Church in regard to the Pope by striving to love him, to support his work for us with our prayers, by having a basic tone of respect in how we speak of the Pope, by being very judicious and careful if we honestly feel we must criticize him, and to offer those criticisms with great caution, great solicitude to not violate the unity of the Church and the bonds of charity within it.

We have to be aware, especially in this Internet age when everyone has a megaphone capable of amplifying our words to the ends of the earth, that words have great power to sow division and doubt, to arouse anger or fear, to weaken the faith of those who are perhaps a bit shaky, to quench the flickering flame or break the bruised reed. A careful, respectful tone, a mindfulness of the central role of the Pope, in particular, as the visible sign of unity, and so a reluctance to break that unity—all of this is what is needed, and is so often lacking in these days.

The Pope is important, and so above all let us pray for that poor man and his near-impossible job, and do our part—not to run the Church with him (nobody’s asking us to do that, thank God!)—but to live the Gospel and to joyfully and generously give ourselves over to the mission of the Church according to our specific vocation and talent.