Babies and Distributism

Here's a little taste of G. K. Chesterton, whose writing style is somewhat ironic because as he writes, the reader has the constant sensation that he is being led somewhere and only the author knows.  He is a master of paradoxical conclusions designed to blow his ideological opponents out of the water.

I hope it is not a secret arrogance to say that I do not think I am exceptionally arrogant; or if I were, my religion would prevent me from being proud of my pride. Nevertheless, for those of such a philosophy, there is a very terrible temptation to intellectual pride, in the welter of wordy and worthless philosophies that surround us today. Yet there are not many things that move me to anything like a personal contempt. I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification. I do not feel any contempt for a Bolshevist, who is a man driven to the same negative simplification by a revolt against very positive wrongs. But there is one type of person for whom I feel what I can only call contempt. And that is the popular propagandist of what he or she absurdly describes as Birth-Control.

I despise Birth-Control first because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly word. It is also an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would at first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth. It only makes sure that there shall never be any birth to control. It cannot for instance, determine sex, or even make any selection in the style of the pseudo-science of Eugenics. Normal people can only act so as to produce birth; and these people can only act so as to prevent birth. But these people know perfectly well as I do that the very word Birth-Prevention would strike a chill into the public, the instant it was blazoned on headlines, or proclaimed on platforms, or scattered in advertisements like any other quack medicine. They dare not call it by its name, because its name is very bad advertising. Therefore they use a conventional and unmeaning word, which may make the quack medicine sound more innocuous.

Second, I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing. It is not even a step along the muddy road they call Eugenics; it is a flat refusal to take the first and most obvious step along the road of Eugenics. Once grant that their philosophy is right, and their course of action is obvious; and they dare not take it; they dare not even declare it. If there is no authority in things which Christendom has called moral, because their origins were mystical, then they are clearly free to ignore all the difference between animals and men; and treat men as we treat animals. They need not palter with the stale and timid compromise and convention called Birth-Control. Nobody applies it to the cat. The obvious course for Eugenists is to act towards babies as they act towards kittens. Let all the babies be born; and then let us drown those we do not like. I cannot see any objection to it; except the moral or mystical sort of objection that we advance against Birth-Prevention. And that would be real and even reasonable Eugenics; for we could then select the best, or at least the healthiest, and sacrifice what are called the unfit. By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly from mercenary motives. Until I see a real pioneer and progressive leader coming out with a good, bold, scientific programme for drowning babies, I will not join the movement.

But there is a third reason for my contempt, much deeper and therefore more difficult to express; in which is rooted all my reasons for being anything I am or attempt to be; and above all, for being a Distributist. Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be "free" to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word "free." By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires' notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have.

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

G. K. Chesterton, "Babies and Distributism," from The Well and the Shallows

I hope you enjoyed that little article as much as I have. Little did Chesterton know... or perhaps he did suspect... that before long an age would come in which men would murder babies in the womb, starve them in hospital janitor closets, and openly speak in the classroom of murdering them into their first years of life postpartum.

What's Caesar Got Behind His Back?

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is hiding some data behind its back. Rather, it's hiding the data from the public. Our policymakers are given access to it, but we, the policymakers' bosses, are to be kept from seeing it.  It seems the CDC is recommending that the Federal government put the kabosh on abstinence-only sex education because their stats on its effectiveness are "inconsistent." 

Perhaps the results are inconsistent with their ideology.  The fact that "comprehensive risk reduction" approaches, ones that favor the use of prophylactic measures, show "limited direct evidence of effectiveness," doesn't seem to stop them from recommending those approaches.

It is telling that there will be no public scrutiny of the data until after public policy is set.  So much for transparency in government.

Our cultural powers are making ceaseless war upon the ways of life developed over eighteen or nineteen hundred years.  They feel Christianity responsible for the misery they experience in lives evacuated of meaning by the expulsion of God.  The economic powers that be are funding this war in order to enrich themselves.  Christians, it is our job, to show the beauty of the Christian way of living by our conduct of life.  While doing what we can to advance the Christian vision, we must brace ourselves for the likelihood that our triumph will not follow obvious victory, but apparent defeat.  Look to a crucifix for a role model.

Holy Cow - Articulate Defender of Georgetown's "No Birth Control" Policy

And in, of all places, the Washington Post / Newsweek "On Faith Blogs."  That's right, a blogger for Georgetown / On Faith's blog has written this piece, supporting Georgetown's insurance plans, that do not cover contraception, and chide the university leadership for skirting the issue quietly rather than offering a cogent defense of that policy.  Mr. Deneen, the blogger in question, offers that cogent defense in his piece.  It is not meant to be a conclusive, syllogistic argument, but it is cogent and strong, arguing both that birth control is wrong (or at least, that the Church is not wrong for warning against it) and that Georgetown is right not to finance it.

I am really surprised and impressed.

Eighteen Kids, No Joke... Just Love

You gotta check out this video interview from WashingtonPost.com. The family has eighteen children, and they love it! Most of us aren't as saintly as they seem to be, for sure, but one has to wonder - maybe it's the willingness to love that we lack, sometimes. Certainly our life circumstances and emotional capacities don't lend themselves, usually, to such a big family... but I wonder how willing I am to stretch myself.

AIDS Worker Says Africans Don't Need Condoms

I just picked up on this awesome article in Zenit's newsfeed from last week. Thanks to Dara for posting it herself.

I've heard the AIDS worker from Meeting Point Kampala speak. Her name is Rose Busingye and she is a part of the Communion and Liberation movement. She is amazing, and so is the work of Meeting Point. These people know what they are talking about. It is a little reported fact that of all African countries, Uganda, with its Christianity-friendly government, has led the way in reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS. In fact, in Uganda, the disease has been brought almost to a standstill, not by condoms or other prophylactic measures, but by chastity-related education.

The Perennial Philosophy

The Perennial Philosophy is a philosophy not invented, but identified, by Aldous Huxley - yes, the same dude who would go on to recommend LSD as a way to gain a new view of reality. Ok, so, before he got to that point, he wrote extensively about how certain elements of thought appeared in diverse sources. The basic principles of this philosophy found among puritans and pygmies are simple. Reality is real - both spiritual stuff and material stuff, and we cannot make them whatever we like just by intending to do so, or by calling them something different. A rose is a rose is a rose, and by any other name, it still smells the same. St. Thomas Aquinas saw it. Confucius saw it, and even said that the restoration of proper names to their things was the foundation of any real reform. We have to call a spade a spade. So those are the basic principles - reality is real, and we have to call things what they are. When we get away from this path, we get into real danger, the sort of danger of a man driving a car through a shopping mall, the whole way telling his passengers, "Relax, it's just the normal 9th Street Tunnel traffic! I can handle it."

The traditional moral code prohibiting murder, theft, etc., is part of it. The same perennial philosophy, this common inheritance of humanity's common sense, also sees marriage as the foundational unit of society and prohibits those things that directly attack it, like adultery, and also those things that call its purpose and function into question, such as contraception and homosexual relationships. These things call the purpose of marriage into question because, according to the perennial philosophy whether found in the West's Aristotelian Thomism or in China's Confucism, the purpose of marriage is the begetting of children and the mutual benefit of the spouses. Lopping off one of those purposes does not merely leave a sterilized marriage, but a crippled or imitation marriage. You can call it what you like. The pioneers of our present situation called it "companionate marriage," marriage for companionship only. But whatever they called it, it was not marriage according to the perenniel philosophy.

The trick in undermining the perennial philosophy in the West has been that the worst things are saved for last. Nobody came out eighty years ago and said what they wanted for this foundational institution not merely of the West but of all human society. They didn't say that they wanted to see it virtually liquidated. They said they wanted to make it more about love. That sounded real nice, I bet. But they snuck in a concept of love that had chiefly to do with feelings, and was not so much about permanence and the begetting of children. Everything since regarding marriage has been legitimated on the basis of this new, false concept of love - love as a feeling. The problem with feelings isn't that they are bad. They are unstable. And obedience to feelings as if they were gods explains a great deal of the fifty percent divorce rate, for starters.

It's going to be hard for us to transcend our feelings and do what's right even when it doesn't feel good. We won't be able to do it on our own, and as a culture we've gone too far down this road of irresponsibility masquerading as love merely to tweak our course. We need wholesale repentence. Only Jesus can bring it. We who know we need it also need to pray for it. If the Pelosis of the world are leading us into moral oblivion, they will be held accountable. If we who think we know better don't spend hours fervently praying, by our prayers hitting the brakes, we will be held accountable for that.

St. Thomas Aquinas made the bulk of his academic career going around Europe after a man named Sieger of Brabant, who said you could have contradictory truths (not perceptions, but realities), and that whatever you called a thing, that it was. Everywhere St. Thomas went, he calmly tried to get folks to listen to common sense and reason. While he lived, he was very successful because he was very prayerful. Let's follow his example.

St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Holy Smoke! I Wish He Were Wrong, but...

Read an article about the address of His Eminence James Francis Card. Stafford, given the other day at the Catholic University of America (CUA).

Among other things, the Cardinal said that in the last 40 years since Humanae Vitae was so resoundingly rejected by most Catholics from wealthy nations, the US has thrown itself "upon ruins." Pause for a moment and reflect upon the strength of the language that the Cardinal uses in refering to the President-Elect's abortion policy: "aggressive, disruptive, and apocalyptic." Rarely do churchmen use strong language; in fact, these days it is a favorite of Catholics who are partisans of the GOP to criticize our bishops for failing to use strong language, let alone strong actions. Apocalyptic, most importantly, cannot be taken as "just a big word that means 'bad.'" Spoken by a churchman, it must be taken to have reference to the apocalypse - the final revelation of evil and its overthrow by the Kingdom of God at the end of time.

Now, Cardinal Stafford is an American, and is in Rome serving the Holy Father as Major Penitentiary. That means he is head of an office called the Apostolic Penitentiary, and its job is threefold. Firstly, the office regulates indulgences, issues new ones, and so forth. Secondly, the office grants any possible dispensations to various sacramental impediments. If for some reason a man is prohibited from being ordained or a couple from being married, for example, the office tries to find a way to make it possible. Thirdly, the office resolves on behalf of the Holy Father those excommunications that only the Holy Father has authority to remit. Basically, the Penitentiary are good guys. They are a happy office in the Vatican, the ones who get people out of purgatory, who find ways to make it possible for an otherwise well qualified man to get ordained in spite of a sketchy distant past.

And the head of the happy office is mad, or at least, very unoptimistic about America's course. And he's not talking about the economy either, folks.

Happy Birthday, Humanae

Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on the regulation of births, had the 40th anniversary of its release today. Here are some excerpts and a link to the document:

1. The most serious duty of transmitting human life, for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress.

At all times the fulfillment of this duty has posed grave problems to the conscience of married persons, but, with the recent evolution of society, changes have taken place that give rise to new questions which the Church could not ignore, having to do with a matter which so closely touches upon the life and happiness of men.

2. The changes which have taken place are in fact noteworthy and of varied kinds. In the first place, there is the rapid demographic development. Fear is shown by many that world population is growing more rapidly than the available resources, with growing distress to many families and developing countries, so that the temptation for authorities to counter this danger with radical measures is great. Moreover, working and lodging conditions, as well as increased exigencies both in the economic field and in that of education, often make the proper education of a larger number of children difficult today. A change is also seen both in the manner of considering the person of woman and her place in society, and in the value to be attributed to conjugal love in marriage, and also in the appreciation to be made of the meaning of conjugal acts in relation to that love.

Finally and above all, man has made stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature, such that he tends to extend this domination to his own total being: to the body, to psychical life, to social life and even to the laws which regulate the transmission of life...

17. Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the Church in this field is based, if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificial birth control. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men -- especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point -- have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.

Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy.

Consequently, if the mission of generating life is not to be exposed to the arbitrary will of men, one must necessarily recognize insurmountable limits to the possibility of man's domination over his own body and its functions; limits which no man, whether a private individual or one invested with authority, may licitly surpass. And such limits cannot be determined otherwise than by the respect due to the integrity of the human organism and its functions, according to the principles recalled earlier, and also according to the correct understanding of the "principle of totality" illustrated by our predecessor Pope Pius XII...

18. It can be foreseen that this teaching will perhaps not be easily received by all: Too numerous are those voices -- amplified by the modern means of propaganda -- which are contrary to the voice of the Church. To tell the truth, the Church is not surprised to be made, like her divine Founder, a "sign of contradiction", yet she does not because of this cease to proclaim with humble firmness the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical. Of such laws the Church was not the author, nor consequently can she be their arbiter; she is only their depositary and their interpreter, without ever being able to declare to be licit that which is not so by reason of its intimate and unchangeable opposition to the true good of man.

In defending conjugal morals in their integral wholeness, the Church knows that she contributes towards the establishment of a truly human civilization; she engages man not to abdicate from his own responsibility in order to rely on technical means; by that very fact she defends the dignity of man and wife. Faithful to both the teaching and the example of the Savior, she shows herself to be the sincere and disinterested friend of men, whom she wishes to help, even during their earthly sojourn, "to share as sons in the life of the living God, the Father of all men."

Thank you, Holy Father Paul. Sorry we didn't listen. Please pray we finally learn.

Read the entire encyclical at http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul06/p6humana.htm.

Witnesses to Christ

Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec 28)

Lest we get to watery-eyed about the meaning of Christmas, we should recall the words of the Prince of Peace Himself, "I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled! I have a baptism that I am to be baptized with, and how I am constrained until it is accomplished! Do you think I came to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division," (Lk 12:49-51). The message of Christmas is not peace on earth, not primarily at least; rather Jesus Christ himself is the message. Try telling people that in whatever words, and you will quickly learn what He meant speaking about causing division.

Two thousand years ago a cynical, petty tyrant named Herod ordered the slaughter of dozens, scores of innocent babes in Bethlehem and the surrounding district. He did so in the vain hope of stopping God's will, in hope of stopping the advent of the Messiah-king. To this date, including now as we sit here at our computers, hundreds and thousands of Christians are murdered each year in the vain hope of stopping the spread of the gospel, of stopping the spread of the Messiah's Kingdom. National governments collaborate to reduce the population of the developing world to "sustainable" levels. One feels that this language is a cover for a lie. Who ro what is being "sustained" by the programs of birth control, sterilization, and abortion in the developing world? Are they being built up? Or are we in the West being permitted to continue our lavish lifestyle by keeping them in firmly controllable numbers?

We in the formerly Christian West now indulge every appetite and repudiate whatever doctrines interfere with our desires. A gospel of wealth and prosperity, or a gospel of environmental stewarship, or a gospel of multiculturalism, or a gospel of nice all wrestle against and threaten now more than ever to subdue the simple Gospel of Jesus Christ. Moreover, we exploit and slaughter our own children in a horrifying orgy of debauchery and bloodletting, subjecting them to pornography, sexual abuse, neglect, and even outright death.

We must wonder in all the warring against children that the ages have seen, who is Satan attempting to strike? Perhaps he fears the second advent of the Messiah, and so is doing everything in his power to frustrate it.

If we reduce the meaning of Christmas to being kind, being calm, not worrying about what goes on around us, far from living in Faith, we will have abandoned it. The blood of the Darfur Christians, the blood of the Indian and Pakistani martyrs, the blood of Chinese Catholics, all these call out to us that the meaning of Christmas is Christ, and to stand for Christ necessarily entails receiving resistance. If nobody is concerned about what we are saying as a Church, we must not be saying anything very Christian, or even very interesting. Happily, this increasingly is not the case.

Singles and the Contraceptive Mentality

Moral theologians and philosophers call an intention that is inherently part-and-parcel with an action its proximal intention. Proximal intentions are inseparable from their acts. It is possible deliberately to flip a light switch so that you can read, so that you can hide in the dark, so that you can cross through a room, and so on. Those reasons are ulterior, or distant. It is not possible deliberately to flip a light switch without intending to alter the state of the switch. Altering the switch's state is the proximal intention for turning it up or down. Proximal intention is always important in discerning the moral goodness or wickedness of an action, because it is always part of the action.

What's wrong with contraception, at its heart, is not necessarily the distant motivation for not begetting more children at present. The Church recognizes any number of reasons for wanting to delay having more children just right now. What's wrong with contraception is the mentality that necessarily goes with it. Whereas natural family planning works with the natural plan that God has crafted in order to influence the size of one's family, artificial contraception in effect says, "God's plan isn't fool-proof enough for me; He isn't to be trusted; I have a more secure way." It would be nonsensical to use artificial means rather than the natural means without presupposing that the artificial means are better than the ones God has provided. The more distant reason for regulating the size of one's family will almost certainly be corrupted by the motivation for preferring artificial to natural means. If one does not trust God with the means of family planning, how can one expect to trust God with the size of one's family, or for that matter, the purpose for having a family? The heart of "the contraceptive mentality" can be summarized, "God, your idea for us to have five children might be quite nice, but really, we'd rather not, because we'd like to have such-and-such instead, and to make sure you don't accidentally get your way, we are going to take cautionary measures."

Single people can fall into this mindset in analogous ways. I am not planning the number of children I will have, nor how to get them through college. I am not even married. But God does ask things of me, and sometimes I'd rather not give them, because, really I'd rather do such-and-such instead. "Spend time with this lonely person," God might whisper into my heart. "Right," I might respond in a cold, callous monotone, "but I'd rather go with my friends because they're much more interesting to me." I might hear a homily about tithing, especially relevant to those of us who have no children to demand sacrifice of us. I might respond, "Yes, but I have so little extra money, especially after buying my gadgets, coffee, eating out, movies, blue jeans, books, and all those other things I really, really need. I mean, it's not like they're starving people in the world, are there? I help out here or there. I've done my part. You've no right to expect more from me, God." Or I might not bother responding at all.

What's at the heart of what God wants for us is for us to be open to His will. That's because He is smarter than us, and knows us better than we know ourselves, and He wants to make us happier than we can imagine. But when we are faced with two options: self-sacrifice and immediate gratification, it is very, very hard to select self-sacrifice in faith that God will provide all that we could ever need or want. The path of self-sacrifice - the long, rocky, narrow ascent to Calvary - is the path of Christ. The other path isn't necessarily evil, it's just broader and easier. But then we must remind ourselves about what our Blessed Lord said about the path to hell (Mt 7:13).

It's not that the path to holiness is long and miserable. It can be, at times, but most of the time isn't. In fact, the communion of a deep and heartfelt community of love is made possible by the willingness to give of ourselves to others, and to receive what they want to give us, rather than trying to take things for ourselves. The less we hold back, the more deep and intimate the communion will be among neighbors, friends, and brothers. Especially when the giving gets deep, we will need to dig deeper than we go, and so we will have to rely on God to provide what we need so that we can keep giving. That means that we will need to develop our communion with Him. So our communion with others becomes an occasion for growth in holiness.

As single people we must always be on the lookout for chances to give, to sacrifice, to love. Without being surrounded by nagging spouses and children, without braces and ballet lessons to pay for, we might find ourselves becoming more and more selfish. We might slip into a contraceptive mentality without ever even noticing. Where a married couple might use a barrier method to keep themselves safe from the risk of expanding their heart to make room for one more, we singles might accidentally build barriers because of the risk and so never expand our heart to make room for more than one.