Holding up a mirror to Planned Parenthood

I'm very busy today, but I feel like this post is necessary to read and assimilate for everyone concerned with the fighting the moral war we've been fighting since Eve bit the apple. It's especially important for all Christians and other Pro-life people upon the release of the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress to agree that the undercover work they do is good and just and justified. Here's the meat of it:

Here are just a few of the implications of verbal pacifism. On that theory, the following activities would be intrinsically evil, just like using child suicide bombers against the Nazis — and it would be better to die, and let millions of others be tortured, raped or killed, rather than engage in them. In fact, doing any one of them would be a sin sufficient to damn one’s soul to hell:

• Deceiving the Pharaoh who wished to kill all the newborn male Hebrews — as the midwives did in Exodus 1:15-21. (The Bible tells us that “God dealt well with the midwives.”)
• Deceiving priest-hunters by using assumed names, as Jesuit missionaries did when they ministered in Reformation England, and St. Miguel Pro did in Mexico in the 1920s.
• Deceiving the Nazis to rescue Jews from the gas chambers, as Oskar Schindler did.
• Distributing false baptismal certificates so that Jews could pass as Gentiles and escape extermination, as John XXIII did during World War II.
• Using false documents and false statements in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, like the conspirators working with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who were aided by Pope Pius XII (who passed their messages via Vatican couriers).
• Deceiving the brutal dictators who hoped to hunt down and torture leftist priests, as Pope Francis did while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
• Posing as a child in online forums in order to catch child porn distributors and pedophiles, as police routinely do — having found it the only effective means of capturing such predators.
• Pretending to be an Islamist, in order to infiltrate terrorist organizations like al-Qaida and ISIS, as CIA operatives do.
• Misleading criminal suspects about the evidence you have, as police do to obtain truthful confessions without coercion.
• Infiltrating an abortion business like Planned Parenthood to see if they are breaking laws about statutory rape and organ trafficking, as Live Action and the Center for Medical Progress did.

Any moral philosophy that claims that all these activities are intrinsically evil has got some explaining to do. By insisting on premises that yield such repugnant conclusions, and claiming that the only alternative is a crass and unprincipled pragmatism, verbal pacifists are cutting off their nose to spite their face.

I was so glad to see clarity provided on the morality of some types of trickery that I sent an email to the author. Here's an abbreviated form of the email:

Excellent work, John! I honestly don't know what Mark Shea's deal is. What is really going on here is that people are holding up a MIRROR to the face of Planned Parenthood, they're looking in, seeing the ugliness and saying "YEP. THAT'S ME. THAT'S US. WE *OWN* IT, WE'RE PROUD OF IT." Picasso said something like "art is a lie which helps us see the truth". Well, what CMP does is ARTWORK.

Here's a few other points I've thought of in the past to counter Shea's absurdity and obsession:

• Acts 5:7-9: St. Peter dissimulates and sets up Sapphira for the Holy Spirit to whack her. So... St. Peter tempted her to sin?
• I Kings 3:24-28: King Solomon tricks a hooker into revealing that she is not the mother, and that she's OK with murdering an innocent child.

These events are held up in sacred scripture as truly right and just. And of course there are many other examples from scripture and elsewhere in history.

The second example is particularly apropos to CMP — they are basically being Solomon in the modern day.

Keep up the good work.

"And Everything Anyone Else Means at Any Given Moment, Too"

As we here at EQE have said all along, from its inception Rod Dreher's so-called Benedict Option play has been nothing more than an open-ended, anything-encompassing cypher cannily crafted to land a publishing deal about whatever could be stuffed into that dimensionless container.

Not only does "The Benedict Option Means Precisely What I Choose It to Mean at Any Given Moment" as Pauli first reported here, now it also officially means "Everything Anyone Else Means at Any Given Moment, Too":

So, we are going to see a proliferation of “options,” and that’s okay by me. Just remember that even though I’m going to make in my book a specifically Benedictine case for the Benedict Option, the term itself is a catch-all for responses based on accepting MacIntyre’s judgment on the dead end of modern moral discourse, and on a determination to act radically to build social and other structures capable of sheltering, preserving, and growing the Christian faith as the broader culture grows more hostile to orthodox Christianity. Call it what you want, but that’s what we share.

Incidentally, here's Dreher's IKYABWAI response to Tom Piatak's critique of the big BO, commandeering the Rorshach imagery from John Zmirak's post:

[NFR: Chronicles, huh? Mmmmph. Yeah, it’s psychologically fascinating to watch certain people squirm so vigorously about this stuff. It’s turning into a Rorshach test on the right. Some of these guys, you wonder what they have to lose if people start taking the Benedict Option seriously, and trying to figure out how to live it locally. — RD

Heart of a lion in the determination to act radically to build social and other structures capable of sheltering, preserving, and growing the Christian faith department there, I'd say, wouldn't you?

So, bottom line, as he did with this BO project's parental unit, Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher is going to take anyone's comments containing the word "option" and try to pitch a publisher on letting him write a book about them entitled The Benedict Option.

The only question remaining at this point is who the lucky publisher might be.

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Better ideas than the Benedict Option

Here we have a better "self-interview" than Keith's, if I may make so bold, about what the so-called Benedict Option most likely is, and why it probably is only good to help someone sell books, and is a nonstarter as a long term solution for religious people currently inhabiting planet Earth. Excerpt:

And Dreher wants Christians to drop our involvement in pro-life and pro-family politics and get busy doing . . . whatever it is. Except that when you confront him about how suicidally crazy that idea is, he pivots on his heel and insists he never meant that at all. All he meant was that we can’t save our souls and bring our children to God by voting Republican. When you ask him who ever said that we could, he never gives an answer. Because no one since AD 33 has ever made such a claim.

This is obligatory for anyone to point out because it is constantly being brought up by the Dreherites and paleocons, over and over.

Q: OK, so maybe we shouldn’t trust the messenger, but what’s wrong with taking St. Benedict as our inspiration? 

A: St. Benedict himself would find the idea puzzling. That mystical ex-hermit never tried to organize laymen, but monks—men who could live and work together only because they took vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience. Benedict drafted his famous Rule to teach monks how better to obey these particular, difficult vows. Married people make very different promises. They don’t obey an abbot but are subject to each other. They’re called to be fertile, not celibate; thrifty and prudent, not poor. The proper bourgeois virtues of responsible Christian parents are almost the diametrical opposite of monastic communalism. Most historical attempts to found such communities among married couples have ended in farce or disaster.

Emphasis mine. This is another thing to constantly point out. We shouldn't have to, but we do for the same reason that young lovers need to be told that someday they will be just like their parents. I.e., immaturity, laziness and reluctance to face the Truth.

Today Christians face something that behaves much more like Islam. It is a rising empire of aggressive secularism, with a deep historical grudge against our faith. Gay activists, New Atheists, radical feminists, population controllers, multiculturalists, and other powerful interest groups see orthodox Christianity as their enemy. We once wielded power throughout the culture as they lived on the margins, and now they are looking for payback. They will know where to find us. Subjecting faithful Christian churches to a crushing, punitive tax is just the beginning. Think of it as the jizya.

Speaking of Islam, the Muslims are not going to help us with our religious freedom struggles one bit. Attacks on Judeo-Christian morality of the west are good for them since they have a moral code with very little overlap.

As we always suggest about good articles, read the whole thing. The author links to a really funny but serious article which he wrote with Jason Jones a few weeks back. Basically it is plea for young people to get a real job and quit self-impoverishing by bad major choices.

Choose this election who will serve

John Zmirak lays out the stark choice ahead of voters.

That is how clear American politics is becoming. Here’s what the next election should be about, if we do our jobs: The Little Sisters of the Poor vs. The Big Merchants of Baby Parts.

It really is that simple. We must press every politician in America to take a clear, explicit stand on two critical issues which can rouse the right passions of Americans: Religious freedom and abortion profiteering. No Republican who won’t support the First Amendment Defense Act and zero out federal aid to Planned Parenthood is worth even two seconds’ consideration. We should flee them as near occasions of sin.

So no, he's not "giving the GOP a pass" as some of us sensible Christian conservatives are accused of doing from time to time.

There’s a lot of junk in the Republican pond, but it still supports life from time to time. The Democratic, by comparison, is a mauve-coated pool of radioactive, flesh-eating bacteria. Their connection with any meaningful concept of the Good has long been tenuous, but now it has snapped. How else to explain apparently sane people who would use police and prisons to punish Christian bakers, but not the merchants of unborn children’s lungs and livers. The Republicans are imperfect but not committed to such monstrosities, showing glimmers of right reason on a list of important issues. Theirs is the only party where at least some leading politicians

• Don’t want to actively persecute the church with punitive taxes and lawsuits if we don’t bless acts of sodomy at our altars and teach our kids to approve them in church schools.

• Don’t want to send the police to stop nuns from caring for the poor unless they hand out abortion pills.

• Don’t want to shovel half a billion dollars every year to the abortionists of racist-founded Planned Parenthood, who appear to be making a tidy profit selling organs from butchered babies.

• Aren’t in the pockets of self-serving public employee unions that want to vote themselves the kind of benefits that just bankrupted Greece.

• Aren’t so drunk on multiculturalist absinthe that they mix up jihadist thugs with Christian preachers.

• Don’t want your taxes to fund sex-change operations for recently amnestied illegal aliens and felony prisoners.

Seems simple enough to me.

John Z Posts Article 3 on so-called Benedict Option

I don't know which event came first, Rod Dreher ranting about how we're not to discuss so-called Benedict Option anymore, or John Zmirak penning his third article on the so-called Benedict Option, which he has obviously been warming up for. Someone else can figure that out if they wish. Here's the lead-off teaser:

Rod Dreher's meme has become The Blob, engorging all it encounters, never assuming a shape you can nail down and consider rationally.

It's funny to me how the Catholics I've encountered who support the so-called Benedict Option all do claim to know what it is already. People like Diane's Facebook friend, for example, always explains that it's homeschooling, plus going to a parish with a respectful liturgy (no balloons, kangaroos or jellos, for example), plus generally keeping your kids protected from bad influences. They are so confident they know what it is in fact that they fully support it 100% and there is no way they need to buy and read a book about it.

But really—what about the BO isn't funny? Here's Zmirak's lead paragraph:

I wrote last week on the “Benedict Option,” a nebulous cultural strategy which its popularizer, Rod Dreher, describes as an “inchoate phenomenon in which Christians adopt a more consciously countercultural stance towards our post-Christian mainstream culture.” It’s named after St. Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, but Dreher isn’t recommending monasticism, or anything else that’s easy to pin down and examine. The concept’s nebulousness, I’ve come to realize, is not a bug but a feature. It allows Dreher an almost infinite freedom to imply whatever he wishes, without committing himself to a single logical or testable assertion from which he cannot backtrack when it’s contested. Nice work if you can get it.

It's also a more serious matter that Dreher has become a go-to guy for the liberal media on the topic of Christians in the public square:

Does Dreher counsel retreat from the public square, from civic life? It’s an urgent question because our First Amendment right to free exercise of religion is under sustained attack from the highest levels of government, the media and even many corporations. The clear-sighted, principled conservative Bruce Frohnen and I each took Dreher to task for waving the white flag in Time magazine just days after the Supreme Court’s same-sex ‘marriage’ decision. Dreher’s piece began with the boldface text: “Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.”

So is dumping the “failed” strategy of voting Republican part of the Benedict Option? Time’s editors thought that this was what Dreher meant, which is why they used that headline — the author’s own words, excerpted from inside the piece. In fact, that call for surrender is surely why Time ran his column in the first place, in the same week that the magazine published an impassioned call for stripping churches of their tax exemptions. Time is not Christianity Today; it shows little interest in offering helpful essays for Christians in living out the gospel.

Then Zmirak embarks on an examination of just which conservatives it could possibly be who believe that all we need to do is vote Republican and Yay! we're saved!

Who is he talking about? Nominal Christians who rarely ever attend church and live as pagans? But half of them don’t vote; more than half of the remaining half don’t vote Republican; and the half of the half who do almost certainly aren’t doing it to save Christendom. So who are his invisible villains?

Dreher certainly cannot mean the Rev. James Robison, the founder of The Stream, who speaks about politics in defense of religious and economic liberty, marriage and the sanctity of life. Robison also runs a ministry that has led hundreds of thousands of people to Christ while his organization’s unflagging work has helped missionaries dig thousands of wells for poor people across the developing world.

Dreher also can’t be talking about the Catholic Church, which lavishes millions yearly on educating non-Catholic poor children in schools across the country, runs non-profit hospitals that refuse to perform abortions, and sends medical missionaries across the world.

And he’s not referring to the Southern Baptist Convention, which pours millions into disaster relief around the planet, helping Christians in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans and Buddhists in places like Nepal.

"Who is he talking about?" Thank you, Mr. Zmirak. I've long asked that question and the answer is brought to mind immediately: straw men. This question along with my oft-made statement that I don't know what he's talking about stands in contrast with those aforementioned Catholics who swear they already know what the BO is. And it is hilarious to me that his staunchest defenders are the least likely to be interested in a book about what they are already doing.

Maybe I'm beating this point to hard, or maybe you're just confused. In either case, it's possible that this literary reference will help (Courtesy of Keith).

He concludes by basically echoing my sentiments here. I'm hoping that we haven't heard the last from John Zmirak on the so-called Benedict Option. It really takes a constant pounding of logic and clear-thinking to talk some people down from ledges which they were lured onto by sweet-sounding words penned by crafty wordsmiths.

Two Down Votes for the Benedict Option

The last several days were sort of rough for the so-called Benedict Option. It's not like the future guru-architect probably cared, though. He was to busy being Mr. World Traveler with his companion, Sordello.

But while he was tramping gayly through Europe, Bruce Frohnen wrote this withering take-down of the BO. Excerpt:

The Rome Benedict fled in the late fifth century surely was chaotic and troubling. But Benedict did not flee to the woods to pray because he was told his God was not welcome in the public square. And when God refused to allow him to pray alone, sending him acolytes and fellow believers to build a community, it was as a means of evangelizing to spread the good news throughout his land and the lands beyond the borders of old Rome, into the pagan forests. Those who went beyond those borders often were martyred because they refused any tactical retreat to the supposedly safe and hospitable regions in and around Rome. They reinvigorated as well as spread the Church, because they refused to be cowed, refused to back down, and refused to retreat, instead recognizing their duty to combat the ignorance and superficial understanding of the nature of reality that ruled most of the world.

Such a vision is attacked as prideful and even oppressive today, as one would expect, given the repaganization of our culture. But it is precisely this hostility toward evangelization that must be fought. As Dreher openly admits, Christians will be persecuted in a culture such as ours has become—we will lose careers, opportunities, and even our freedom if we step too far out of line with the ruling ideology. But there will be no safe place to reorganize for the future. Should we withdraw we will merely devolve into insular groups, many run by crackpots (there already are too many examples to mention) and most so cut off from one another that they will die out. The faith will not be lost, just as the cause of a Christian society will not be lost, because no cause is ever truly lost. But our duty is not to hope for better days. It is to work for better days in the here and now, including by confronting a political and legal regime increasingly hostile to our faith and way of life.

The article is worth reading in its entirety. Frohnen concludes: "[O]ur children and our children´s children need to know that we fought hard, not that we retreated in the face of arrogance and injustice. For we are not fighting for victory in this world, but to witness to the nature and reality of the next."

No doubt the future guru-architect of the Benedict Option will merely wave his hand, smile and gently state that Frohnen just doesn't understand what the Benedict Option is. The insinuation would be that Bruce Frohnen has neither thought nor meditated deeply enough upon the glorious Benedict Option, and maybe just doesn't have the mental capacity or the imagination to do so. By the way, Dr. Frohnen got his PhD at Cornell and has three other degrees.

I would like to point out several things the second paragraph. First of all: "[T]here will be no safe place to reorganize for the future." Keith did an entire post on related aspects of this truth. I have laughed from the very time I heard the term strategic withdrawal from the guru and future architect of the BenOp. How can any planned battlefield action which you broadcast to everyone beforehand be called strategic? Sloppy usage of battlefield language is a betrayal of unseriousness.

Secondly: "Should we withdraw we will merely devolve into insular groups, many run by crackpots (there already are too many examples to mention) and most so cut off from one another that they will die out." Emphasis mine. And the groups will be insular by definition. Diane could probably list off a number of crack-pot, insular "communities"— it's one of her specialties. In theory, I realize, the proposed BenOp communities will be enlightened, immaculately clean, free from scandal, covetousness, dissension and bickering in the ranks about small worldly matters such as, oh, I don't know... money for example. But in practice just look historically at the groups of people who have tried this. And please, don't argue for the Amish. I live in Northeast Ohio OK?

A day before Dr. Frohnen wrote this, John Zmirak wrote another article condemning the Benedict Option. (We blogged his first here.) Excerpt:

So is it time to give up, hide, and hope for the best? Should we throw down the weapons we still have, which God provided us? Shall we surrender America to the sex radicals, and leave our children with none of the liberty that we inherited from our parents? Is it moral to abandon our fellow citizens and neighbors to the ever-escalating demands of the secular culture of death? Is it time to dissolve all activist divisions of the pro-life movement, which has made so many strides, and accept that abortion on demand, for nine months, for any reason, will be legal here forever?

All of these outcomes would flow from the misnamed “Benedict Option,” favored by Dreher, who for years has advocated a sort of apolitical Christian separatism. I am not surprised that the same magazine that publishes a piece from a writer wanting to crush the churches with the tax code has given Dreher a venue to counsel surrender. Any conquering army hopes to sow defeatism in the enemy. Remember all those leaflets in Arabic we dropped on Saddam’s troops in 2003, promising good treatment and hefty rations for those who defected? Think of Marshal Petain’s appeal to the French Army in 1940 to throw down their guns and collaborate. The Germans were happy to broadcast it.

Kudos to John Zmirak—who attained his BA from Yale and his PhD from LSU—for bringing it to the fight and not worrying about offending the guru of the BenOp, with whom I understand he briefly attended school. He rightly points out that Dreher is a favorite of the ultra-liberal TIME because they like the separatism and withdrawal as much as he does.

I hope more Catholics will follow Zmirak's' lead and less will take Father Longenecker's on this ridiculous fantasy.

UPDATE: Commenter 'Peter' gives us a link over at a post by a kindred spirit. Thanks, lads!

John Zmirak on the Benedict Option

I wanted to point this out earlier; it was written back on April 18, 2015 and reflects on the passing of Cardinal George. Zmirak praises the Cardinal's work and witness in the public square, and he acknowledges a temptation which arises in the face of the "prospect of real persecution" which Cardinal George famously predicted.

The prospect of real persecution contains within it a subtle, more sinuous snare for the Christian soul — the blissful escape of Gnosticism. That’s the comforting option of pretending that we few, we happy few, have been blessed with a higher vision that teaches us to disdain this earthly life, the needs of society and the claims of the common good.

All that we’re called to do is to decorate our own souls, and keep our children “clean” of the vast corruption that surrounds us. We are not obliged to fight in the squalid arena of politics, or to wade down into the “culture.” Instead, we can please Our Lord by fashioning tiny, private gardens, where reverent liturgies and wholesome lifestyles will somehow survive amidst the ruins. When the pagans around us finally collapse in their filth and futility, it’s to us (or to our sturdy, fearless great-grandchildren) that they will look, and our scions will rise from the rubble to build another Chartres from the broken pieces of abortion clinics and international airports.

Yeah, that sounds great to me. We’ll get our payback then, and we’ll sing Easter hymns on our enemies’ unmarked graves.

It would be possible to take such Gnostic comfort by willfully misreading Cardinal George’s final prophecy, that the heir of the martyred bishop “will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” But Cardinal George was not such a cruel or callous man as to wish that future on us, or see it as something hopeful, a promise of vengeful glory after a temporary setback.

Zmirak compares the so-called Benedict Option not to the heroes in Lord of the Rings, but to the mad king, Denethor, who famously gave in to pride and despair, planning a murder/suicide with his son by burning and crying "The West has failed!"

We face a profound obligation today to fight the Culture of Death with all the tenacity that God gives us. We must indeed fight as Churchill promised “on the seas and oceans, on the beaches … on the landing grounds … in the fields and in the streets.” We cannot take comfort in the prospect of escape, of a “Benedict option” whereby we will hide from evil in tiny enclaves of fellow believers. Because evil will find us there, as wolves can sniff out lambs. In a closed, self-protective environment, evil is all too likely to take over, among folk whose guard is down.

No subculture is safe. Indeed, the bleak facts of the sex abuse crisis should teach us that preachers are not immune. So should stories like those of the Legionaries of Christ, and the Society of St. John, each of which set itself up as a militant, separatist alternative to the culture — and proved to be the vehicle for some to prey upon the unwary. The further we retreat from the cold, clear light of day, the more vigilant we must be about our motives and our leaders. In fact, I think that a better name for the separatist imperative is not the “Benedict” but the “Denethor Option.”

I think that "misreading Cardinal George’s final prophecy" is exactly what Father Longenecker does in his acceptance of the Denethor Option, although it is perhaps not a willful misreading.

And, learning from experience, it really does seem like creating subcultures increases the chance of child sexual abuse. Here's another example from the Amish which, from what I've heard, is not an outlier in that "gated community". It strikes me as a bit ironic that people who obsess the most about the chances of their kids getting abused would start talking about "options" which would create communities with less accountability instead of more. Of course you are never going to see a SNAP created to go after the Amish because the Amish don't have deep pockets.

Big kudos to Zmirak for writing this. Normal serious Catholics still aren't buying the so-called "Benedict Option". It's not Benedictine and it's not an option.

John Zmirak on Human Dignity and Current Debates

The hat tip goes to our friend Carol McKinley for pointing out this excellent piece by John Zmirak. It reminds me of another one of his articles which I linked to regarding "misguided compassion". Those Zmirak skewers here are no less misguided than the Earl of Longford; here's his initial characterization:

When asked, "What's your favorite thing about being a Catholic?" some well-instructed souls will cite the Eucharist, while others will speak of their devotion to Our Lady.... Reading what many Catholics have to say on economics and politics lately, it seems to me that if these folks answered honestly, they'd have to say: "Being Catholic gives me a high-minded rhetoric of noble-sounding values, a sense of moral superiority, and unrestricted license to speak and write as a crank."

I really beg everyone to read this entire thing. John Zmirak is not a Catholic blogger, but a Catholic writer, and a well-informed Catholic writer, not a hack theologian or amateur apologist. Plus he's always funny, which makes his writing pleasant, and he's always succinct, which makes reading him worthwhile. Following are some excerpts and my own short commentary on his insights which are rooted in the meaning of what the Church proclaims about Human Dignity and not based on chimerical vagaries bearing titles like "living wage" or "economic justice".

I've had my disagreements in the past with the learned Thomas E. Woods Jr., but as someone who has taken the trouble to read seriously in the discipline of economics (I wrote a book on the subject in the light of Catholic social teaching), I share with him a violent frustration at Catholics who grandstand about "distributive justice" and offer Rube Goldberg schemes for re-engineering our country's economy, without knowing or caring how wealth is produced in the first place. Our country's relatively recent, hard-won, and fragile prosperity they treat as if it had descended in pennies from heaven, and the only question now is how to divide up the windfall fairly. All property and all labor, they take for granted, is owned in common. It may suit the State to allow you to hold a "title" to your house, or keep some portion of your wages. But fundamentally you belong to the U.S. Congress, just as a Russian serf and every stick of furniture in his house was the property of the tsar. Left-leaning bishops who wish to make this point note that Creation was given to man in common; they leave out the fact that our labor is our own, and that taxes enforced by the threat of imprisonment can mount up to a kind of slavery. (Medieval serfs paid only 10 percent of their wealth to their feudal lords; you and I pay up to 50 percent when federal, state, local, Social Security, and sales taxes are added up -- which means that half our time is spent working with a bayonet at our backs.)

This is why whenever I hear the phrase "giving back to the community" I intone the same mantra: "I gave at the office."

What's missing from these people's happy, totalitarian picture is something fundamental to the West, a fruit of Christian culture that it took Vatican II (yes, you read me correctly) for the Church to fully recognize: the fact of human dignity. In the early Church, up through the first writings of St. Augustine, the Church asked only for liberty of worship, confident that the gospel would sway people on its own. In his later years, frustrated by the intransigence of the Donatist heretics, Augustine changed his mind and asked the now-Christian emperors to "compel them to come in." Building on Augustine's later work, many popes and countless Christian kings used the coercive power of the State to persecute heretics -- arguing that the free will of these individuals was outweighed by the danger to the souls they might lead to hell. Besides, they said in a phrase that became a little bit infamous, "Error has no rights." Since no one has a right to do what's wrong, how can those with false beliefs have a right to hold and practice an inaccurate religion? Do they have the right to lie about the gospel?

At Vatican II, the Council Fathers were more concerned about the very real persecution of Christians throughout the Communist bloc than the duty of (now-deposed) Catholic monarchs to uphold orthodoxy. They reframed the question as follows: Error may have no rights, but the person holding the error does. In Dignitatis Humanae, the Council teaches that the dignity of the human person forbids religious coercion by the State. Pope John Paul II was not, I think, misguided when he apologized for the actions of his predecessors that violated this precept.

Now—this is the key paragraph, and it might provide a dividing line for modern day American Conservative Catholics and modern day American Liberal Catholics on issues such as health insurance reform, wage laws, the environment and the role of government in general:

Nor does human dignity stop at the church door. Throughout the Catechism, the Church insists on the rights of the human person to liberty of thought, association, and action—within the limits of justice and the countervailing rights of one's fellow men. Only when our actions violate justice—not charity, but justice—is it right to use the violent, coercive power of the State to curb and restrict them. Indeed, it is only justice that can be enforced by the State. Mandatory charity is as moot as mandatory faith or hope.

If you have a problem with this, go back and read Dignitatis Humanae again, the first paragraph should do in a pinch if you are short on time.

Then he concludes beautifully by explaining the prudential nature of the current debate. I think Zmirak has explained Pope John Paul II's apologies better than just about anyone else I've heard on that oft-misunderstood topic.

Any Roman Catholic decrying the government's use of coercive tactics—the torturing of terrorism suspects comes to mind—should extend their disapproval to the kind of economic coercion imposed by the kind of out-of-control government redistribution being discussed and proposed currently in our nation. It consitiutes an affront to the same human dignity possessed by all, only on a much larger scale.

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A Must Read for the Gullible

This is kind of stale but boy, do I love John Zmirak's piece on the film Longford from December '08. It's sort of a review/recommendation, but more than anything it's an illustrated condemnation of "misguided compassion". Zmirak quotes Mother Angelica as calling this folly "the reigning sin of our time" and he shows how the character and story presented in the movie gives us a perfect example of this vice. From his article:

Frank Pakenham, the Seventh Earl of Longford, was a kind and pious man. Born a British aristocrat, he flouted public opinion by converting to Catholicism in 1940. An accomplished historian, loving husband, and nurturing father -- one of his many overachieving children is historian Antonia Fraser -- Lord Longford was also active in politics. Long a member of the British House of Lords -- and a convinced socialist -- he led campaigns against pornography and gay activism, in the face of widespread mockery in the press. (It didn't help, I guess, that he insisted on conducting widely publicized fact-finding tours in strip clubs, with journalists in tow. Did I mention that Longford lacked the virtue of prudence?)

Educational reformer, chronicler of the Irish war for independence, visionary moral crusader: For none of these things do Englishmen remember the Earl of Longford. Instead, they know him as the British lord who tried to get Myra Hindley out of jail. Hindley's name is still a watchword for hellish cruelty; she was convicted in 1966 along with her lover Ian Brady for jointly kidnapping, sexually abusing, torturing, and murdering five children -- whose anguished cries they tape-recorded. The Moor Murders, and the subsequent trials, were the media sensation of the middle 1960s, and neither Hindley nor Brady showed remorse at their public trial. The two were sentenced to life in prison.

And that's where poor Longford came in. As a deeply religious Catholic, the Earl made a point of visiting prisoners -- which, you might remember, is one of the Corporal Works of Mercy. What you might also recall from Catechism class is that it nowhere says you have to try to get the prisoners out, assuming they're guilty. That distinction eluded the good Lord Longford, who responded to a letter from Myra Hindley requesting a visit.

As the film depicts their dawning (fawning?) friendship, it is clear that Hindley is a brilliant manipulator, skilled at reading Longford's character and telling him what he most wants to hear: That she is deeply, profoundly sorry for what she did. That she was an abused child, seized and dominated by a strong, sadistic lover, who forced her to take part in the murders. Oh yes, and that she is deeply attracted to Longford's Catholic faith. Would he consider sending her some Catholic books, including her in his prayers, and returning for future visits?

Zmirak goes on to reveal the horrifying and embarrassing results of what he brilliantly describes as the "slow-motion train wreck of the Little Choo-Choo That Could." He states that he favors the death penalty for this noble do-gooder by the end of the film. Although he is possibly exaggerating, Longford seems like a guy who, after pushing an enormous boulder down a mountain, claims that he had no idea that fifty goat-herders would be smashed. In other words, Longford is the kind of moral idiot who really poses a danger within society.

I said at the start I loved this article, and I do for the same reason that I love my Swiss Army knife and my all in one Epson printer. It's designed to take on a number of important jobs and complete them well. First of all, it shows the major attack on the virtue of prudence and how that attack takes shape in our society among the bleeding hearts. I especially like the point that helping the guilty get out of punishment is not a work of mercy.

Secondly, I sense a corollary here that I've seen play out in my life personally, viz., the more prudent one becomes, the more mean one seems to the aforementioned unwisely compassionate in certain situations. For example, if a fairly close in-law's sibling is "dating" an incarcerated pen-pal, starts falling in love with him and talking about marriage, you might be considered mean for stating that you smell a train-wreck. Not that you are told this directly to your face, however, you are told that you don't know this guy and that "...she feels that he really has turned his life around and gotten saved in prison." Then you ask what he's in for. "Well, he hasn't told her that yet, even though she did ask him." Oh. That's when you start feeling like you know this guy a lot better than everyone else involved. The most merciful event in that case was that the in-law got wise in time and called it off.

Thirdly, the argument against capital punishment has been blurred and marred by the fact that many of those fighting it choose the worst poster children. Remember the efforts of left-wing wackos to save Stanley "Tookie" Williams, a convicted multiple murderer who refused to help police whilst penning anti-gang children's books? From Wikipedia:

Williams refused to aid police investigations with any information against his gang, and was implicated in attacks on guards and other inmates as well as multiple escape plots. In 1993, Williams began making changes in his behavior, and became an anti-gang activist while on Death Row in California. Although he continued to refuse to assist police in their gang investigations, he renounced his gang affiliation and apologized for the Crips' founding, while never admitting to the crimes for which he was convicted. He co-wrote children's books and participated in efforts intended to prevent youths from joining gangs.

Not quite a graduate from the St. Mary Magdalene school of repentance, I dare say.

Fourthly, aren't there people out there who need assistance who have never spent a day in jail? I've found plenty of people to help out by various means, finding work for them, just chatting and being friends with them, etc. There are people who are called to prison ministry--obviously Longford was not among them. My guess is that other romantics have fallen prey to wily criminals in much the same way. This story also reminds me of the judge from Tom Sawyer who thinks he's rehabilitated the town drunk, before he's forced to think again. Should have stuck to being judgmental, Your Honor.

Finally, It seems like people tempted to rob justice to pay mercy should take a lesson to the thief on the cross who pointed out to the other other criminal that they deserved punishment. I suppose that St. Dismas was showing us that a lot of the misguided compassion toward which we might be tempted is self-directed.