Kresta In The Afternoon

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Notre Dame’s Plan for a Faithful Homosexual Outreach

The university’s administration outlines its plan for a student organization intended to address homosexual issues in an authentically Catholic manner, but some informed observers are skeptical it will respect Church teachings.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — After years of petitions, Notre Dame, the premier Catholic university in the United States, has announced it will create an official campus support group for homosexual students and their friends.

The University of Notre Dame's Basilica of the Sacred Heart in the forefront as well as the Golden Dome in the background.

– Michael Fernandes/ Wikipedia

But Notre Dame has a more radical idea than the petitioners imagined: It plans to create a permanent student organization grounded fully in Catholic social and moral teaching.
Students and faculty at Notre Dame aggressively pressed Notre Dame’s administration and president, Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, to approve an official “gay-straight alliance” club on campus and add sexual orientation into the university’s legal protections.
AllianceND, an unofficial club for homosexual students and their allies, requested approval as an official student club on campus. The club’s proposed constitution, however, did not address Catholic teaching other than pledge the club would “not address GLBTQ issues that are in opposition to [Notre Dame’s] Catholic identity.” The GLBTQ acronym stands for “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered and Questioning.”
The Progressive Student Alliance spearheaded the campaign for AllianceND’s approval with “It needs to get better” videos spread all over social media and convinced both the student and faculty senates to vote their support.
But instead of approving or denying official recognition to AllianceND, Notre Dame’s administration came to a solution that has both surprised and excited the campus and elicited praise from the local Catholic bishop.
“I am confident that this multifaceted, pastoral approach represents the next step in advancing our efforts toward this aspiration for our GLBTQ students,” Father Jenkins said in a press release.

‘Beloved Friends’
Notre Dame’s Office of Student Affairs has developed a comprehensive plan, called “Beloved Friends and Allies: A Pastoral Plan for the Support and Holistic Development of GLBTQ and Heterosexual Students at the University of Notre Dame.”
One part of the initiative is a new student organization fully engaged in supporting GLBTQ youth with Catholic resources and within a Catholic context.
“Notre Dame’s Catholic mission grounds all of the revised structures outlined in the 'Pastoral Plan,' including the student organization,” Erin Harding, vice president for student affairs, told the Register. “These structures are designed both to continue to build an inclusive community at Notre Dame and promote students’ holistic growth and development, including their moral and spiritual formation.”
The plan calls for a permanent body that homosexual and heterosexual students may join and elect officers. The new student organization will provide peer-to-peer support, programming, service opportunities and integrate students better with the programs and formation initiatives of Notre Dame’s Gender Relations Center, Campus Ministry, the University Counseling Center and the Institute for Church Life.
But, most significantly, Notre Dame’s "Pastoral Plan" declares that its “goals and objectives, as well as its programs and initiatives, are consonant with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.” It dedicates eight paragraphs to making this point, repeatedly citing passages from the Catechism of the Catholic Church dealing with marriage, sexuality, friendship and the life of chastity.
The plan notes: “The Catholic Church states that ‘love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being’ (CCC, 2392) but also attests that the call to chastity is God’s invitation for all to be in loving relationship with others according to the demands of the moral virtues (CCC, 2348).”
The plan repeatedly notes that the new student organization will uphold “the challenging, even though beautiful and life-giving, call to chaste relationships” and that “Student Affairs neither condones nor supports sexual activity outside the marital relationship or any sexual activities that ‘close the sexual act to the gift of life’ (CCC, 2357).”

Skepticism
Father Jenkins approved the plan after conducting a five-month review, but some critics were skeptical about whether the university administration could effectively secure the new organization’s adherence to Church teaching.
“The school has regularly turned down these requests for the last 15 years because these clubs collide with Catholic identity,” said William Dempsey, president of the Sycamore Trust, an alumni organization dedicated to upholding Notre Dame’s Catholic identity. “The issue here is the approval of a gay student organization and then giving it the additional exalted status of a ‘student organization.’ That ranks it alongside student government, and we have no indication Father Jenkins will impose any limitations or Church doctrine.”
Dempsey expressed concern over Father Jenkins’s leadership of Notre Dame with respect to its Catholic identity and said he had no confidence Father Jenkins would restrict the student organization’s activities. He cited the university president’s decision to give President Barack Obama an honorary law degree in 2009, despite public objections from scores of U.S. bishops; the handling of the 88 pro-life protesters who were charged with criminal trespassing at the Notre Dame campus for protesting against President Obama’s being honored; and Father Jenkins’s permissions for an on-campus production of the obscene playThe V----- Monologues and sponsorship of a “Queer Film Festival.”
However, the play has not made an appearance on campus since 2008, when Father Jenkins ordered that its presentation be accompanied by panel discussions with a “sympathetic and thorough presentation of Catholic teaching” on sexuality. And Tom O’Neil, an alumnus who helped to found Notre Dame’s “Queer Film Festival” in 2004, also blamed Father Jenkins for administration moves that O’Neil said had caused the “slow, quiet strangulation” of the homosexual film festival by 2009.
Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, said Notre Dame’s attempt to address homosexual issues in an authentically Catholic way was “impressive.” However, he said, Father Jenkins must impose restrictions on the group’s activities.
“The problem comes from the students who are engaged in this issue but have a lack of catechesis and moral maturity,” Reilly said.
Notre Dame law professor Gerard Bradley, the former director of Notre Dame’s Natural Law Institute, was similarly cautious. While the "Pastoral Plan" includes “some sound elements,” it needs more specifics, he said.
“There is substantial cause for concern about the soundness of that coming implementation,” Bradley said. “For example, the plan says that Notre Dame affirms Church’s teaching, which distinguishes between homosexual acts and the homosexual condition, and that the condition itself is not sinful. But the plan nowhere affirms the Church’s teaching that the condition is itself objectively disordered.”
Holy Cross Father William Miscamble, who is a Notre Dame history professor, said his own misgiving is that the university’s good intentions might go awry.
“Much will depend on the implementation of the 'Pastoral Plan,' but such an organization seems likely to develop into an advocacy group promoting the gay lifestyle,” he said. “This will run counter to the professed goals of the plan and will be very damaging to the Catholic mission and identity of Notre Dame.”
But Holy Cross Father William Dailey, a visiting lecturer at the university’s law school and a fellow at Notre Dame’s Center of Ethics and Culture, expressed optimism that Notre Dame had seized an opportunity to engage directly in a conversation with students about living a life of holiness in the context of same-sex attraction.
“This document does not include the culture’s belief that we find our real identity in our sexual orientation or sexual identity,” Father Dailey noted. “Rather, we find our identity in Christ. I think this is an effort to minister pastorally to this group without in any way compromising our Church’s beautiful teachings, especially on chastity.”

Stronger Oversight
Student affairs vice president Harding explained in an email to the Register that the university will have much more say over the formation and direction of the student organization than would be the case if it had authorized an official student club.
“We determined that a recognized student organization provides both autonomy and accountability for our students to offer peer-to-peer support and service opportunities,” Harding said.
Harding said that clubs can “make constitutional changes at will” and change their advisors whenever they like. As a student organization, however, the university “always” appoints the advisor, and no constitutional changes can be approved without the advisor’s consent.
To fill that position, Harding said Notre Dame is looking for a full-time student development professional “who understands and embraces the university’s Catholic mission.” Students will have a voice in the hiring process, but once a candidate is selected, the plan will be fully implemented.
Eve Tushnet, an openly homosexual writer living as a faithful Catholic, said she found Notre Dame’s approach “refreshing.”
“I think the focus on friendship is perhaps more surprising and refreshing than it may seem to those outside these debates,” Tushnet said. “While young people do have questions about Catholic teaching, they also have no role model for leading a chaste gay life.”
Tushnet suggested that Notre Dame’s action could open lines of communication with homosexual youth about how to live a full Catholic life, develop friendships and find their vocation.
Tushnet said the loneliness of living silently with same-sex attraction creates a huge opening for sin: “This can lead to hooking up with the opposite sex to prove you are not gay, despair, leaving the Church and dishonesty.”

Bishop Rhoades
Bishop Kevin Rhoades of South Bend, Ind., told the Register that Notre Dame’s initiative has praiseworthy objectives and should not be dismissed beforehand.
“I believe there is a need at Catholic universities to provide pastoral care and support to persons with same-sex attraction. This is what Notre Dame’s 'Pastoral Plan' is attempting to do,” Bishop Rhoades said. “This pastoral care should help the students not to feel unwelcome or alienated in the community, but also help them to lead chaste and holy lives.”
“I think that people, especially youth, who feel isolated or alienated can be more susceptible to destructive unchaste behavior,” Rhoades said. “Isolation, alienation, insecurity, etc. can lead to pleasure-seeking in sinful behavior that ultimately brings unhappiness.”
Bishop Rhoades stressed that Christians must understand that ministry to homosexual persons is an essential element of the integral promotion of human dignity, which is critical to the success of the pro-life movement as well.
“Promoting chastity is an important part of our pro-life commitment,” Rhoades said. “The Sixth Commandment that calls to chastity follows the Fifth Commandment that calls us to respect life. It is the connection between life and love.”
Notre Dame senior Chris Damian, a philosophy major and writer for The Observer campus newspaper, told the Register that he had shared the concerns that the administration would approve a student club that could pose a similar challenge to Catholic teachings about sexuality.
But Damian said students at Notre Dame, even those with concerns like himself, welcomed the administration’s move in “Beloved Friends and Allies.”
“I’m very enthusiastic, because Notre Dame has a great opportunity to make a radical commitment to the care of these students,” Damian said.
Alex Coccia, a junior majoring in Africana studies and co-chairman of AllianceND, said he was pleased with the pastoral plan and that its initiatives were grounded in Church teaching. Although socially progressive himself, Coccia said that AllianceND would never had gained the majority support it received at Notre Dame if it had opposed Church teaching, especially on same-sex "marriage."
He said AllianceND would end its bid for club status and transfer into the new student organization.
“Ultimately, we decided that the goals of AllianceND are found in this new organization, especially the peer-to-peer support,” Coccia said.
The next key phase in the development of the student organization will be drafting its constitution, a process that will involve participation of both students and the administration. Coccia said he expected that “components of the 'Pastoral Plan'” will be part of the new constitution.

Not ‘Morally Neutral’
However, Bishop Rhoades cautioned that pastoral plans and support groups for homosexual students and their friends cannot take a “morally neutral” position on homosexuality.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, in 2357, that “homosexual acts are gravely disordered” and that “under no circumstances can they be approved.”
“They are called to be faithful to the Christian message as handed on to us through the Church,” Bishop Rhoades said of pastoral outreaches on Catholic campuses. “Such ‘moral neutrality’ does not serve the ultimate good of the students.”

Peter J. Smith writes from Rochester, N.Y.

Today on "Kresta in the Afternoon" - December 18, 2012

Talking about the "things that matter most" on Dec. 18

4:00 – Direct to My Desk: Tragedy, Culture and a Free People

4:40 – Big Labor, The Right to Work, and Catholic Social Teaching: A Debate
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder last week signed a right-to-work bill limiting union power into law in his state. Similar bills have proved brutally contentious in other states like WI and IN, and MI has been no different. We debate the issue, and particularly what Catholic Social Teaching has to say about it with David Peterson and Fr. Robert Sirico.

5:00 – Lance Armstrong's Former Friend Speaks Out About Athlete's Use of Performance Enhancing Drugs
For some of those who knew Lance Armstrong the best, his fall from grace amid doping allegations is no surprise at all. Betsy Andreu, a former family friend to Armstrong says Armstrong is the “Bernie Madoff” of the sporting world. Andreu says Armstrong played the world and the media for years while knowingly taking performance enhancing drugs. Betsy joins us to discuss how she and Armstrong had a falling out when she refused to lie about something she heard while visiting Armstrong in the hospital at the time he was diagnosed with testicular cancer.

5:40 – Direct to My Desk: Tragedy, Culture and a Free People

4 Awful Reactions to Sandy Hook School Shooting - And Thoughts on a Better Response

Nick Gillespie, December 15, 2012Reason magazine

Horrific events such as the mass shooting at Newtown, Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School are terrible enough in showcasing the evil that men do.
But they also regularly bring out the worst in observers, commentators, and pundits who will never let a lack of knowledge or expertise stand in the way of making grand pronouncements.

Here's a short tour of four of the least-helpful reactions to an attack that slaughtered more than two dozen Americans - most of them kids 10 years and younger. They come courtesy of a former presidential candidate (Mike Huckabee), an international media mogul (Rupert Murdoch), an Oscar-winning filmmaker (Michael Moore), and a famous crusading journalist (Geraldo Rivera).
Following that is a discussion of the reality of gun violence in America and what might actually address some of the issues in play.

Next: God has left the building...
1. Mike Huckabee: "We have systematically removed God from our schools."
The former governor of Arkansas, Republican hopeful for president, and Fox News host says we've got no reason to be surprised when adult gunmen shoot up educational establishments.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

More here.
I don't doubt the governor's sincerity, but among other things, he might want to think about the declining rate of school violence. According to data compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, schools have been getting safer and less violent at least over the past couple of decades - despite what Huckabee would doubtless consider a period of rising godlessness. During the school year of 1992-93, for instance, the number of on-location murders of students and staff at K-12 public schools was 47 (out of population of millions). In 2009-2010 (the latest year for which data is listed), the number was 25. Over the same period, the rate on victimizations per 1,000 students for theft dropped from 101 to 18. For violent crimes, the rate dropped from 53 to 14. And for "serious violent" crimes, the rate dropped from 8 to 4.

Next: It's never too late to blame George W. Bush...

O Sapientia chant

Latin lyrics sung by the Cantarte Regensburg

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

On December 17th we enter into that final stretch of our Advent preparation. In the Church’s solemn prayer of the hours, at Vespers, the great "O Antiphons" are sung. Today we have the first.

ENGLISH:
O Wisdom, who came from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from end to end and ordering all things mightily and sweetly: come, and teach us the way of prudence.

Scripture References:
Proverbs 1:20; 8; 9
I Corinthians 1:30

Relevant verse of Veni, Veni Emmanuel:
O come, O Wisdom from on high,
who orders all things mightily,
to us the path of knowledge show,
and teach us in her ways to go.

(from Fr. Z's blog)

Monday, December 17, 2012

A More Complete Wisdom

By Br. Humbert Kilanowski, O.P.

December 17, 2012

Dominicana

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter, suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

Tonight, with Christmas Eve only a week away, the Church’s liturgy intensifies in anticipation for the coming of the Savior. Each evening until then, at the Magnificat, the Church prays one of the O Antiphons, a series of invocations to the Lord, each beginning with one of the titles applied to Him in the Old Testament. The first one, quoted above, is sung at Vespers this evening:

O Wisdom, who hast proceeded from the mouth of the Most High, who reaches from end to end mightily and orders all things sweetly, come to teach us the way of prudence” (cf. Ws 8:1).

The idea of wisdom is not unique to the Scriptures. In fact, Aristotle wrote in his Metaphysics, “It belongs to the wise man to order,” and in the Nicomachean Ethics, “[The wise] must not only know what follows from the first principles, but must also possess truth about the first principles.” Thus, even this pagan philosopher agrees with the divinely inspired author on the nature of wisdom.
But how can this be put into practice? Can all of human knowledge be ordered?

In the first half of the last century, one school of philosophy, called the Analytic Movement, thought the answer might be “yes.” Thinkers like Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead sought to create a logical system in which every “verifiable” statement could be included. (Anything not verifiable, they said, was not worth consideration.) Using the language of symbolic logic, they undertook the ambitious task of systematizing all knowledge in that purest and most certain of fields—mathematics. They began with primitive propositions, such as “Zero is a number,” and developed rules for deriving true statements, or theorems, from these first principles. Their three-volume work, Principia Mathematica, remains influential even now, a century later.

In 1931, however, Austrian-born mathematician Kurt Gödel found a gaping hole in this system. He devised a rule of assigning a unique number to each symbol in the language, as well as to each statement that could be formed or proof that could be argued. For example, the proposition, “You can add one to any number to get another number” would be represented by the number 626,262,636,333,262,163,636,262,163,111,123,262; and more advanced statements would be mapped to even larger numbers. By effectively turning theorems into numbers and the rules of proof into mathematical relations, Gödel showed that statements about arithmetic could be expressed within arithmetic.

Using these rules, and in this language, Gödel was able to construct the sentence, ”This statement is unprovable within the system.” This presents a quandary: if you can prove it to be true, it becomes false, and vice versa. Just as with the recent popular song lyric, “You don’t know you’re beautiful, and that’s what makes you beautiful,” the sentence is true, but there is no way to know it with logical certainty. This idea, known as Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem, showed that Russell and Whitehead’s project had failed. In any logical system large enough to contain the rules of arithmetic, there are some statements that are intelligible and true, but not verifiable.

This principle extends beyond mathematics to other areas of thought. For example, one can understand what is meant by the statements, “There exists a unique God in three Persons,” and, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us”; and Christians know these propositions to be true by the divine light of faith. Yet, they cannot be proven within the system of human reason. Even Aristotle himself could not have come up with them. These sentences, known as articles of faith, can only be known as given from a source of knowledge outside our natural reason—they must be revealed by God. St. Thomas Aquinas attests to this at the very beginning of his Summa Theologiae, as he embarks on his project to order the knowledge of God, man, and the universe: “It was necessary for the salvation of man that certain truths which exceed human reason should be made known to him by divine revelation.” St. Thomas continues,

Sacred doctrine essentially treats of God as viewed as the highest cause—not only so far as He can be known through creatures, just as philosophers knew Him . . . but also as far as He is known to Himself and revealed to others. Hence sacred doctrine is especially called wisdom.

Only by divine revelation, given to us through Scripture and Tradition and defined by the Church, can we hope to order everything that the human mind can know.
The gift of faith is what shows us the truth that lies beyond our limited power of reason. It perfects reason and brings us to a more complete wisdom. As we prepare for the coming of Jesus during this Year of Faith, let us ask Him to increase our faith, that we may know Him more closely, and know all things as ordered to Him:

To us the path of knowledge show,
And teach us in her ways to go.

About the Author:

Br. Humbert Kilanowski, O.P.

Br. Humbert Kilanowski entered the Order of Preachers in 2010. He earned a doctorate in mathematics from The Ohio State University and did his undergraduate studies at Case Western Reserve University.

St. Rose priest mourns with his flock after witnessing his parishioners’ grief

Community bands together in Newtown, Conn.

By Anne Hull, Dec 17, 2012 04:33 AM EST, Published: December 16

NEWTOWN, CONN. — As if it were any normal day, Monsignor Robert Weiss had his usual breakfast at the Sandy Hook Diner — a short stack of French toast and two strips of bacon. Waitresses call it the “Monsignor Special.”
Within hours of that hometown breakfast Friday, Weiss found himself in a room at a firehouse, with parents on folding chairs, in what would become one of the worst days in American history.

The 66-year-old priest is known as Father Bob to the 3,500 families who belong to St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church. On Sunday, what Father Bob craved — after long hours of counseling and grieving and not enough sleep — was a good Scotch and a place to let go. Half of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary were members of Weiss’s congregation, and he had baptized many of them.
After the 10:30 a.m. Mass on Sunday, in a rectory full of law enforcement officers and priests, Weiss wept.
Nothing at seminary had trained him for this week. Nothing about his 13 years at St. Rose. Nothing about his understanding of the world.
“I thought about Paul,” said Weiss, his black clergy shirt unbuttoned and his white collar in his shirt pocket like a pen. “Paul said, ‘In my weakness I find my greatest strength.’ ”
On Friday morning, Weiss was working in his office when he received a call from authorities to lock down the school at St. Rose. There had been a school shooting. Weiss left the rectory and walked 100 yards to the church, where students were gathered for regular Friday morning Mass. Weiss interrupted the priest who was officiating and told him to stop and keep the students inside the church.
When Weiss heard that the shooting had occurred at Sandy Hook, less than a mile away, he grabbed two other priests from St. Rose, and they rode in Weiss’s BMW to the school. Three priests in clergy collars were a welcome sight.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” said the police officer who flagged them through the secured perimeter.
When Weiss pulled up, he saw teachers organizing students into lines in the parking lot. The second-grade teacher held up a sign that said two, and the third-grade teacher held up a sign that said three. And the students — who had been told to close their eyes while they evacuated the building to avoid seeing the carnage as they rushed past — obediently began forming lines.
Not every child was there. Some had run into the woods when they heard the shots. A few had run home. And some were inside the school.
Frantic parents were arriving. Children burst from their lines upon seeing their mother or father, while parents ran toward the lines.
Reunion after reunion whittled the lines down, leaving only parents, empty-handed and desperate. They were taken to the nearby firehouse where the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire and Rescue Company operated.
Weiss walked over, too. He knew half the parents from St. Rose. He had officiated at their weddings and the baptisms of their children, some of whom were now unaccounted for.
Inside the firehouse, parents texted relatives, called babysitters to stay late and called around to likely places where their missing children might have gone.

Elementary School Massacre ‘Not Part of God’s Plan,’ Newtown Pastor Says

Msgr. Robert Weiss accompanied police while they informed parents of their children’s deaths following the Sandy Hook School massacre.
by CNA/EWTN NEWS 12/16/2012

Msgr. Robert Weiss of St. Rose of Lima Parish in Newtown, Conn.

NEWTOWN, Conn. — The motive behind the gunman whose Dec. 14 shooting rampage took the lives of 28 people, including 20 children, is not something that can be answered, Newtown’s local Catholic parish priest said.

“This was not part of God’s plan,” Msgr. Robert Weiss of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church told ABC News Dec. 15.

Msgr. Weiss, who accompanied police while they informed parents of their children’s deaths following the Sandy Hook School massacre, said gunman Adam Lanza’s actions show he was “a man who had serious issues in his life.”

“Why he’d want to destroy innocent children, no one can figure out.”

Archbishop Henry Mansell of Hartford, Conn., called the shooting “a senseless act of violence that claimed the lives of many innocent people” in a recent statement.

“Although we will never understand the motivation behind such a heinous act, we must turn to prayer and reflection for the victims and their families during this time of need,” he said.

“Keep them in your hearts; let them know that they are not alone in their grief and suffering, and pray that the comfort of God's love will help them through this difficult time.”

The Archdiocese of Hartford, along with Catholic Charities, has offered support for Newtown and its parish in “any way that we can.”

Msgr. Weiss said although many victim’s family members “knew in their hearts” that their child or spouse had been killed in the attack, he said in an interview with NBC that their grief was still “overwhelming” when he traveled with police to confirm that information early on the morning of Dec. 15.

When he broke the news, parents asked him what the last moments of the victims’ lives must have been like.

“Of course, no one can answer that question,” he said.

Parents of the victims recalled fond memories of their children as he consoled them late into Friday evening.

“One mother told me her daughter was going to be an angel in our Christmas pageant next Tuesday,” the priest said, “and another one told me how excited (her daughter) was getting because she was making her first holy Communion this year.”

“It was really an amazing time for parents to bring back memories,” he said.

He said the prayer vigil that packed St. Rose to capacity on the evening of Dec. 14 really showed what “kind of town Newtown is.”

“People came together to care and to support,” he said. “Hopefully, we can just keep the community together, and they can console each other.”

He shared that “many of the families” he spoke with following the shooting found consolation in the knowledge that even though their child was killed, “at least they know their child is safe; they know where they are.

“And that’s a terrible thought for any parent raising a child today to think that they might have to grow up in a world like this.”

“I pray that the Lord just lift up these families and that they know especially their children are safe,” he said.

Even in the face of such violence, Msgr. Weiss said, “If we work together, good things can happen.”

The victims of the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook School massacre have now been identified as Charlotte Bacon, 6; Daniel Barden, 7; Olivia Engel, 6; Josephine Gay, 7; Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6; Dylan Hockley, 6; Madeleine F. Hsu, 6; Catherine V. Hubbard, 6; Chase Kowalski, 7; Jesse Lewis, 6; James Mattioli, 6; Grace McDonnell, 7; Emilie Parker, 6; Jack Pinto, 6; Noah Pozner, 6; Caroline Previdi, 6; Jessica Rekos, 6; Aviele Richman, 6; Benjamin Wheeler, 6; Allison N. Wyatt, 6; Dawn Hochsprung, 47; Rachel Davino, 29; Ann Marie Murphy, 52; Lauren Rousseau, 30; Mary Sherlach, 56; and Victoria Soto, 27.

Sunday, December 16, 2012

Suspect Adam Lanza was obscure in life, now is infamous in death

School shooting in Newtown, Conn.: Shooting at a Connecticut elementary school kills 28 people, including 20 children.

By Greg Jaffe, Paul Duggan and Colum Lynch,
Dec 15, 2012 02:34 AM EST
The Washington Post

Adam Lanza was his name.
Adam P. Lanza, 20, obscure in life, infamous in death.

A really rambunctious kid, as one former neighbor in Newtown, Conn., recalled him, adding that he was on medication. He was the son of an accountant. A family member told investigators that he had a form of autism, a law enforcement official said.
And he will long be remembered.
On Friday morning, police say, he shot and killed his mother in their home. And then, carrying firearms and an abundance of ammunition, he drove to Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School and started shooting. By the time he turned one of the guns on himself, police say, he had killed 20 children, many of them kindergartners, and six more adults.
Adam Peter Lanza — a new addition to a dreadful list, the roster of killers who targeted students: Seung Hui Cho at Virginia Tech (32 dead); Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High in Colorado (13 dead), Charles C. Roberts IV at a little Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania (five dead). The litany of massacres goes on.
As scores of investigators worked Friday to piece together what happened at the school and why, the barest details of Lanza’s life began to emerge.
His parents, Nancy and Peter Lanza, separated about a decade ago, and his mother remained in the family’s home with her sons, Adam and Ryan Lanza, according to Ryan Kraft, 25, who was a neighbor.
The separation hit the children hard, Kraft recalled.
When Nancy Lanza would go out to dinner with friends, she sometimes relied on Kraft to watch Adam Lanza, who was too boisterous for Ryan Lanza to manage. “He would have tantrums,” Kraft said. “They were much more than the average kid [had].” Yet he was not prone to violence, Kraft said.
“The kids seemed really depressed” by the breakup, Kraft said of the Lanza brothers. Ryan Lanza, 24, now lives in Hoboken, N.J. Police questioned him Friday, but law enforcement officials said he was cooperating and is not suspected of having anything to do with the shootings.
For several hours Friday, authorities and the news media misidentified the shooter as Ryan Lanza, who, like his father, is an accountant, a law enforcement official said.
The Wall Street Journal quoted a friend of Ryan Lanza’s as saying that Lanza works for Ernst & Young. “He [is] a little shy, but very nice and sweet,” the friend, Katie Colaneri, 24, of Hoboken, told the Journal.
Nancy Lanza put the best face possible on her domestic troubles, the former neighbor said. “Nancy was really pleasant,” Kraft said. “She would come by the house and have a glass of wine with my mom.” The couple’s divorce was finalized in 2009, according to court records.
Beth Israel, who lived for a time on the same street as the Lanzas, recalled Adam Lanza as withdrawn but not threatening in any way.
“Overall, I would just call him a socially awkward kid, I don’t know, shy and quiet. Didn’t really look you in the eye,” Israel said in a telephone interview Friday night. “Just kind of a weird kid, maybe. I can’t tell you any specific incidents why [I thought so],” she said.
At a vigil in Newtown, a man of about Adam Lanza’s age was visibly distraught. “I knew Adam in high school,” he said, declining to give his name. “He always seemed like a quiet type. He was never really sociable. When you try to communicate with him, he would just kind of like have one- or two-word responses.
“He was a wicked smart kid, he excelled in everything,” the man said. “He graduated high school three years early.”
The man defended Adam’s mother and objected to some reports about her. “I know her. My family knew her. She was a respectable collector [of guns]. She used them responsibly. It’s not her fault that any of this happened.”
At the vigil, Catherine Urso said her son went to high school with Adam Lanza, who “was very remote, reclusive.” Lanza and his friends, she said, “always gathered alone in a corner in the school.”
A law enforcement official — who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is far from finished — said Adam Lanza fatally shot his mother in her home, then drove in her car to Sandy Hook Elementary.
He had two semiautomatic pistols and a .223-caliber rifle, law enforcement officials said. He apparently used only the handguns, which were later found in the school. The rifle was found in the vehicle.
Peter Lanza, a vice president and tax specialist at GE Energy Financial Services, is remarried and lives in Stamford, Conn., according to the Stamford Advocate. When he arrived home Friday and was approached by a reporter, the paper reported, he appeared “surprised and horrified” and declined to comment on the massacre.
A woman who is a close friend of Peter Lanza’s became highly emotional in a brief telephone interview Friday. “His son was doing wonderfully,” she said of Adam Lanza. “This is inconceivable. Peter adores his children. His son was doing so well.”

Lynch reported from Newtown, Conn. Sari Horwitz and Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Save the Date! January 12, 2013

Ann Arbor, Michigan - In the wake of what we consider to be a disastrous election, Ave Maria Radio will be holding a conference in southeast Michigan to consider what our path should be from here. This conference will be ecclesial, not political. Primary among our considerations will be how to reach the 40% of Mass-attending Catholics who voted in support of candidates who champion the intrinsic evils of abortion and same-sex so-called "marriage." Speakers will include prominent area Catholics such as Al Kresta himself, Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, and Dr. Monica Miller, director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society.

Details TBA very soon!! But in the meantime, save the date and begin making travel arrangements to the Ann Arbor, Michigan area, for Saturday, January 12, 2013. We are looking forward to working together to more effectively face the encroaching darkness and transform our society into one which respects the face of God in all human beings.

Bespoke Babies

December 14, 2012

Joseph A. Kohm, Jr.

First Things

A recent article on Slate chronicles one woman’s quest to become a “girl-mommy” using preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Ms. Simpson (a pseudonym) already had three sons, and after almost four years and $40,000, she was able to use PGD to give birth to a girl. Said Ms. Simpson, “She was worth every cent. Better than a new car, or a kitchen reno.”

“Preimplantation genetic diagnosis” was originally designed to identify genetic diseases or chromosomal disorders, such as cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia, in embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF) before they are implanted in the woman’s uterus. IVF is designed to initiate a pregnancy, while PGD is used to sort and choose preferable embryos before pregnancy.

Now, though, enterprising fertility doctors have found a way to maximize the utility of this technology by marketing it to individuals seeking to determine the sex of their child. The use of PGD for gender selection has become a lucrative practice for American physicians, as it is illegal to use it for that reason in Australia, the U.K., and Canada.

Technological advancements in science are sprinting past our laws and cultural norms. The appeal of PGD is that it subjugates reality to humanity’s desires, striving to eliminate the chronological distance between want and satisfaction. Gender selection of your child is reduced to just another consumer decision, similar to selecting a car or choosing the color of the living room carpet. Genetic engineering is merely convenient “family balancing.”

As science sprints past law, few stop to consider whether PGD is “good.” To the secular mind, science’s ability to determine gender is a testament to individual freedom. After all, more choices must intuitively mean more freedom. But as our choices have multiplied, the ethical, societal, and religious guardrails have been destroyed. We are where the Israelites were in Judges when “everyone did as he saw fit.” Limitless freedom, however, is unsustainable, as the book of Proverbs forewarns that the eyes of man are never satisfied, and Machiavelli instructs that men desire everything but cannot attain everything.

One woman in the Slate piece describes her reason for wanting a girl by saying, “I’m not into sports. I’m not into violent games. I’m not into a lot of things boys represent and do.” Would she be disappointed if her daughter exhibited behavior generally associated with a tomboy? After a child is born there is no return policy (as of yet) should Ms. Simpson be subject to the personal inconvenience of having to raise a daughter who does want to play sports. In buying a daughter she thought she was purchasing traditional gender-identified experiences.

Another issue that progressives fail to consider with PGD is that each generation’s attempts at genetic engineering constitute the forced exercise of that generation’s view of what is good upon the succeeding generation. One generation’s abuse of freedom severely constrains the freedom of the next. As C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means . . . the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

The real problem with PGD is found at a deeper root than even selfishness, consumerism, or man’s attempt to conquer nature. It is found in the concept of image. Man once saw himself reflecting the image of God: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God he created him.”

A proper concept of man looks outward and views him as reflecting the eternal. The secular mind has turned its gaze inward to consider humanity as a malleable product. Man created in the image of man has significantly less inherent value than man created in God’s image.

As technology advances, our desire to be like gods will not abate. Eden should have taught us that while we thought we were laying hands on the forbidden fruit, it was really laying hands on us.

Joseph A. Kohm, Jr. is an attorney residing in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

RESOURCES

Jasmeet Sidhu, “How To Buy a Daughter”

On Right-to-Work law: Catholic vs. Catholic

Ann Arbor, Michigan - Legislation granting workers the right to opt out of paying union dues has passed in Michigan, with more details here.

Many of the issues we discuss on Kresta in the Afternoon are clearly defined by the Church as moral goods or evils. Abortion and gay marriage are two prime examples. Laws regarding the collection of union dues, however, do not deal necessarily with intrinsic evils, but rather with matters on which our prudential judgment may, and should, be put to use. Catholics of good will may hold differing opinions on such matters. This week, two prominent Catholics published commentaries holding forth opposite points of view on Michigan's Right to Work legislation. We share them with you now, in hopes of fostering continued conversation.

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a retired auxiliary bishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, expressed opposition to the new law:

Bishop Gumbleton

"The right-to-work legislation that was passed by the House and the Senate in Michigan just this month is designed to break unions. It is designed to prevent workers from organizing. And we must oppose it as firmly as we did during the 1980s.

As Catholics, we believe that if the dignity of work is to remain protected, then the basic rights of workers must be protected — fair wages, freedom from discrimination and the right to organize and join unions. We believe in justice. We believe in the common good.

Right-to-work laws go against everything we believe...

Right-to-work laws do not help the least among us. Rather, they profit those who already hold more power and wealth than is their fair share. They foster extreme inequality, inequality that can only lead to extreme disparities and extreme division." (entire article available on Mlive.)

Fr. Robert Sirico

But Fr. Robert Sirico of the Acton Institute, penned a response to Gumbleton, entitled
"Big Gains for the Union Liberation Movement"in which he states, in part:

"I dissent. Michigan’s new right-to-work law is neither “unjust” nor will it “foster extreme inequality.” The law simply gives working people the freedom to choose whether or not they want to be members of a union. What’s more, they are not forced to pay union dues or agency fees as a condition of employment. Another word for this is freedom.

Historically, the Catholic Church has looked favorably on unions — with exceptions, of course. The Church sees unions as one way to look after the well-being of workers and their families. However, this favorable bias does not mean that workers are obligated to join a union, nor that management is obligated to accept the terms of a union. The right to join a union, in Church social teaching, is rooted in the natural right of association, which of course also means that people have the right not to associate. Which is exactly what this legislation addresses; it protects workers from being coerced to association with and paying fees to a group with whom they would rather not join.

Pope Leo XIII addressed the intolerable treatment of workers during the Industrial Revolution in Rerum Novarum. As I have observed earlier on this blog, the “savage capitalism” that occurred several decades ago is not what workers in Michigan face today. The entire thrust of Leo’s encyclical, beginning with its title, was precisely aimed at looking around at the “new things” (Rerum Novarum) that were emerging in his day, and reflecting upon them in the light of Scripture, Tradition and the Natural Law. If the situation for Michigan workers is remotely comparable to the subsistence living conditions under which many workers lived in the latter part of the 19^th century, this has somehow escaped my notice." (article in its entirety available on the Acton Institute's website.)

What do you think?

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Community organizing group lying to U.S. Bishops to retain grants?

Mon Dec 10, 2012 15:26 EST

Co-authored with Patrick Craine
WASHINGTON, D.C., December 10, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A coalition of Catholic organizations is charging that one of the largest recipient of funds from the U.S. Bishops’ domestic anti-poverty program lied to the bishops about its activities to keep the Catholic money flowing.

The Gamaliel Foundation, which received $799,500 in grants last year from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development through 21 local affiliates, was a founding member of a coalition called the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) that advocates for legal recognition of same-sex “families.”
But CCHD guidelines stipulate that grantees may not join coalitions that advocate against Catholic teaching “as part of their organizational purpose or coalition agenda.”

CCHD leaders questioned Gamaliel on the problematic relationship after it was discovered by the Reform CCHD Now Coalition (RCN). The Gamaliel Foundation informed the Catholic agency that it had “severed ties” with FIRM in 2010. As a result, CCHD continued the grants.
But the RCN Coalition says Gamaliel is lying. They found information on Gamaliel’s own website indicating that Gamaliel was elevated to FIRM’s executive committee in December 2011. The relevant pages from their website were put under password protection after the issue arose, but RCN has posted screenshots on their website.
LifeSiteNews spoke on the phone briefly with Gamaliel’s executive director, Ana Garcia-Ashley, who asked that questions be sent by e-mail. But after several e-mails she has failed to respond.
LifeSiteNews also contacted officials with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and the Gamaliel Foundation at both the national and local levels for comment, with no response.
Michael Hichborn, a spokesman for the RCN Coalition, said “it’s not surprising that Gamaliel and CCHD would choose not to issue a comment on this, given the long-standing, tight relationship these two organizations have enjoyed for the past 40 years.”
“But while it’s understandable that they would not want to acknowledge to the public that Gamaliel lied to the CCHD about its relationship with FIRM, the question that remains is ‘will CCHD let Gamaliel get away with lying to them?”
On top of Gamaliel’s connection to FIRM, it is also a dues-paying member of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), which actively promotes abortion and same-sex “marriage,” and encourages philanthropic organizations to give grants to such organizations. Ana Garcia-Ashley sits on NCRP’s board.
Gamaliel gained national attention when its former employee, President Barack Obama made his first presidential bid. The president worked as a community organizer with Gamaliel during the 1980’s.
The foundation and President Obama’s ties to the CCHD go back just as far, with Gamaliel having received reimbursement from the CCHD for the pro-abortion Obama’s community organizing training in Los Angeles in 1986.
RCN member American Life League produced a video titled, “Robbing Peter to Pay Saul,” explaining the details surrounding Gamaliel and CCHD.

Contact information:
Catholic Campaign for Human Development
202-541-3210
cchdgrants@usccb.org
Fax: 202-541-3329
Ralph McCloud, Director of CCHD
202-541-3367
rmccloud@usccb.org

Father James Schall’s ‘Final Gladness’

With a nod to Belloc, the respected theologian retires with a parting lecture that focuses on friendship.

by SOPHIA MASON 12/13/2012, National Catholic Register

Jesuit Father James Schall

– Georgetown University

WASHINGTON — Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall was filled to capacity. The images of morality, faith and patriotism, of art, science and the alma mater looked out at the crowded horseshoe balcony and down on the stage, with its podium and single chair.
In the first row in front of the stage, edged with roses, gladiolas and Canterbury bells, pink, purple and white, sat professors and priests, authors and political philosophers. They were almost the only representatives in the hall of the elderly and the middle-aged. The bulk of the rest of the 700 seats was taken up by undergraduates and youngsters still in their 20s.
The students had come to Gaston Hall on a Friday night to hear a lecture — a lecture on which no credits or grades depended and for which no attendance would be taken: the last lecture of Jesuit Father James Schall.
Born in 1928, Father Schall joined the Jesuits in 1948 and received his Ph.D. from Georgetown in 1960. He taught in Rome at the Pontifical Gregorian University and in the government department at the University of San Francisco before returning to the government department at Georgetown in 1977. He is the author of more than 30 books and numerous essays on theology, political philosophy and related subjects.
After 34 years of teaching at Georgetown, Father Schall has retired. The lecture on Dec. 7, “The Final Gladness,” was his farewell to the school and its professors and students. The meaning of the title was perhaps obscure to most of those waiting in the hall — unless perhaps they took it to refer to their old professor’s retirement. Maybe after so many years of teaching, a sunny home in California is precisely the sort of gladness that one looks forward to.
The case, as it turned out, was otherwise. The quotation from which Father Schall took his title belongs to Hilaire Belloc’s The Four Men and comes as one of the four, Grizzlebeard, reflects on how he returns from his travels: “Then indeed I have each time remembered my boyhood, and each time I have been glad to come home. But I never found it to be a final gladness.”

The Importance of Friendship
With that quote, and lines from Frederick Wilhelmsen and Samuel Johnson as anchors, Father Schall sailed off into a meditation on learning, philosophy and friendship — on friendship most of all and the importance of friendship in and for philosophy and learning.
“For both Aristotle and Aquinas,” Father Schall explained, “friendship stands at the core of human and Divine reality. No subject stands closer to the reality of the student: If we get that wrong, we get it all wrong.” Of Aristotle’s views on friendship in particular, he reflected that “it’s a sobering and, yes, exhilarating experience for the student to realize that the best thing said on the subject was said 2,500 years ago.”
More recently, Father Schall finds the idea of friendship in an essay that G.K. Chesterton wrote on Charles Dickens: “This is one of the greatest passages I have ever read. Its central truth has come back to haunt me over the years. It contains something transcendent, which I bequeath to each of my students over all the years:
“There is ‘a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant: and the passage is along a rambling English road, a twisting road such as Mr. Pickwick traveled. But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure forever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: And when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.’”
Father Schall reflected that the passage, which is “a graphic English version” of the visions of the afterlife suggested by reason and Revelation, is something from which he has “never quite recovered.” In fact, the topic was one on which he wrote his dissertation, the argument of which “concerns the truth that Chesterton saw in Dickens, that Aristotle and Aquinas saw in friendship, that John saw in the passage ‘I call you not servants, but friends.’”
In Christianity, Father Schall explained, God is neither the unapproachable God of the philosophers nor a lonely being who needed to create man to satisfy his own needs, but a Being whose Triune existence both ensures his sufficiency and overflows to our benefit.
It is this image of God’s perfection, anticipated in the thought of Plato, which, according to Father Schall, gives force to the Aristotelian injunction that men should as far as possible “devote our lives not to the human and mortal things, but to divine things.”
Of course, one can only learn so much of the divine things in a lifetime. But for Father Schall, the recognition that one has much to learn is an excellent discovery; it acts as a spur. He and his fellow professors know three kinds of students, “those who are interested only in grades, those who know everything and the eminently teachable.” The eminently teachable are those who, like Socrates, know that they do not know — and who, therefore, like Socrates, continue to ask questions.

Things to Remember
Towards the conclusion of his lecture, in preparation as it were for his own departure, Father Schall asked rhetorically what a professor most wants his students to remember. It is “not himself, but what is true. Above all, he wants them to remember the Socratic foundations of our culture: that it is not right to do wrong, that death is not the worst thing that can happen.”
Reflecting on his return to California, to the part of it that used to be called El Dorado, Father Schall repeated the line of Samuel Johnson which he had quoted at the beginning of his lecture: “It is folly to delay those things that cannot be escaped.” Parting, Father Schall concluded, is an inevitable element of human existence; and yet, at the same time, “it is clear that human life is ultimately about meeting again.”
That meeting, in Father Schall’s vision, will be both Dickensian and Socratic, will involve both friendship and debate, will be a time of “drinking from those great flagons at the end of the world.” Most of all, however, it will be a meeting in which we, in friendship, at last find ourselves “seeing God as we would have it, face-to-face.”
This, then, is “the final gladness” of Father Schall. There is no question, in his opinion, that such a final gladness exists. The only question regards “its location and whether our manner of living and thinking is worthy to receive it.
“Such is my last lecture that I bequeath to you.”

Sophia Mason is a graduate student at The Catholic University of America.

She blogs at The Girl Who Was Saturday and lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Five Questions With Jesuit Father James Schall

What was the best course you ever taught?
As I taught every semester a course on the nature of political philosophy — that was probably my best course. I always found it a delight. I taught an eight-semester cycle that included the following semester courses: "Plato," "Augustine," "Aristotle," "Aquinas," "Classical Political Philosophy," "Medieval Political Philosophy," "Natural Law" and "Roman Catholic Political Philosophy."
Each of these was an insightful, often-wondrous course; probably the semester with Plato was the most memorable, though I liked them all. When one has finished a semester on Aristotle, Augustine or Aquinas, he can hardly imagine how much he still has to learn from these great men.

What book of yours do you think was the most worth writing? Which others do you think will still be read in 50 years?
Goodness, I should be pleased if any Schall book were read in five years. Another Sort of Learning is undoubtedly the book that has received most attention. I think Roman Catholic Political Philosophy is the one that solves the most theoretic problems. The book that I like best is On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, but The Praise of ‘Sons of !@#$%’: On the Worship of God by Fallen Men and Idylls and Rambles are more autobiographical and are books that I have enjoyed doing.
My best literary form, as it were, is the short essay. I do a regular column entitled “On Letters and Essays” in The University Bookman. I think Belloc was the greatest essayist in our language. I do love the short essay. In fact, the subtitle of Idylls and Rambles is precisely Lighter Christian Essays.
The Schall-on-Chesterton book is in this category, as is Unexpected Meditations Late in the Twentieth Century and in the forthcoming The Classical Moment.

How do the roles of a priest and a teacher fit together? Does being a Jesuit have anything to do with it?
At least one of the purposes of the Society of Jesus was to combine the priest and teacher into one person. A priest simply knows things that a teacher is not likely to know. To teach is also one of the duties of the priest. St. Paul said that teaching is one of the possible manifestations of the variety within the Church. To teach is to make present to another what is true and how to see it by himself. Teachers do not own knowledge. It is free.
One of my best essays was entitled “What a Student Owes His Teacher.” Both teacher and student pursue the same thing: the truth itself. If they do not, both are lost.

You left the Army to join the Jesuits in 1948. How did this come about? Is there any leftover Army in you?
Well, I did not exactly leave the Army to join the Jesuits. I had an 18-month enlistment after World War II. On finishing that, I went back to the University of Santa Clara. It was at the end of my first year there that I entered the order. Do I still have any Army left in me? Every time I make my bed in the morning, I thank God for the Army.
One of my best essays is in The Mind That Is Catholic — The Real Alternative to Just War. It is about the need and rational for need of a military. The first essay in my Maritain book — Jacques Maritain: The Philosopher in Society — entitled “Justice, Brains and Strength,” deals with this issue also.
I must confess little patience with pacifists or those who are unwilling to see that sometimes the lack of strength and the will to use it reasonably is itself a cause of greater injustice and suffering than the use of force when needed.

Chesterton is frequently characterized as a brilliant but unsystematic thinker. Is that a fair characterization, and (if the latter part is true) does the unsystematic nature of his writings pose any problems for studying him?
Chesterton, as you know, is simply the greatest. On the 100th anniversary of the publication of Orthodoxy, I wrote a long essay on this book in Telos magazine. Orthodoxy is simply the greatest book written in the 20th century, and I have not seen a better one yet in the 21st. The major premise of the question about Chesterton being unsystematic is roughly that real thought only takes place in systems. Usually what takes place in systems is ideology. What Chesterton was is a metaphysician. He went where "what is" took him. That is why he understood St. Thomas practically without reading him. No more orderly mind ever existed than Chesterton, except perhaps Aquinas. Neither one had a system.
The real problem in reading Chesterton, as a lady once asked him, is his humor. She thought that one had to be serious to be a philosopher. Chesterton told her: “Madam, the opposite of funny is not serious. The opposite of funny is not funny.” There is absolutely no reason why truth cannot be found in humor or presented in a humorous way.
Why people have difficulty in reading or appreciating Chesterton, I think, has nothing to do with his supposed unsystematic mind. It has to do with his clear grasp of the truth and where arguments contrary to it lead us. The conclusion of his 1905 book Heretics always seems to me to state the real issue. Modern philosophy has separated us from what is. It now takes faith to affirm whether the grass is green.
One cannot read Chesterton very long without examining his mind. He must be put away or put off by calling him unsystematic or funny to avoid the real implications of Chesterton, which is that Christianity has it right about man, cosmos and God. If we live our lives in a way that allows us to blind ourselves to his logic, we will have to find ways also to reject reality itself. This rejection, as I tried to point out in my book The Modern Age, is what we are about today. But if we want to know what reality itself is about, we had best read Chesterton.

— Sophia Mason

Friday, December 14, 2012

Today on "Kresta in the Afternoon - December 14, 2012

Talking about the "things that matter most" on Dec. 14

4:00 – Kresta Comments - France Monitoring Traditionalist Catholics For 'Religious Pathology' / New Stats on Hate Crimes against Catholics

4:20 - Lincoln: The Movie, the Man and the 13th Amendment

The film critics and theater-goers everywhere have overwhelmingly given their collective “thumbs up” to the film “Lincoln” which focuses its scope to the fight over the 13th Amendment. But what about the Lincoln scholars? Ronald White Jr. is the author of numerous books on Lincoln and joins us to give his perspective.

5:00 – Kresta Comments - France Monitoring Traditionalist Catholics For 'Religious Pathology' / New Stats on Hate Crimes against Catholics

5:20 – Who Is My Enemy?: Questions American Christians Must Face about Islam--and Themselves

Our guest argues that current discussion of Islam in America tends toward two polar extremes. On one hand is the notion that Christianity is superior to Islam and that Muslims are warmongers. On the other is the notion that all religions basically say the same thing and are peaceable. Lee Camp argues that both these extremes are wrong. He introduces Christian and Islamic views on war and peacemaking. Lee is here to discuss how to respond faithfully and intelligently to Muslims in today's world as well as to the New Atheists who suppose that all religion is inherently violent.

For Liberals, Religious Freedom Means Freedom from Religion

December 12, 2012

by Thomas Fleming, Crisis Magazine

As the presidential campaign came to a close, religious questions sneaked surreptitiously into the national debate. The Democrats had an easy target: Governor Romney’s unusual religious affiliation, though since few Democrats know anything about any religion, particularly Christianity, they found it difficult to distinguish Mormonism from other not quite so strange semi-Christian sects. Watching national commentators fumbling for words, I was reminded of the media reaction to Jimmy Carter’s declaration that he was a born-again Christian. The national dailies and weeklies actually had to run major stories explaining what the phrase meant. Some Evangelicals responded by changing their position on the LDS. The people who run Billy Graham’s website “Mormonism” went so far as to remove Mormonism from a list of cults. Since the best defense is a good offense, the Republican Christianists went on the attack, excoriating President Obama and his Party for subtly shifting their advocacy of religious freedom to a defense of “freedom of worship,” a phrase that has been kicking around the dusty corridors of professional religiosity for some time. Freedom of religion, as we have all heard in sermons and editorials, goes beyond the right to assemble and worship in the proverbial “church of your choice.” Religious freedom is the right to live out the life prescribed by religion: to wear religious garb and symbols, preaching the faith in public, doing all such good works that the faithful have been instructed to perform.

Alarmists can point to the shifting rhetoric of rights as enunciated by the UN Secretary General.
In connection with Freedom of Worship, there is also the ambiguity of the UN Secretary General’s recent remarks on the freedom of expression which is absolute–so long as you offend no one (except Christians).

All human beings have the inalienable right to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly. These are very fundamental rights. But, at the same time, this freedom of expression should not be abused by individuals. Freedom of expression should be and must be guaranteed and protected, when they are used for common justice, common purpose. When some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected in such a way. So, my position is that freedom of expression, while it is a fundamental right and privilege, should not be abused by such people, by such a disgraceful and shameful act.

So it is the rulers of states and (in the Secretary General’s imagination) the world, who get to decide what we are free to say and how we are free to worship.

The Deseret News—owned and controlled by the LDS organization—weighed in: “But worshiping within a sanctuary constitutes just one facet of a living faith. Religious institutions and believers realize their vocations most fully when engaged in ministering to the sick, caring for the poor, counseling the poor in spirit, educating the rising generation and promoting integrity in society.”
This all sounds rather nice, but (as I explained in a recent column) when Christianists try to turn it into an ultimate creed, they run afoul of religions that persecute other religions or engage in disagreeable acts. Christianists then fall back on the position that freedom of religion is to be permitted except where exercise of that freedom conflicts with longstanding moral and legal traditions, such as prohibitions on murder, or even with more recent revelations on the rights of women, children, and brute beasts.

As an aside, let me point out the obvious flaw: None of the great monotheisms, compared with Greco-Roman or Egyptian paganism, has much of a track record on tolerance and religious freedom. The Romans did cracked down on the Druids, both for human sacrifice and for their agitation against imperial government, and they sporadically persecuted Christians, mostly for their alleged misanthropy and lack of patriotism. However, the Greeks and Romans did not care what you believed, so long as you paid lip service to the religion of the city or of the empire.
Religious freedom may well be the prudent thing for Christians of this age, but it was non-Christian liberals like Mr. Jefferson who promoted the idea of toleration of dissent. “Error of opinion,” he intoned in his inaugural address, “may be tolerated where freedom is left to combat it.” Note, by the way, that Jefferson used the word may as opposed to must. He was not so foolish as to declare an absolute freedom of opinion and expression.
President Jefferson was, of course, speaking of political opinions, but he would have cheerfully applied the same rule to religion, if only because he was largely indifferent to all religions. His family, friends, and neighbors were all—to one extent or another—Christians, mostly Anglicans, and he had no quarrel with a superstition (as he certainly regarded Trinitarian Christianity) that taught kindness, charity, thrift, and personal responsibility.
When liberal deists, agnostics, and atheists declare themselves in favor of religious freedom, there is no paradox or anomaly, because toleration of diversity is a liberal but not a Christian virtue. As a postmodern man living in a postChristian world, I freely acknowledge the practical advantages of religious freedom, but as a Christian I am not naïve enough to believe that this doctrine was taught by Christ and his Apostles or by the great doctors of the Church. Nor do we find it in the great reformers—Calvin was as an enthusiastic a persecutor as Torquemada.
Freedom of religion, then, is the creed of the anti-Christian liberal tradition that has always wanted to stick Christianity in a box that can be put safely away in some Lost Articles depot. When they are more honest, anti-Christians speak openly of “freedom from religion,” which is the real meaning of the campaign for religious tolerance.
This column first appeared October 19, 2012 on the Daily Mail (London) website and is reprinted with permission.

By Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of several books on ethics (The Morality of Everyday Life) and politics (Socialism, The Politics of Human Nature). In an earlier life he received a Ph.D. in classics and taught Greek and Latin at several universities.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Democrats urge delay for ‘job-killing’ Obamacare tax

December 11, 2012 | 8:12 pm | Modified: December 11, 2012 at 9:00 pm

Sixteen Democratic senators who voted for the Affordable Care Act are asking that one of its fundraising mechanisms, a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices scheduled to take effect January 1, be delayed. Echoing arguments made by Republicans against Obamacare, the Democratic senators say the levy will cost jobs — in a statement Monday, Sen. Al Franken called it a “job-killing tax” — and also impair American competitiveness in the medical device field.
The senators, who made the request in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, are Franken, Richard Durbin, Charles Schumer, Patty Murray, John Kerry, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Joseph Lieberman, Ben Nelson, Robert Casey, Debbie Stabenow, Barbara Mikulski, Kay Hagan, Herb Kohl, Jeanne Shaheen, and Richard Blumenthal. All voted for Obamacare.
Two other Democrats, senators-elect Joe Donnelly and Elizabeth Warren, also signed the letter. Donnelly voted for Obamacare as a member of the House. Warren was not in Congress at the time.
“The medical technology industry directly employs over 400,000 people in the United States and is responsible for a total of two million skilled manufacturing jobs,” the senators wrote in a December 4 letter to Reid. “We must do all we can to ensure that our country maintains its global leadership position in the medical technology industry and keeps good jobs here at home.”
Beyond that, the senators say, the medical device industry “has received little guidance about how to comply with the tax” — a reference to the apparently confused and halting nature of the Obama administration’s implementation of Obamacare.
Several of the senators, many of whom have medical device manufacturers in their states, have opposed the tax for a long time. During the Obamacare debate, for example, Franken and Klobuchar were among a group of senators who successfully pushed to reduce the tax. (The device giant Medtronic is headquartered in Minnesota.)
On Monday, Franken again expressed his opposition to the tax he voted for. “I want to repeal the medical device tax altogether,” the senator and former comedian said in a statement. “But I am concerned that we are running out of time before this job-killing tax goes into effect. So, for now, the best thing to do to ensure that this important industry continues to create jobs and producing life-saving devices is to delay this unwise tax.” Franken and other want Reid to include a provision to delay the tax in the ongoing fiscal cliff negotiations.
None of the senators found his or her earlier objections to the tax a sufficient reason to vote against Obamacare. In December 2009, with 60 votes in the Senate and a determined Republican opposition, Democrats needed every vote they could get to pass the president’s national health care plan. But now, with Obamacare — and the taxes to fund it — about to become a reality, some of those Democrats are singing a different tune.

Wyoming Catholic College Dismisses Chaplain

Decision follows allegations of improper behavior with students.

by TIM DRAKE 12/11/2012

Father Stuart MacDonald

– Wyoming Catholic College

LANDER, Wyo. — Two months after beginning as chaplain for Wyoming Catholic College, Father Stuart MacDonald has been dismissed, following allegations of improper behavior — drinking and using inappropriate language — with students surfaced.
Father MacDonald, a priest of the Diocese of St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, was fired from his position on Nov. 19.
“His dismissal is subsequent to an internal investigation by the college, which revealed Rev. MacDonald’s improper conduct and language with the college’s students and a pattern of behavior unacceptable as a Catholic college chaplain,” said the college’s press statement about the dismissal.
Father Robert Cook, president of the college, said he first met Father MacDonald in the spring.
“I interviewed him in March,” said Father Cook. “We flew him here. He was here for three or four days. He said he had his bishop’s permission to interview.”
According to Father Cook, he was first alerted to Father MacDonald’s alleged misbehavior by a graduate of the college on Nov. 10.
“I insisted that he go to the Lander police,” explained Father Cook.
Father Cook explained the nature of the allegations as “excessive drinking with students, foul language and bad jokes” — behavior Father Cook described as “incredible acts of poor judgment and imprudence.”
Subsequently, Father Cook made inquiries of students who knew Father MacDonald. When others confirmed what Father Cook described as a “pattern of behavior,” Father Cook met with Father MacDonald.
“Our students are very committed to living their faith,” said Father Cook. “Father MacDonald’s behavior was unacceptable by a priest who is to give the very best moral example conceivable.”
Father MacDonald ceased his chaplaincy work at the college as of Nov. 19. Efforts to reach him through his diocese were unsuccessful.

Student Reaction
Recent graduate Caitlin Milligan happened to be visiting on campus when the announcement was made to students.
“The announcement was made at dinner on Nov. 19,” said Milligan, a high-school theology teacher in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. “The initial reaction by students was one of indignation and the colloquial response, ‘They [the administration] had better know what they are doing.’”
Clarification was made, and further details were offered for students, the following day by a faculty member during lunch.
“Students were told of inappropriate behavior that he had admitted to,” said Milligan. “After the clarification was made, the noon bells rang, and a student led the Angelus. The student response was one of prayer.”
“The students are organizing an all-night vigil,” said Milligan. “They’re praying for strength and praying for a new chaplain.”
“He was a very, very good chaplain,” said Erin Milligan, a sophomore, and one of Caitlin’s two younger sisters at the college. “He was my spiritual advisor and helped all of us in our spiritual struggles.”
“Some of my friends said that his jokes seemed inappropriate for a priest to be telling,” admitted Erin. “I didn’t care for his sense of humor.”
Caitlin described the attitude on campus now as one of “resigned anticipation.”
“I agree that the school made the right decision. This was a wake-up call,” said Erin. “As we’re searching for a new president, it’s a reminder that we have to be extremely careful in looking at people who are coming to the school.”

No Criminal Conduct
Some news stories, quoting from an anonymous email received by Lander news outlets, alleged sexual misconduct on the part of Father MacDonald.
“That is clearly untrue,” said Father Cook.
Christina George, editor of the Lander Journal, said that the Lander Police Department had investigated allegations of sexual misconduct and alcohol use.
“There was an investigation. It has been closed. No charges will be filed,” said Det. Randy Lutterman, the Lander officer in charge of the investigation.
While not certain, Father Cook believes that Father MacDonald returned to Canada on Nov. 20. In the press statement, the college stated that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security had been notified that Father MacDonald’s employment visa should be terminated.
Father MacDonald was ordained a priest in the Diocese of St. Catharines on May 17, 1997. A former priest at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Niagara Falls, Father MacDonald holds a licentiate in canon law from the Pontifical Gregorian University. He had the permission of Bishop Gerard Bergie to take up the position of chaplain at Wyoming Catholic College. He had maintained the Musings of a Canonist blog since March 2012.
Father MacDonald could not be reached for comment.
According to Father Cook, Father MacDonald did not have experience in campus ministry, but he was familiar with celebrating the extraordinary form of the Mass, an important requirement for the chaplain position at the college, as the school celebrates that form. In preparation for assuming his position at Wyoming Catholic, the college sent Father MacDonald to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter at St. John Cantius in Chicago last June to learn the celebration of the high Mass. He began as chaplain on Aug. 18.
“We’re incredibly shocked,” said Matthew Brasmer, spokesman for the college. “He was incredibly well-liked by students.”
“We immediately informed parents of what was going on,” said Father Cook. “I’ve received well over 35 messages from parents thanking us for acting so quickly and clearly. They felt our actions were appropriate and said they didn’t want their children attending a college having such a chaplain.”

Tim Drake is the Register’s senior writer.

Today on "Kresta in the Afternoon" - December 13, 2012

Talking about the "things that matter most" on Dec. 13

4:00 – Bernanke Explains New Fed Guidance, Confusing Reporters and Self
Yesterday Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke to reporters held a 90-minute press conference following a two-day meeting of the U.S. central bank’s powerful rate-setting committee. The Fed said it would keep its remarkably low benchmark interest rates for the moment and believed "this exceptionally low range for the federal funds rate will be appropriate at least as long as the unemployment rate remains above 6-1/2 percent." With some reporters still seemingly struggling to digest the significance of the announcement, Bernanke made a couple of explanatory statements that paradoxically made the Fed’s new position both more explicit and more confusing. Here to help us understand is economist George Schwartz.

4:20 – The Hobbit Hits Theaters At Midnight: A Literary Professor Reviews It
Nearly a decade after the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the first film in the Hobbit trilogy hits theaters at midnight tonight. Literary professor and Tolkein expert Dr. Henry Russell is here to discuss the film and offer his expert review.

5:00 – Kresta Comments: Vatican Observatory Comments on Mayan Calendar / FBI: 67 hate crimes against Catholics in 2011

5:20 – My Sisters the Saints: A Spiritual Memoir
In My Sisters the Saints, author Colleen Carroll Campbell blends her personal narrative of spiritual seeking, trials, stumbles, and breakthroughs with the stories of six women saints who profoundly changed her life: Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, Faustina of Poland, Edith Stein of Germany, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Mary of Nazareth. Drawing upon the rich writings and examples of these extraordinary women, the author reveals Christianity's liberating power for women and the relevance of the saints to the lives of contemporary Christians. She joins us today.