A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism: II

Frans de Waal straightens out Milton Friedman, Enron's Jeff Skilling, and Richard Dawkins

In Part I I wrote about primatologist Frans de Waal's campaign to make more people aware of the origins of empathy in nature and to consider how this knowledge might benefit society. When discussing "nature" and "human nature" he stresses the importance of knowing the difference between Darwinism and Social Darwinism, with the latter being an inaccurate caricature of the former. In the video I embedded in the Part I post he says:

The thing that I'm reacting to strongly is that conservatives in the US try to present society as an imitation of nature, like "nature is a struggle for life, nature is a process of competition, and we need to mimic that in society..." and I'm not convinced that nature is like that, first of all, and I'm not convinced that what nature does needs to be mimiced in society... And my argument would rather be that we have a lot of cooperative and empathic and nicer tendencies, and if that's part of human nature then that needs to be represented in society as well. We need to build a society that has room for that and is not just based on competition.

A ton of people write about science, evolution and ethics these days. So why do I find him enjoyable to read and listen to? In the prologue to his 2001 book The Ape and the Sushi Master he wrote:

My personal prejudices probably shine through, even though I may be less good at spotting them than some of my readers. I come from the southern part of the Netherlands. Since I was not born in the actual province of Holland, I rarely refer to my country by this name. The cruel hand of the Spanish Inquisition, which in the sixteenth century reached all the way to Flanders and my part of the Netherlands, put a halt to the Reformation that brought Calvinism to the North. The South stayed Roman Catholic, and as a result my upbringing instilled less fear of God's wrath than is typical of the rest of Northern Europe. We have street carnivals (not unlike those in New Orleans), and in general we pride ourselves on a certain joie de vivre.

I knew it! Just listening to him and reading his work I could tell he had Catholic roots. We can always tell one of our own, even when they've lapsed or strayed.

That might not seem like an important point to make when it is clear that he's not a religious man at all, but I do think it makes him inherently different from the Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris types who throw a lot more heat than light around the public discourse on these issues. He clearly has a host of different sensibilities.

He has a strongly Catholic sense of ethics whether he still realizes it or not.

I take his point about the Spanish Inquisition, and of course our current nightmare just seems to go on and on, but I think one of the great tragedies of history is that the so-called Reformation largely put an end to the allegorization of certain parts of the Bible, and it leapfrogged back past the Catholic Church's attempted synthesis between faith and reason (using both Aristotle and Renaissance Humanism). It fell backward into dreary Augustinian obscurantism and the rejection of reason. Galileo and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine were great friends. If it wasn't for Luther, Calvin & Co., Galileo probably would have been hailed as a hero instead of being censured, but the Catholic Church was afraid of being seen as "soft on the Bible." It retreated behind fortress-like walls.

On the Freakonomics blog Frans de Waal wrote:

When I came to this country, over twenty-five years ago, I was amazed that creationism was still taken seriously, and assumed that it would blow over. It never did, of course. I can’t help but look at it as a left-over of a medieval mind-set unresponsive to overwhelming counter-evidence.

At the same time, I must say that I don’t think the recent wave of God-questioning rants have helped much. They have polarized the issue, whereas in my mind it is eminently possible to look at religion as a collective value system and at science as telling us how the physical world operates. Even though I am not religious myself, I think the conflict between science and religion is unnecessary and overblown.

That's refreshing. It's an attitude I greatly appreciate, coming from an evolutionary biologist.

Anyway, did you know that convicted Enron felon Jeffrey Skilling, who was found guilty on 19 counts of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors, is seeking to have his conviction overturned by the Supreme Court? What nerve.

Skilling was a big fan of Richard Dawkins, and found justification in his own selfish cutthroat ways in Dawkins' writings on nature and evolution.

For this very sort of reason Frans de Waal takes strong exception to the language Dawkins uses to describe evolution, and for his part, Dawkins criticizes what he considers de Waal's tendency to be "poetic" when describing the behavior of animals.

In the excerpts below, de Waal examines the role of economics in society... Economics is, after all, a social science, not the "science of money." He also gives us his take on Milton Friedman, Skilling and Dawkins...

Does an economy serve society, or is it the other way around?

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant saw as little value for human kindness as former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney did in energy conservation. Cheney mocked conservation as “a sign of personal virtue” that, sadly, wouldn’t do the planet any good. Kant praised compassion as “beautiful” yet considered it irrelevant to a virtuous life. Who needs tender feelings if duty is all that matters?

Celebrated economist Milton Friedman claimed that “few trends could so very undermine the foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.” Friedman thus offered an ideology that puts people last.

Even if Friedman were right in theory about the connection between money and freedom, in practice money corrupts. All too often it leads to exploitation, injustice, and rampant dishonesty. Given its colossal fraud, the Enron Corporation’s sixty-four-page “Code of Ethics” now seems as fictional as the safety manual of the Titanic. In the past decade, every advanced nation has had major business scandals, and in every case executives have managed to shake the foundations of their society precisely by following Friedman’s advice.

Enron and the Selfish Gene

Outside a hip restaurant I finally met my celebrity. My friends had promised that this place was frequented by Hollywood stars, and indeed when darkness fell in the middle of dinner, and we spilled out onto the street, I found myself next to a cigarette-smoking movie idol whom I chatted with about this and that, and how our food must be getting cold. The encounter took place thanks to one of those rolling blackouts that struck California in 2000. Fifteen minutes later everyone was back at their table, back to normal, but of course what had just happened was extraordinary.

No, I don’t mean meeting the star, but witnessing the wonders of unrestrained capitalism, all thanks to Enron, the Texas-based energy company that had developed innovative ways of tweaking the market and creating artificial power shortages so that prices would soar. Never mind that the blackouts posed serious risks for people on respirators or in elevators. Social responsibility just wasn’t part of Enron’s mindset. They played by Friedman’s rules but were inspired by an unexpected additional source that came straight out of the world of biology. The company’s CEO, Jeff Skilling—now in prison—was a great fan of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and deliberately tried to mimic nature by instigating cutthroat competition within his company.

Skilling set up a peer review committee known as “Rank & Yank.” It ranked employees on a 1—5 scale of representing the best (1) or worst (5), and gave the boot to everyone ranked 5. Up to 20 percent of the employees were axed every year, but not without having been humiliated on a website featuring their portraits. They were first sent to “Siberia”—meaning that they had two weeks to find another position within the company. If they didn’t, they were shown the door. The thinking behind Skilling’s committee was that the human species has only two fundamental drives: greed and fear. This obviously turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. People were perfectly willing to slit others’ throats to survive within Enron's environment, resulting in a corporate atmosphere marked by appalling dishonesty within and ruthless exploitation outside the company. It eventually led to Enron’s implosion in 2001.

The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. Its good to realize though that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn’t mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish this doesn’t mean that genes actually are. Genes can’t be any more “selfish” than a river can be “angry,” or sun rays “loving.” Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are “self-promoting,” because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves. Like many before him Skilling had fallen hook, line, and sinker for the selfish-gene metaphor, thinking that if our genes are selfish then we must be selfish, too. This is not necessarily what Dawkins meant, though, as became clear again during an actual debate that we had in a tower overlooking my chimpanzees.

As brief background one needs to know that Dawkins and I had been critical of each other in print. He had said that I was taking poetic license with regard to animal kindness while I had chided him for coining a metaphor prone to be misunderstood. The usual academic bickering, perhaps, but serious enough that I feared some frost during our encounter at the Yerkes field station. Dawkins visited in connection with the production of a TV series, The Genius of Charles Darwin.

The producers arrived ahead of him to set up a “spontaneous” encounter in which Dawkins would drive up to the door, step out of his van, walk toward me, shake my hand, and warmly greet me before we’d walk off together to see the primates. We did all of this as if it were the first time—even though we’d met before. To break the ice, I told him about the epic drought in Georgia, and how our governor had just led a prayer vigil on the steps of the state capitol to make sure we’d get some rain. This cheered up the staunch atheist, and we laughed at the marvelous coincidence that the vigil had been planned as soon as the weatherman had announced rain.

Our tower debate was frosty indeed, but only because it was one of those unusually chilly days in Georgia. With Dawkins unselfishly tossing fruits at the apes below, we quickly settled on common ground, which wasn’t too hard given our shared academic background. I have no problems calling genes “selfish” so long as it’s understood that this says nothing about the actual motives of humans or animals, and Dawkins agreed that all sorts of behavior, including acts of genuine kindness, may be produced by genes selected to benefit their carriers. In short, we agreed on a separation between what drives evolution and what drives actual behavior that is about as well recognized in biology as is the separation of church and state outside Georgia.

In Part III, Frans de Waal examines the differences between the USA and Europe, and the relative merits of each.

A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism: I

Not By Competition Alone. Frans de Waal on the Origins of Altruism and Empathy



As I've stated in earlier posts, I see no particular reason for us to pit science against religion. Some people consider that a self-deluding dodge, but I really don't have a problem with Darwinism. I have no problem accepting the Theory of Evolution, although I do have strong concerns that if left philosophically unchecked, if misconstrued or narrowly construed, if taken exclusively as the basis for ethics and morality, it can lead to Social Darwinism and eventually towards Eugenics. We've seen ample evidence of this within the past 150 years.

In this present age full of apologists and polemicists I find Frans de Waal a breath of fresh air. He mitigates my fears towards Darwinism to a certain extent. If only there were more spokesmen like him coming from that side.

De Waal is a primatologist who teaches at Emory University, where he also heads up the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. I first became aware of this good-natured Dutchman last year when I read his book Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. In that work he presented his thesis, based upon his long study of primates, that morality is not limited to humans alone and that certain traits we share with other primates such as kindness, altruism, and empathy have biological origins built upon the principles of natural selection. In the book he also takes to task and debates several philosophers and evolutionary psychologists such as Robert Wright, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer, who tend to argue (I think) that de Waal anthropomorphizes animals, and that what he (and we) call morality and altruism is really self-serving behavior at its very root, and that our selfish genes in a sense "trick" us into thinking we are doing something good for someone else when we are really just looking after ourselves. In one particular chapter I thought he did a terrific job arguing against the bizarre Peter Singer, an ardent advocate of animal rights, that animals don't have "rights" per se, but that people should find it imperative to treat them ethically and with dignity in any case.

This past year de Waal has expanded on his general theme in The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. Following a decade of war, terror, the failure of various institutions and the ruination of the Western financial sector due to greed, speculation, and deregulation, he ponders the lessons we humans might want to take from nature and from evolution, as properly understood, rather than improperly understood.

I know he's a scientist, a skeptic in matters of faith, an agnostic at the very least and probably an atheist, but I appreciate his tone and his irenicism. I have a feeling that he, as one of a large Dutch family of seven children if I recall correctly, is willing to engage with people of faith and good will quite differently from the likes of evolutionary fundamentalists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens,who've inherited that specifically English strand of virulently knee-jerk anti-Catholicism, which, if my perusal of the comboxes attached to recent articles on Catholic topics in The Times and The Guardian indicates, is very much alive and well there.

An excerpt from The Age of Empathy:

We are group animals: highly cooperative, sensitive to injustice, sometimes warmongering, but mostly peace loving. A society that ignores these tendencies can’t be optimal. True, we are also incentive-driven animals, focused on status, territory; and food security, so that any society that ignores those tendencies can’t be optimal, either. There is both a social and a selfish side to our species. But since the latter is, at least in the West, the dominant assumption, my focus will be on the former: the role of empathy and social connectedness.

There is exciting new research about the origins of altruism and fairness in both ourselves and other animals. For example, if one gives two monkeys hugely different rewards for the same task, the one who gets the short end of the stick simply refuses to perform. In our own species, too, individuals reject income if they feel the distribution is unfair. Since any income should beat none at all, this means that both monkeys and people fail to follow the profit principle to the letter. By protesting against unfairness their behavior supports both the claim that incentives matter and that there is a natural dislike of injustice.

Yet in some ways we seem to be moving ever closer to a society with no solidarity whatsoever, one in which a lot of people can expect the short end of the stick. To reconcile this trend with good old Christian values, such as care for the sick and poor, may seem hopeless. But one common strategy is to point the finger at the victims. If the poor can be blamed for being poor, everyone else is off the hook. Thus, a year after Katrina, Newt Gingrich, a prominent conservative politician called for an investigation into the “failure of citizenship” of people who had been unsuccessful escaping from the hurricane.



Those who highlight individual freedom often regard collective interests as a romantic notion, something for sissies and communists. They prefer an every-man-for-himself logic. For example, instead of spending money on levees that protect an entire region, why not let everyone take care of their own safety? A new company in Florida is doing just that, renting out seats on private jets to fly people out of places threatened by hurricanes. This way, those who can afford it won’t need to drive out at five miles per hour with the rest of the populace.

Every society has to deal with this me-first attitude. I see it play out every day. And here I am not referring to people, but to chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, where I work. At our field station northeast of Atlanta, we house chimps in large outdoor corrals, sometimes providing them with shareable food, such as watermelons. Most of the apes want to be the first to put their hands on our food, because once they have it, it’s rarely taken away by others. There actually exists respect of ownership, so that even the lowest-ranking female is allowed to keep her food by the most dominant male. Food possessors are often approached by others with an outstretched hand (a gesture that is also the universal way humans ask for a handout). The apes beg and whine, literally whimpering in the face of the other. If the possessor doesn’t give in, beggars may throw a fit, screaming and rolling around as if the world is coming to an end.

My point is that there is both ownership and sharing. In the end, usually within twenty minutes, all of the chimpanzees in the group will have some food. Owners share with their best buddies and family, who in turn share with their best buddies and family. It is a rather peaceful scene even though there is also quite a bit of jostling for position. I still remember a camera crew filming a sharing session and the cameraman turning to me and saying, “I should show this to my kids. They could learn from it.”

So, don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also to our closest relatives, the primates. In a study done at Tai National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards; they licked their mates’ blood, carefully removed dirt, and waved away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense, given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof.

What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick we have fallen for for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.

In Part II, Frans de Waal will straighten out Milton Friedman, Enron's Jeff Skilling, and Richard Dawkins.

American Nō Theatre

"Whatever it is, I'm against it!"

Recently I've become aware of Bloggingheads.tv, which features videochats of sharp people from different walks of like just talkin' about stuff.

Here's a segment of a long conversation between Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, and The Evolution of God) and Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach (author of Why Things Are & Why Things Aren't, and The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West) discussing what they call "the Audacity of Nope" and an "againstness epidemic."



The topic is the reaction and resistance to Obama's healthcare reform process, characterized as "Obamacare" and Socialized Medicine even though it was hardly radical in nature and didn't even present a single-payer system in the end (although I wish it did). In their view, there is no longer any tolerance for the ugliness associated with the deal-making and "sausage-making" of government. Instead of allowing for things to get done, the system now only allows us to mobilize against what we don't want.

Are they just Obama supporters carping and complaining, or are they onto something? Does this Senate supermajority system, which allows a tyranny of the minority, mean perpetual gridlock and hopelessly broken government?

Senator Quincy Adams Wagstaff explains...



The original from Horsefeathers (1932)

What Makes for Catholic Lite?

For that matter, what makes for Taliban Catholicism?



In his book The Courage to be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, George Weigel famously came up with the term "Catholic Lite" while saying:

The answer to the current crisis will not be found in Catholic Lite... It will only be found in a classic Catholicism — a Catholicism with the courage to be countercultural, a Catholicism that has reclaimed the wisdom of the past in order to face the corruption of the present and create a renewed future, a Catholicism that risks the high adventure of fidelity... There is little in Catholic Lite theology that poses a serious countercultural challenge to the spirit of the age. Catholic Lite is a soft Catholicism, understanding and sympathetic. Being understanding and sympathetic are, of course, virtues. But as G. K. Chesterton pointed out long ago, the world is filled with old Christian virtues ‘gone mad.’ When a religious tradition is profoundly challenged, as Christianity is by modernity, more than vices are set loose in the world, Chesterton wrote: ‘The virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more damage.’ That is precisely what has happened in the culture of dissent.

John Allen, writing recently in the National Catholic Reporter, had a thought-provoking take on this. In his column A 'Dallas experiment' in Orthodoxy and Openness he mentioned his coining of the term "Taliban Catholicism" and the criticism he has taken for it. That criticism continued after that column. I share the feeling of many conservatives that the term is hyperbolic, insulting, and not very useful, but what I found particularly interesting was his observation on how he sees the problem of "Catholic Lite" on the right and "Taliban Catholicism" on the left:

In fact, there's a right-wing form of Catholicism Lite that's just as watered-down and sold out to secularism as its kissing cousin on the left. In the States, it can take the form of a country club Republican Catholicism -- untroubled by the inequities of global free-market capitalism, quite at home with anti-immigrant rhetoric, the death penalty, and the use of armed force.

At least in my mind, the defining feature of "Catholicism Lite" is not a liberal or conservative outlook, but rather taking one's cues from secular culture rather than the faith. No ideological camp has a monopoly on that.

Similarly, there's a Taliban instinct on the Catholic left that can be just as noxious as its right-wing version. It generally includes paranoia about almost any exercise of authority in the church, coupled with derision of any attempt to defend traditional Catholic thought, speech or practice -- a liberal "hermeneutic of suspicion" that can easily shade off into rage. Try telling a certain kind of Catholic liberal that Benedict XVI isn't actually "rolling back the clock" on Vatican II, for example, and you'll want to duck and cover.

I see where Allen is coming from, but I wonder about that last part. I get what is behind his critique of liberals and I understand the rationale that lies behind the claims for a "hermeneutic of continuity" and a reform of the reform" but there are plenty of centrists and conservatives who think that Benedict is "turning back the clock" too. In fact, many conservatives openly celebrate it.

Squawkin’ Rich Dawkins Weighs in on Haiti and Christianity

Is Pat Robertson the Real Christian?



Every now and then there are writers on post-modern comparative religion such as Karen Armstrong (The Case for God) who prevail upon the evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins to cool down his rhetoric a bit towards people of religious faith, arguing that there is too much heat being generated already in a world full of colliding fundamentalisms. He tries to tone down it down for a while, but he is what he is, and eventually he lets fly again.



Recently, in a response to Pat Robertson’s statement indicating that the Haitians were being punished by God for having made a pact with the devil, Dawkins came out swinging hard with both fists, not so much at fundamentalists like Robertson, whom he credits for being a real and unabashedly honest Christian, but at Christian moderates, whom he accuses of dissembling and duplicity.

His article Haiti and the Hypocrisy of Christian Theology is hard-hitting and lays down a provocative indictment and challenge towards all Christians. For all believers, it’s certainly worth reading in its entirety. Is he right? Are people like Pat Robertson the real Christians?

We know what caused the catastrophe in Haiti. It was the bumping and grinding of the Caribbean Plate rubbing up against the North American Plate: a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, un-premeditated, unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human misery.

There are plenty of Christians who acknowledge this. I did so myself, along with a few commenters here not two posts ago. The world is built to change via the forces unleashed by volcanoes and earthquakes. They were essential for life itself to flourish to begin with, and shifting continental plates and volcanoes actually provide a means for the world to recycle and renew itself. As we learn more about these things it forces us to reconsider how we view God and our relationship with each other and with creation itself. It doesn't necessarily force us to abandon faith.

The religious mind, however, restlessly seeks human meaning in the blind happenings of nature. As with the Indonesian tsunami, which was blamed on loose sexual morals in tourist bars; as with Hurricane Katrina, which was attributed to divine revenge on the entire city of New Orleans for harboring a lesbian comedian, and as with other disasters going back to the famous Lisbon earthquake and beyond, so Haiti's tragedy must be payback for human sin. The Rev. Pat Robertson sees the hand of God in the earthquake, wreaking terrible retribution for a pact that the long-dead ancestors of today's Haitians made with the devil, to help rid them of their French masters.

Needless to say, milder-mannered faith-heads are falling over themselves to disown Pat Robertson, just as they disowned those other pastors, evangelists, missionaries and mullahs at the time of the earlier disasters.

What hypocrisy.

Loathsome as Robertson's views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonized theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable 'mystery', or who 'see God' in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti , or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God 'suffering on the cross' in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.

Where was God in Noah's flood? He was systematically drowning the entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for 'sin'. Where was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock stock and barrel, as punishment for 'sin'. Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated Christian, your entire religion is founded on an obsession with 'sin', with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the obnoxious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus' incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the 'sins' of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the 'sin' of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed?

True, but that’s just one model of atonement. Loren Rosson, a Unitarian, does a fine job here (a much better job, in fact, than many Trinitarians would be capable of) of explaining how biblical texts can support not only this model of atonement, but several others besides (martyrdom, sacrifice, scapegoat, and ransom redemption).

Just a note regarding Dawkins' accusation of hypocrisy. It has to be taken seriously, there is certainly plenty of hypocrisy to go around, but he ought to consider if he’s a bit guilty of his own. How delicious it must be for him to throw an indictment against all Christians with his catalog of God’s genocidal misdeeds as described in the Old Testament. If Dawkins’ examples are to be culled from the Books of the Torah, why doesn’t he hew to his own standards of intellectual honesty and consistency by hurling his accusation against Judaism? Would he dare to? I tend to think not, because he knows the consequences of doing such a thing. How much safer it is from his perspective to attack Christianity instead.

To quote the President of one theological seminary, writing in these very pages:

"The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on the globe."

You nice, middle-of-the-road theologians and clergymen, be-frocked and bleating in your pulpits, you disclaim Pat Robertson's suggestion that the Haitians are paying for a pact with the devil. But you worship a god-man who - as you tell your congregations even if you don't believe it yourself - 'cast out devils'. You even believe (or you don't disabuse your flock when they believe) that Jesus cured a madman by causing the 'devils' in him to fly into a herd of pigs and stampede them over a cliff. Charming story, well calculated to uplift and inspire the Sunday School and the Infant Bible Class. Pat Robertson may spout evil nonsense, but he is a mere amateur at that game. Just read your own Bible. Pat Robertson is true to it. But you?

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for 'sin' - or suffering as 'atonement' for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up.

You may weep now too, Mr. Dawkins, but where have you been up until now? You make an ostentatious donation and urge your atheist followers to do the same in order to prove that you are as compassionate as the religious, but where have you been and what is your answer to evil, but nothing?

I reiterate what Sean Michael Winters recently wrote

My friend Christopher Hitchens says that the suffering of one child should force us to question the existence of God. And so it should. But, it is more than a little ironic that Hitchens’ robustly secular worldview does not require anything in the way of solidarity with the suffering of a child and the religious worldview he questions not only demands such solidarity, it already had people on the ground before the earthquake. The Church’s concern and care for the poor does not need a headline to become manifest, it is on-going, and has been from that day when the Master fed the hungry multitudes with five loaves and two fish until today.

I’m not really trying to be confrontational here. I actually do have some respect for flat-out atheists, even the new radical variety we see in people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and PZ Myers, etc… At least they come by their skepticism honestly. They trust in empiricism and nothing else, and that’s understandable . Arguments crafted around the Bible, apostolic witness and succession, Aristotle’s First Cause and Unmoved Mover, Anselm’s Ontological Argument, and Pascal’s Wager are unconvincing and unpersuasive for them. OK. Fair enough. In addition, it has to be admitted that theodicy is certainly a problem for Christianity. It’s always been there, it’s nothing new, but at least we grapple with it. One thing I’ve noticed about the new atheists, however, is that no one looks to them for comfort or for an explanation when their children die. They have none to offer in either case.

When he posted this column on his website, he got plenty of accolades and “attaboys” from his admirers, and some counter-arguments from religious believers, but of the thousands and thousands of comments that rolled in I appreciated this humble and cautionary note I happened to notice that came from a humanist, a certain Luis Cayetano:

Good article, but there is an important qualification that needs to be made: the Haitian disaster wasn't simply the result of plate tectonics, it was also the result of economic fundamentalism. A similar earthquake that struck California killed 63 people. In Haiti, they've registered 170,000 bodies in Port-au-Prince. We should be asking why Haiti doesn't have any building codes, why its government isn't empowered to make sovereign economic decisions on behalf of its people, and why so many people live in slums in the first place.

The religious exploitation of the tragedy should be treated with the contempt it deserves (this is of course something that shouldn't even need mentioning), but let's not miss the most important factor here: how WE might have contributed to this disaster. We already know that Robertson is a sorry excuse for a human being. That's easy to acknowledge, and easy to deal with in the sense that it doesn't provoke any cognitive dissonance within us. What's harder is to challenge doctrines that WE'RE responsible for allowing to be perpetuated and implemented. If we miss the elephant in the room, then we effectively endorse doctrines just as pernicious and harmful as anything being spouted by Robertson, and our critiques of Robertson, while justified, won't be as principled as we would like to imagine. As Dawkins has said on so many occassions, ideas have consequences. Let's not overlook that when it comes to secular mythologies. If anything, we should hold ourselves to standards far higher than we would ever dream of holding religious fanatics up to, if we dare to call ourselves rationalists and humanists in the fullest sense of those terms.

Prayers and Help for Haiti

Starting last Fall, my son has had the exceedingly good fortune to have a chance to play for a club soccer team that is run by the New England Revolution midfielder Shalrie Joseph. He's great at working with kids, and so are his coaches. Many of the coaches and staff associated with the club are from Haiti.

As more and more reports come in, we are seeing the horrific consequences emerging from Haiti as a result of the earthquake that struck this week. The scope of the destruction is enormous and the death toll may reach into the tens of thousands.

It took some of the coaches a long time to get any news out of Haiti, but as of today we now know that they've lost family members. Please join me in praying not only for them and their families, but for the thousands and thousands of people who are suffering in Haiti from this tragedy.

Ways to help:

Doctors without Borders. Hit Donate, choose ecards and tributes; choose donate online; and under tribute information type Shalrie Joseph SC Lions (If you write 'Shalrie Joseph SC Lions' for the tribute, they will ensure all donations go to Haiti).

Also, see America magazine:

Ways to Help

More Ways to Help in Haiti: JRS

How to Help in Haiti

Michael Sean Winters writes On Suffering:

On mornings like this, only the tears flow easily. Thoughts and words grapple with the enormity of a tragedy so devastating. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse have made their grim way to Haiti – War is busy elsewhere – and yet, already, we discern a fifth horseman on the horizon, Chaos, and know that he may bring the most evil and be the most difficult to overcome...

My friend Christopher Hitchens says that the suffering of one child should force us to question the existence of God. And so it should. But, it is more than a little ironic that Hitchens’ robustly secular worldview does not require anything in the way of solidarity with the suffering of a child and the religious worldview he questions not only demands such solidarity, it already had people on the ground before the earthquake. The Church’s concern and care for the poor does not need a headline to become manifest, it is on-going, and has been from that day when the Master fed the hungry multitudes with five loaves and two fish until today. Still, Hitchens’ question cannot be dismissed by good works. Why is there this new, acute suffering in a land where suffering was already chronic?

There is no answer to the question of suffering...

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete ... spoke about the mystery of suffering. He warned us not to try and seek answers to our suffering lest we become like Job’s friends. They, too, tried to explain to Job why he suffered and, at the end of the story, God upbraids them for this. He told us that only those who love suffer, that only a heart that is open is capable of breaking, and so the mystery is not suffering, the mystery is love. In the end, we are not called to understand suffering nor to explain it, but to embrace it as the price of love.

Today, let us embrace the suffering we feel in our hearts and the much greater suffering we see in the streets of Haiti. Let us turn our prayers to God, not in the manner of Job’s friends, but in the manner of the Mother of God, silently standing at the foot of the Cross... In a word, let us not be crippled by the suffering we see but let us find ways to love these Haitian neighbors in this dreadful hour. The mystery is not suffering. The mystery is love.

Christmas 2009

The Star of Bethlehem, by Edward Burne-Jones (1890)

Folk say, a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.

--From Prologue of the Earthly Paradise, by William Morris

The Christmas Spirit

Modern Warfare 2 and PTSD



Not to be all holier-than-thou and all, and I certainly know that not all gamers confuse fantasy with reality, but is anyone else troubled by the fact that Call of Duty's Modern Warfare 2 is the highest selling video game in Europe and the USA this Christmas Season, even beating out FIFA 10, even though soccer is the world's most widely followed sport? Is this really Christmas fare...?

I guess the main reason I find it troubling is because there are soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq who are doing their fourth, and even fifth tours of duty. The brunt and burden of this war is being placed upon the shoulders of a small set of families while the rest of the nation has been asked to make no sacrifice whatsoever. Moreover, the realistic action portayed in MW2 is precisely the kind of thing, which, when it occurs in reality, afflicts our troops with PTSD. It reminds me of paintball weekend-warriors who would never dream of actually enlisting themselves. I'm sorry, I'm not anti-gaming or anti-escapism, but I think there's something obscene about this kind of thing while there's an actual war going on.

From Time magazine, on December 14th, A Mounting Suicide Rate Prompts an Army Response:

The recently released figure for November show that 12 soldiers are suspected of taking their own lives, bringing to 147 the total suicides for 2009, the highest since the Army began keeping track in 1980. Last year the Army had 140 suicides.

Although Army officials don't blame the spike on repeated deployments to war zones, evidence is mounting to the contrary. Only about a third of Army suicides happen in war zones, officials note, and another third are among personnel who had never deployed. But that means two-thirds of Army suicides have deployed, many returning home with mental scars that make them prone to take their own lives, the Army's No. 2 officer said last week...

Nearly 1 in 5 soldiers — more than 300,000 — comes home from the wars reporting symptoms of PTSD. Army officials also acknowledge that substance abuse, fueled by repeated combat tours, and a war-created shortage of mental-health professionals, contribute to mental ills that can lead to suicide...

Chiarelli, the Army's top suicide fighter, finds the challenge daunting. "This is horrible," the Army vice chief of staff said recently. "The challenge of suicides," added the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, "is without a doubt the toughest that I have had to tackle in 37-plus years in the Army."

Chiarelli has singled out abuse of alcohol and prescription drugs by soldiers as a mental-health issue that can lead to suicide. "I think there's a link to substance abuse in some of the issues we're seeing," Chiarelli said last month. A recent Army study shows that the percentage of soldiers in Afghanistan taking antidepressants and other mental-health drugs nearly tripled — from 3.5% to 9.8% — between their first and third deployments.

The Army's corps of substance-abuse counselors is hundreds short of the number of trained personnel needed. "I have been pounding the system to say we have got to sit down and determine what we need after eight years of war," Chiarelli said. That shortage has made it tougher "to handle what I think is a higher rate of substance abuse today than eight years ago." Why is it higher? "I think it's only natural you're going to see that as soldiers come back [from war], you know, with the dwell time that they have [before returning to war], that we're going to have a higher rate." Last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said pressure on the Army means that for the next two years, soldiers will continue to ship off to their next combat tour without sufficient rest at home.

The Hidden Front - Combat PTSD

Today's Boston Herald cover story:



911 on video game obsession

Prof: Games are fun, but play down pain of warfare

Oil Well Plug

Exactly two years ago I put up a post about peak oil and the ramifications that are likely to result from reaching it.

I mentioned my good friend Joe in that post, and now I'd like to put in a plug for his new blog. Based in Madrid, Joe is now writing about this topic in Visions of Another Time - an exploration of peak oil and its repercussions for tomorrow. If you're interested in what all this means in practical terms, and also what the impact of the falling US dollar is going to be, this blog will be a good one to keep an eye on.

They ain't makin' many Jett Rinks anymore... Jimmy Dean in Giant

A Bit of Reciprocity Would Have Helped...

As much as I hate to admit it, I think the Swiss referendum that put a constitutional ban on the new construction of Islamic minarets on mosques may have been reasonable.

First, a story from around these parts... As you head eastbound towards Boston on Route 2, the highway begins to rise steeply shortly after you've crossed Interstate 95, and it hits its apex at a point in Belmont where the vast panorama of Boston and Cambridge suddenly appears before you as the rustic woods and ponds of Concord and beyond recede behind... Right at the crest of the hill stands an enormous Mormon Temple, a massive grey stone edifice with a towering steeple crowned by an enormous sculpture of the angel Gabriel blowing his trumpet.



It positively dwarfs everything else in the area. A much smaller Lutheran church on the other side of the highway has gamely erected a large cross which they illuminate at night, but it barely makes an impression compared to the behemoth across the way.

The construction of the temple was controversial from the day it was proposed. I have to say quite frankly that it seems very much out of character in this area, although I have an appreciation for the size of the Mormon community in Belmont. I do confess to feeling a certain sense of disquiet as I pass by it, but as a Catholic, I also realize that I need to feel an extra bit of sensitivity in this area.



For example, I must remind myself every time I see the gargantuan St. Francis de Sales church in Charlestown, perched upon a hill as if dropped there from some dreary place in Northern Ireland, and visible for miles around in every direction, that the Yankee WASPs allowed us to build our churches much larger than theirs when we arrived as largely unwelcome immigrants in this country, even though our faith was most distasteful to them. They lived true to their ideals of religious liberty and allowed us to build our churches, hospitals, and schools on a vast scale even though we were officially still preaching extra ecclesiam nulla salus at the time. When you drive through a city like Providence, RI, this is even more visible, as the enormous Catholic churches to be seen in every direction make everything else in Roger Williams' old city seem miniscule in comparison.

Civic and religious leaders in the USA have almost always stood by the principle of religious tolerance, realizing that an attack on any one religion could easily be directed against another, or against all. Why, therefore, do I think the Swiss decision is defensible?

Maybe I don't have a particularly good reason, but my gut tells me this situation is quite different somehow. Both the Vatican and the Catholic bishops of Switzerland, increasingly wary of the creeping militancy of the secular left in Europe, and wanting Islam as an ally in their advocacy for conservatism on cultural issues, have criticized the results of the referendum stating:

"The decision of the people represents an obstacle and a great challenge on the path of integration in dialogue and mutual respect.. and increases the problems of coexistence between religions and cultures... the measure will not help the Christians oppressed and persecuted in Islamic countries, but will weaken the credibility of their commitment in these countries."

That may all be true, but as far as mutual respect and peaceful coexistence is concerned, perhaps a bit of reciprocity is in order from the Islamic world, and perhaps that reciprocity needs to be insisted upon by the West with sharper emphasis and alacrity.

Those who immigrated to the USA in years gone by knew that they needed to assimilate to the Enlightenment/Protestant-ethos in America to at least some extent. Catholics who managed to flourish in this country while abiding by those principles, thriving more than the churches of Europe at the time, were even accused by the Vatican of the heresy of Americanism, but skillfully hewed to the same course just the same.

Switzerland itself may do a better job than most, but at least a few European nations have had great difficulty in assimilating their Muslim minorities, and much of that is their own fault, but at the same time Europe seems to be going through a great crisis of identity right now, and when a continent in which a dwindling population of even more dwindling faith encounters a growing minority population with a vibrant faith (which can also be quite militant at this point in history), I wonder if the Swiss can be forgiven for wanting to keep Switzerland looking like Switzerland. Europe is not beholden to commit cultural suicide.

Although Andrew Sullivan on his Daily Dish found this decision to be quite bigoted, I'm more inclined to agree with one of his commenters who wrote:

I have no problem with anyone wanting to practice their religion so long as it hurts no one else. And I also have no problem with the Swiss being unwilling to listen to “Allahu akbar, etc.” at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset and nightfall. The Roman Catholic church down the street from me has a carillon that rings the hours. I like it; it’s pretty and it provides a useful function for the entire neighborhood. But, if it broadcast its priest intoning “Introibo ad altare Dei” every time Mass was said, I’d be on the phone to City Hall every time I heard it.

Sullivan responded by pointing out that none of the minarets that are currently in Switzerland are issuing calls to prayer. Yes. For now. Ultimately, though, what are they for? They are not merely for architectural decoration. I give some creedence to the argument that they are edifices of thriumphalism.

The problem of reciprocity is outlined very starkly in the December 7 issue of America in an article by David Pinault called Hidden Prayer in Yemen: Islam and the problem of religious intolerance (subscription only). Until we see some signs of a reforming spirit within Islam that allows for some reciprocity regarding the free exercise of other faiths in Islamic countries, I think decisions like those made by the Swiss can be defended to at least a certain extent, although anyone who still reads this blog can feel free to contradict me without recrimination. Some excerpts from Pinault's article, which described the necessarily furtive and underground practice of Christianity in Yemen.

Unfortunately, the plight of Christians in Yemen is not unique. In Iraq, Saudia Arabia and other countries in the Muslim world, freedom of worship is severely restricted, and the number of Christians has dwindled. The values of pluralism and diversity are dismissed in favor of a strict adherence to the rule of the Koran, which sees any visible Christian presence as an attempt at evangelization. Yemen is emblematic of an Islamic culture that fails to see the spiritual growth that can come from encounters with people of other faiths.

The government does not prohibit foreigners from private Christian worship, but authorities are intent on discouraging conversion from Islam. I heard reports of young Muslim men, apparently commissioned by the Yemeni government, posing as potential converts in an attempt to lure Christian foreigners into proselytizing. In one recent case, a Christian Ethiopian working in Sanaa as a day laborer gave an Arabic text of the New Testament to a Yemeni who feigned interest in the faith. The result: three months in jail followed by deportation.

Consequences can be far harsher for Yemenis who genuinely desire to convert. In a culture where religious identity is equated with loyalty to family, clan and nation, conversion from Islam is seen as treason, a threat to Yemen ’s communal identity—hence what one Muslim cleric described to me as al-khawf min al-tansir, “the fear of Christianization.” (Tansir comes from the root nasrani, “Nazarene.”) Muslims caught flirting with the “Nazarene” faith are routinely arrested, imprisoned and made to reaffirm their allegiance to Islam. Others suffer violence at the hands of their own
families—“the only way,” as one American resident told me, “in an honor/shame society for a father to erase the stain of shameful behavior on the part of his children.”

Violent hostility to religious minorities is a problem in other Islamic countries as well. In Iraq in recent years, terrorists have used death threats against indigenous Christians in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq to extort payment of what is known as the jizyah. This is the discriminatory tax imposed on “People of the Book” — Jews and Christians living under Islamic rule — in accordance with Chapter 9, verse 29 of the Koran: “Fight against those who do not believe in Allah…from among the People of the Book, until they pay the jizyah and have been humiliated and brought low.”

Enforced during the height of Islamic political power in the days of the caliphate, collection of the tax was abandoned by secularizing governments of the modern Middle East. But some of today’s Islamist movements view the jizyah as a marker of the resurgence of Islam. For years, Paulos Faraj Rahho, archbishop of Mosul’s Chaldean Catholic community, had made jizyah payments to local militants on behalf of his diocese’s Christians. Finally, as the security situation in Iraq improved, he refused any further payments, a decision that led to his kidnapping and murder in 2008. Eventually a member of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia was convicted of the crime. Under such pressure, almost half of Iraq’s Christians have fled the country.

Analogous developments are occurring in Pakistan. In April 2009 Christian day laborers residing in an impoverished part of Karachi known as Khuda ki Basti found warnings chalked on the walls of their neighborhood: “The Taliban are coming.… Be prepared to pay jizyah or embrace Islam.” When the Christians registered their defiance by erasing the threats, ethnic Pashtuns living in Karachi attacked the neighborhood, killing an 11-year-old boy and injuring several men and women. The assailants torched homes and set fire to copies of the Bible...

Several years ago, in a conversation with Ali Abdullah Saleh, president of Yemen, Pope John Paul II petitioned for the construction of a church in Yemen’s capital. The president promised he would see to it. Nothing has come of the promise.

There are no churches in Saudi Arabia either, despite the presence of over one million foreign Christian workers and a personal plea from Pope Benedict XVI in 2007. Pope Benedict noted that in the 1990s the Italian government permitted the construction of a Saudi-financed mosque in Rome, a short distance from Vatican City. Yet so far Saudi Arabia’s leaders have refused to follow suit and recognize the right to freedom of worship in their own country. Anwar Ashiqi, a Saudi religious scholar, summarizes the government’s position: “It would be possible to launch official negotiations to construct a church in Saudi Arabia only after the pope and all the Christian churches recognize the Prophet Muhammad.”

I raised this issue in a conversation in June with a Sunni imam in Yemen’s capital. An affable individual in his early 30s, this imam directs a mosque in Sanaa and is known as a hafiz (someone who has learned by heart the entire Koran). When I pointed out the disparity—mosques in Rome, no churches in Sanaa—he said this struck him as right. Islam, he stated, is al-din al-niha’i (the final, definitive religion). But Christianity and Judaism, he said, were religions from the past, outdated and superseded. “They may be permitted to exist,” he continued, “but they shouldn’t be allowed to propagate.” A church in Sanaa might attract Yemeni Muslims, thereby facilitating al-tansir: the propagation of the Nazarene faith. Better, he said, to keep Yemen as nearly as possible 100 percent Muslim.

What this imam articulated was an attitude I encountered in all too many conversations in Sanaa: a resistance to religious pluralism. By pluralism I mean the notion that spiritual paths alternative to one’s own have value; that these alternatives have something to teach us, even as they challenge us by their difference; and that one’s religious identity and spiritual life are deepened by the self-reflection triggered in the encounter with diversity. Such encounters can take place only in settings where freedom of worship is allowed to flourish. In hindering the construction of Christian churches, countries like Yemen impoverish their own Islamic faith.

I'll Be Home For Christmas..."Is that a threat or a promise?"

--Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly



Bob Dylan has just released, of all things, a Christmas album.

Christmas In the Heart

I'm really not sure what to make of all this (try his Must Be Santa). It might be better than David Archuleta's album of nearly the same name, but he ain't no Mitch Miller or Burl Ives when it comes to kicking out the Christmas tunes.

At least it's for charity... For samples and commentary, listen to:

Is Dylan's Heart Really In This 'Christmas'?

For those not especially enamored of Dylan's vocal "style," or who favor the sacred over the secular in any case, hey, there's always Pope Benedict's album coming out on November 29th...

More Friday Music

Dear Mr. Fantasy... Steve Winwood with Clapton's band at the Crossroads Guitar Festival, 2007



I knew he could play a lot of instruments, but I always thought of Stevie Winwood primarily as a keyboards guy. Shows how little I know...

Friday Musical Interlude

Comfortably Numb - Van Morrison w/ Pink Floyd



I was rewatching Martin Scorcese's 2006 film The Departed a few nights back, and the Leonardo DiCaprio - Vera Farmiga love scene had this track as a backdrop. The song stuck in my head for days. I like this version.

I've been looking forward to seeing Scorcese's upcoming adaptation of Shusaku Endo's book Silence, although I wasn't too thrilled with Scorcese's recent defense of Roman Polanski.

Hello.
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home?

Come on, now.
I hear youre feeling down.
Well I can ease your pain,
Get you on your feet again.

Relax.
I need some information first.
Just the basic facts:
Can you show me where it hurts?

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I cant hear what youre sayin'.
When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I cant explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

Ok.
Just a little pinprick. [ping]
Therell be no more --aaaaaahhhhh!
But you may feel a little sick.

Can you stand up?
I do believe its working. good.
Thatll keep you going for the show.
Come on its time to go.

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I cant hear what youre sayin'.
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.

Traditionalist Trifecta II: Thoughts on the TAC Moving Towards Rome and the Upcoming SSPX Talks

Pope Benedict's vision of a creative minority made up of traditionalists of various stripes


St. Edmund Campion S.J, martyred in 1581.
I wonder what he'd make of this...

I've let a few timely topics slip by recently because I hardly have time to blog anymore, but I wanted to say a few things about these latest developments before they get too dated.

Regarding the joint Anglican/Catholic announcement on October 20th that members of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) would be welcomed into the Catholic Church, operating under a personal ordinariate... I guess I have mixed feelings about it. It's always good to see people coming into the Church, especially since there's been so much bad news for us in recent years, accompanied by a mass exodus that has made ex-Catholics one of the largest "denominations" in the country... It's a pretty bold and creative move in terms of building a united church with diversity within it. It would have been unthinkable years ago. On the other hand, I worry if the Vatican is consciously trying to build appeal to groups who are anti-women's ordination and anti-gay. That part's a little spooky. I find Benedict's tendency to build bridges to some of the most reactionary elements out there to be troubling.

I felt a little bad for Archbishop Rowan Williams too, having to stand up there for this announcement. He must have felt a bit like the Vatican's beeyatch. The British press and the liberal Anglican blogosphere certainly see it that way too. They're pounding him over it. He doesn't deserve it. He's a very good man and a fine scripture scholar, and he's faced a daunting challenge trying to hold together his fractious communion over the past few years. I don't know how he hasn't suffered a breakdown over it. In a way, I suppose the departure of the TAC takes a lot of the pressure off of him.

Was Rowan humiliated in an act of ecumenical insensitivity? On the America Blog, Austen Ivereigh reports (via the Times of London):

Cardinal Levada, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), came to London only last weekend to brief Dr Williams and the English and Welsh bishops on what was being proposed, and that the Vatican's Council for Christian Unity had been left out of the plans.

Ivereigh goes on to downplay that aspect, however, noting that the TAC had approached Rome themselves regarding these issues long ago, and that the Vatican had waited to make this overture for more than a year after the crisis that occurred at the last Lambeth Conference.

Does it speak well for ecumenism, or does it spell the end of meaningful dialogue between Catholics and Anglicans? It's hard to tell. Certain TAC priests and bishops may do one thing and their congregations may do another. This might not go over well in the long run with other Anglicans either. We'd do well to keep in mind that the existence of Eastern-Rite "Uniate" churches in communion with Rome is despised by the Eastern Orthodox. In the dotCommonweal post History is Being Made, Rita Perrone made a very good point in response to the claim that this move serves as a new model:

New model or blueprint? You are dreaming. The uniate churches are an exact parallel. And they have set back the cause of church unity with the East for centuries, not advanced it. The only difference here, besides the canonical terminology, is that the Anglican liturgy is descended from the Latin rite, unlike the Eastern rites. In this sense it’s new.

And in regard to the anger over this expressed in Anglican and Episcopalian circles, at least a few people over there are aware that this goes both ways. They've been maintaining their ranks with disaffected Catholics for years. In fact, I think there'd hardly be any Episcopalians left at all in this country if it wasn't for former Catholics. Appreciate as well, that Anglicanism in its original form was largely imposed on the British people from above, not from below, as Eamon Duffy has pointed out very well in his books The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 and Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. Catholicism in England did not disappear naturally or easily.

It seems that Benedict has a grand vision of uniting Catholicism, The Eastern Orthodox Churches, and the Traditional Anglican Communion into one grand Church characterized by "Tradition" that will revitalize Christendom in Europe. Says Sandro Magister:

Today more than ever, with Joseph Ratzinger as pope, the ecumenical journey seems not a pursuit of modernity, but a return to the terrain of tradition.

I wrote about a Traditionalist Trifecta once before. Here is the latest Trifecta:

1) The excommunications on the SSPX bishops were lifted last year.
2) The Traditional Anglican Communion has been brought into the fold.
3) The SSPX will be brought back into the fold next.

I do admit to being nervous about what this means for the upcoming SSPX discussions, which are going to be held in private. They'll find some way to let the SSPX back in, and why does this group, that willingly went over into schism, get to debate what Vatican II meant (in private) while the rest of us don't get that privilege?

One final question:

If this "personal ordinariate" is going to have its own seminaries, can a married Catholic man become a priest through an Anglo-Roman seminary?

Charles Péguy and the Lord's Prayer

Back in August I wrote briefly about The French poet and essayist Charles Péguy in the post A God Dumbfounded by Humanity's Hope. A couple of months ago I was reading a short book by Jesuit Father Gerald O'Collins, a series of reflections on the 'Our Father' called The Lord's Prayer. In his introductory paragraph, he spoke of Charles Péguy's special insight into the words Jesus taught us:

The river Marne which flows north-west across central France was the scene of an epic battle at the start of World War I when the German forces were halted and repelled as they advanced rapidly on Paris. Among the thousands of soldiers who died in the early days of the Battle of the Marne was a prophetic thinker and great poet, Charles Peguy (1873-1914). An atheist from the age of twenty, Peguy returned to his Catholic faith six or seven years before he died. St Joan of Arc was his lifelong heroine, as he struggled with the sufferings that human beings endure and the hope that they can find through the divine love. In ‘A Vision of Prayer’, one of the plays found in Peguy’s Basic Verities, it is God who comments at length on the words of the Lord’s Prayer. God introduces the opening words of the parable of the prodigal son, and closes by declaring: ‘It always ends with embraces, and the father crying even more than anyone else’. Progressive, chant-like repetition turns God’s words into an astonishing tribute to the tender love at the heart of the “Our Father’.

Peguy stands with these innumerable others who for two thousand years have cherished, prayed, proclaimed, translated, interpreted and embellished the Lord’s Prayer. It has proved a living text for public and private use, endlessly rich for everyone in its meaning and power. It is a perfect example of what Gregory the Great said about the scriptures in general: “they provide water in which lambs may gambol and elephants swim’ (Moralia, dedication, 4) .

Here is the text Fr. O'Collins was referring to:

A Vision of Prayer

God Speaks: "I am their father, says God. Our Father who art in Heaven.
My son told them often enough that I was their father.
I am their judge. My son told them so. I am also their father.
I am especially their father.

Well, I am their father. He who is a father is above all a father.
Our Father who art in Heaven. He who has once been a father can be
nothing else but a father.

They are my son's brothers; they are my children; I am their father.
Our Father who art in Heaven, my son taught them that prayer.
Sic ergo vos orabitis. After this manner therefore pray ye.

Our Father who art in Heaven, he knew well what he was doing that day,
my son who loved them so.
Who lived among them, who was like one of them.
Who went as they did, who spoke as they did, who lived as they did.
Who suffered.
Who suffered as they did, who died as they did.
And who loved them so, having known them.
Who brought back to heaven a certain taste for man, a certain taste for the earth.

My son who loved them so, who loves them eternally in heaven.
He knew very well what he was doing that day, my son who loved them so.
When he put that barrier between them and me, Our Father who art in
Heaven, those three or four words. That barrier which my anger and perhaps my justice will never pass.
Blessed is the man who goes to sleep under the protection of that outpost,
The outpost of those three or four words.
Those words that move ahead of every prayer like the hands of the suppliant if front of his face.
Like the two joined hands of the suppliant advancing before his face and the tears of his face.
Those three or four words that conquer me, the unconquerable.
And which they cause to go before their distress like two joined and invincible hands.
Those three or four words which move forward like a beautiful cutwater fronting a lowly ship.
Cutting the flood of my anger.
That, actually, is the way I see them, says God…

Because of that invention of my Son’s, thus must I eternally see them
(And judge them, How do you expect me to judge them now, after that?)
Our Father who art in Heaven, my son knew exactly what to do
In order to tie the arms of my justice and untie the arms of my mercy.
(I do not mention my anger, which has never been anything but my justice.
And sometimes my charity.)
And now I must judge them like a father. As if a father was any good as a judge. A certain man had two sons.
As if he was capable of judging. A certain man had two sons.
We know well enough how a father judges. There is a famous example of that.
We know well enough how the father judged the son who had gone away and came back.

The father wept even more than the son.

That is the story my son has been telling them. My son gave them the secret of judgment itself.
And now this is how they seem to me; this is how I see them.
Just as the wake of a beautiful ship grows wider and wider until it disappears and loses itself…

And the ship is my own son, laden with all the sins of the world.

More information about Charles Péguy can be found in an article by Robert Royal titled The Mystery of the Passion of Charles Péguy. Extended excerpts:


French troops on line in the First Battle of the Marne, September 1914

Like many other pre-Vatican II figures, Péguy has been in eclipse the past few decades, even in France. The secular world neglects him for complicated religious and political reasons. But gifted minds in their own right as different as the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel, the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the British poet Geoffrey Hill have tried to bring us back into contact with his great spirit. In fact, Péguy’s life gives moving witness that a great spirit and heart outweigh even genius. If he ever gets a fair hearing, Péguy may one day be recognized as a figure on the order of Kierkegaard or Newman, and perhaps something more besides.

Péguy was born in 1873 near Orléans, Joan of Arc’s birthplace, and grew up with a mother and grandmother who were basically illiterate. … Though he showed great gifts the moment he entered school, Péguy was as close to a peasant as any major literary figure who ever lived.

The genius of Péguy lies mainly in the ways he tried to bring simple truths to bear on the whole modern world. Sheer intellect would take him to the Ecole Normale Superieure and the Sorbonne, the twin summits of the French educational system. But except for some activity in political causes, he would live a largely uneventful life — at least in the way most people conceive of events…

Péguy was killed by a bullet through the head during the Battle of the Marne in 1914. He had anticipated his death in a poem:

Blessèd are those whom a great battle leaves
Stretched out on the ground in front of God’s face,
Blessèd the lives that just wars erase,
Blessèd the ripe wheat, the wheat gathered in sheaves.

It was a dramatic end to a heroic life. He was barely forty.

In a different age, Péguy might have founded a religious order. As it turned out, he did something even more difficult: He lived a life of complete intellectual and spiritual integrity in the modern world...

As a young man in Orléans, Péguy gravitated toward simple workers and peasants who were interested in freedom and learning, even if they had to pursue them in the evening after long hours at work: “I consider it a personal blessing to have known, in my earliest youth, some of those old republicans; admirable men; hard on themselves; and good for events; I learned through them what it means to have a whole and upright conscience.”

Though Péguy was an activist for workers, he deplored the new attitude among labor groups of demanding the largest compensation for the least work and even, something unthinkable in the old system, of destroying tools and machinery during strikes. In the old days, there had been more independence and simple virtue: “when a worker lit a cigarette, what he was going to tell you was not what some journalist had said in the morning newspaper. The free-thinkers in those days were more Christian than pious people today.”

Péguy’s talk of his peasant world and workers’ virtues harmed his reputation in some quarters. Like Nietzsche (though with even less justice), Péguy was portrayed by a few Nazi sympathizers during World War II as an advocate of a kind of popular French nationalism and racism. The Nazi version of the Volk and Péguy’s appeal to the peuple could not have been more different: The first sought exclusion and racial distinctions, the second inclusion and human brotherhood... All this has been exposed beyond dispute by scholars. But while Nietzsche, who has certain uses in today’s academy, has been given a free pass despite his Nazi admirers, Péguy, clearly because of his Catholicism and embrace of the old world, remains in limbo…

Péguy never finished his university studies because he was repeatedly sidetracked by situations demanding charity and action. He had sticks broken on his back in demonstrations. He broke with allies who struck dishonorable compromises. If he had wanted to play along with what was already becoming a corrupt system and corrupting alliance between politicians and intellectuals, he could have had a secure existence as a university professor. Instead, he chose the path of truth — along with poverty and isolation.

Amid various struggles for workers’ rights and relief efforts, Péguy became a socialist of sorts because he believed that true socialism sought real brotherhood and respect among men. He was young, and the world had not yet seen any socialist regimes. But he intuited the true spirit behind socialist movements when he came into contact with actual socialist practice. Péguy was by nature incapable of the kinds of lies and partisanship that make up most party politics. His verdict about such things is a phrase known to many people who have otherwise never heard of Péguy: “Everything begins in mysticism (le mystique) and ends in politics.” This formula summed up more than twenty years of political experience...

Somewhere along this path of betrayal by the socialists and Dreyfusards, Péguy returned to the Church. A friend stopped in to see Péguy when he was sick in bed at home. After a long conversation, Péguy merely remarked as the friend was leaving, “Wait. I haven’t told you everything. I’ve become a Catholic.” No great explanations were later forthcoming. On the few occasions when he wrote of the conversion, Péguy didn’t even use the word, preferring to speak of the “deepening” of his passion for truth, justice, and brotherhood, which found its fullest scope in Catholicism.

But he did not find that the Catholic parties were doing much better than the others in keeping their politics from overwhelming their mystique. The Catholic Church seemed to have betrayed its mystique by becoming a temporal party in France and elsewhere. Péguy thought that if it dropped clerical politics and returned to its spiritual greatness and concern for the poor, the Church would enter into a period of massive renaissance. Fidelity to the Gospel, which in the realm of mystiques did not exclude what was noble and good in other traditions, now became the overruling passion of his life...

Once he embraced them fully, fidelity and abandonment to the divine will started to become a full-time job. When Péguy’s son Marcel fell seriously ill, he turned the son over to the protection of the Virgin and “walked away,” promising that if Marcel recovered, Péguy would make a walking pilgrimage between Notre Dame in Paris and Notre Dame in Chartres, a good sixty miles. Marcel recovered and Péguy kept his vow. He would later repeat the pilgrimage for other causes. In the interwar years, as the cult of Péguy grew in France, thousands of people reenacted this concrete devotion yearly. Even today, when hardly anyone reads Péguy anymore and many ancient devotional practices have all but disappeared, large groups of fidèles make the trek out of solidarity with Péguy...

We have lost or mislaid a great portion of the riches of the Catholic faith in recent years. Some of it is so far gone that it will take an immense effort of preparation to put us in a state to recover it again. Péguy has been one of the partial casualties of that history. But unlike many other figures, he speaks with a directness and vitality about things quite close to our own experience. To reconnect with him we do not need anything other than eyes to see and ears to hear. This century has been a mess, and still worse for failure to heed prophetic voices like his. If we are looking for a Catholic renaissance and a restoration of our civic virtues in the new millennium we will find them only by recovering the work and imitating the lives of men like Charles Péguy.