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Archive for the ‘04 Fr. John McCloskey’ Category

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On the Meaning of Sex

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2013/08/16 at 12:00 AM

Rarely have I read in so few pages (145) a book as thought-provoking and compelling as J. Budziszewski’s On the Meaning of Sex (ISI Books). Budziszewski, a Yale Ph.D. and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, has clearly grappled for years with the sad effects of our era’s shallow understanding of sex on the lives and psyches of the young people he teaches. This book represents his effort to convey the significance of the human sexes and sexual relationships to young people largely persuaded (but not satisfied) that sex is a momentarily intense but largely casual kind of pleasure. I will leave it up to the reader to decide how well he convinces.

While the author is clearly a Christian, God’s presence discreetly occupies the background through interspersed quotations from the extraordinary verses of the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. In the forefront, Budziszewski presents arguments largely drawn from the natural law and set out in a finely honed use of the Socratic teaching method.

Clearly this is the method he follows at the University of Texas in Austin, where his students for the most part (judging from their reactions as recorded here) have trouble thinking clearly on a topic that does not so much concern them as obsess them.

Budziszewski’s book is an attempt to restore to sex what has been tragically and shortsightedly lost by our culture, and that is “meaning.”

Continue reading…
http://www.catholicity.com/mccloskey/on-the-meaning-of-sex.html

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Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2013/08/01 at 12:00 AM

by Anthony Esolen – published by ISI Press, 2010

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey

Perhaps the cattiest quote of all time was Mary McCarthy’s summation of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.” After finishing Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Press, Wilmington, 2010), I would apply McCarthy’s quote to Professor Esolen, with the crucial substitution of “a truth” for “a lie.”

Anthony Esolen is a graduate of Princeton, professor of English at Providence College, and translator and editor of the Modern Library edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy. A man of erudition and one of the world’s experts on Dante, Esolen signals with this book his presence in the top rank of authors of cultural criticism, following in the footsteps of Richard Weaver, Walker Percy, Russell Kirk, John Senior, Christopher Lasch, and Roger Scruton. A father and a man of strong Christian convictions, he nourishes a great love of the West—and of that America that anyone over 60 remembers and anyone under 50 knows only through old movies. And he thinks that West is rapidly, and permanently, fading away.

He’s targeting an audience of educators and parents. He wants to save the imagination of children from a culture of death that, even when it permits physical survival, kills the human imagination.

If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope that some of it might open our own eyes a little.

We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in us those memories of play that no one regrets. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do. Yet, for the first time in human history, most people are now doing things that could never interest a child enough to want to tag along.

In ten chapters Esolen outlines the techniques being used to destroy the imagination of children. Similar to C.S. Lewis’s adoption of a devilish persona in The Screwtape Letters, in each chapter Esolen poses as an educator, parent, or government official expressing the outlook and pushing the agenda of quasi-totalitarian brainwashing to ensure the “dictatorship of relativism,” as Pope Benedict describes it.

In his persona as the destroyer of youth, Esolen writes:

We must then kill the imagination. The ideal of course would be to cease having children, but that might have some adverse effect upon long-term economic prosperity, besides threatening certain industries with extinction—the manufacturers of tasteless clothing, for instance, and the importers of refined sugar. Since we must have children, we should be sure to subject them to the most efficient and human techniques to fit them for the world in which they will live, a world of shopping malls, all the same everywhere, packaged food all the same, paper pushing all the same, mass entertainment all the same, politics all the same… I am sure that judicious application of three or four of these methods will suffice to kill the imagination of an Einstein, a Beethoven, a Dante or a Michelangelo.

In his first chapter, “Why truth is your enemy, and the benefits of the Vague,” Esolen in the pose of his evil avatar advises:

How then do we do away with the facts? The first thing is to keep the memory weak and empty… That is because a developed memory is a wondrous and terrible storehouse of things seen, heard and done. The developed imagination remembers a strain from Bach, and smells spinach cooking in the kitchen, and these impressions are not separate but part of an unified whole, and are the essence of creative play… The Greek lad knew his poetry, which was for him also history and moral training, only by memory.

Come to think of it, when was the last time your children or grandchildren ever recited anything for you? For that matter, can you yourself remember (much less recite) any poems, speeches, or passages from novels without the help of immediate access to the Internet? Yes, in this case the majority of us are also victims.

In the “Threat Outside the Door,” Esolen’s anti-imaginative persona observes that few parents grasp the danger of children playing outside.

The most enlightened educators grasp it and have taken steps to ensure that their own children are left to their own devices outdoors as little as possible. They have shortened summer vacation, parceling out free days here and there through the school year. As for the school day itself, both parents and educators want it to be as long as possible.

Parents will accept all of this. Canceling years out of their children’s lives, which otherwise would have to be genuinely lived (with all the risks that that genuine life must run) sounds like a perfectly safe proposition. It also frees the parents. They may, with a clear conscience, go forth bravely and be “themselves” along with millions of others who are being themselves, working at jobs that don’t need to be done among people they don’t really like. That is the Real World, and the routine of the school day and the night of homework prepare us for it.

Other chapters deal with such subjects as patriotism, narcissism and sex; distinctions between man and woman; and the “kingdom of noise.” This book is unfailingly witty and also maddening, reminding the reader of what was our American culture and calling us to take action—whatever that might be—to both conserve and retrieve the rapidly disappearing West. More and more clearly we are facing, as C.S Lewis named it, “The Abolition of Man.”

First appeared on American Spectator Online, July 14, 2011.

©CatholiCity Service http://www.catholicity.com  Re-published with permission.

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The 40th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Dr. Nathanson the Prophet

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2013/01/18 at 9:15 AM

by Father John McCloskey

In 1973, the infamous Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade legalized the crime that would take the lives of over 50 million innocent unborn humans, who were made in the image and likeness of God. As a result of this unspeakable decision and its aftermath, the United States of America has plunged into a moral chasm that no longer respects the dignity of the human person from conception until a natural death. In my opinion, this will inevitably destroy our country, unless America returns to its Christian roots in recognizing the natural law written in our hearts as children of God.

However, there is always hope.

Part of the hope is the story and witness of Dr. Bernard Nathanson, whom I came to know well during our many years of friendship. Nathanson was the co-founder in 1969 of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL, later renamed the National Abortion Rights Action League), and former director of New York City’s Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health, then the largest abortion clinic in the world. In the late 1970′s he turned against abortion to become a prominent pro-life advocate.

I played a small part in bringing him into the Catholic Church where he found peace and happiness. Nathanson served as a prophet for life, as he engaged in a heroic worldwide effort through tireless travel to deliver pro-life speeches in foreign countries. He continued his work through his writings and video productions until his death in 2011.

When the heinous decision of the Supreme Court is overturned and the Holy Innocents are saved again from the atheistic American Herods, Dr. Nathanson’ conversion to life and to the Catholic faith will be seen as a very important part of the possible resurgence of respect for life at all stages.

After his conversion, Dr. Nathanson became a target for the cultural anti-life forces in America, the subject of ridicule and satire in comic strips, news commentary, and for television comedians because he had the audacity to change his mind regarding the objective reality of abortion. Since then, along with a distinguished obstetric medical practice and teaching in a university, he gave hundreds of lectures throughout the world in defense of the unborn.

Upon the verge of retirement he wrote his autobiography, which contains searing personal revelations about how a man could possibly become an abortionist, yet also a powerful witness to the possibilities of divine grace as he draws near to the final step of Baptism and incorporation into Christ’s Church.

Later this year, Regnery Press will be republishing an updated edition of Nathanson’s powerful autobiography, The Hand of God with a new forward by yours truly. Keep an eye out for it. It can change minds and hearts.

Now read below for a taste of its contents so as to understand the horrors that Dr. Nathanson had to overcome, including his family background and his complicity in the death of over 75,000 children. Indeed, in some ways we can see in him another St. Paul:

A warning to the reader: this is not an easy or pleasant book to read because it tells the truth about evil acts that are truly repugnant. What is remarkable and praiseworthy is that the doctor does not make excuses for his behavior. The reader certainly has many reasons at least to understand without condoning his behavior after reading about his childhood and adolescence in a familial setting that can truly be described as loveless. Nathanson recounts in painful detail his bringing up in New York by a family that appears to have been seriously dysfunctional for at least a couple of generations without the slightest semblance of religious faith or familial loyalty or affection.

The first chapter is entitled “The Monster,” referring to his father, and spells out very clearly the young Nathanson’s relationships with his Jewish Canadian physician father and his family. “We would take long walks together, he and I, and he would fill my ears with poisonous remarks and revanchist resolutions concerning my mother and her family and. I remained his weapon, his dummy, until I was almost seventeen years old, when l-as-he rebelled and told him I would no longer function as his robotic surrogate assassin.” About his sister, “her mental health destroyed, her physical health intact but–to her befuddled mind–suspect, her children rebellious, fallen in with bad company and truant, my sister killed herself one sunny August morning with an overdose of a powerful sedative.” Regarding himself, “And l? I have three failed marriages and have fathered a son who is sullen, suspicious but brilliant in computer science.”

In one of the final chapters of the book, entitled “To the Thanatoriums” he prophesies about what Pope Paul VI presaged so clearly in his Encyclical Humanae vitae, that once the respect for human life at its inception is lost the way will lead inevitably to euthanasia. “Drawing largely from my experience with a similar brand of pagan excess I predict that entrepreneurs will set up multiple small, discreet infirmaries for those who wish, have been talked into, coerced into, or medically deceived into death…. But that will only be the first phase. As the thanatoria flourish and expand into chains and franchised operations, the accountants will eventually assume command, slashing expenses and overheads as competition grows. The final streamlined, efficient, and economically flawless version of the thanatorium will resemble nothing so much as the assembly line factories that abortion clinics have become and–farther on down the slope–the ovens of Auschwitz.”

However, he ends the book on a note of hope in Christ’s mercy, forgiveness, and offer of salvation. As is often the case in a story of conversion, it is the prayers and personal example of so many of his pro-life friends and coworkers that over time melt down the resistance of a hardened atheistic sinner so that he can see that there might be room in God’s heart even for the likes of him.

Speaking of the witness of pro-lifers at a demonstration at an abortion clinic: “They prayed, they supported, and encouraged each other, they sang hymns of joy, and they constantly reminded each other of the absolute prohibition against violence. They prayed for the unborn babies, for the confused and pregnant women, and for the doctors and nurses in the clinic. They even prayed for the police and media who were covering the event. And I wondered: how can these people give of themselves for a constituency that is (and always will be) mute, invisible, and unable to thank them?”

Witnessing these pro-life demonstrators who were willing to go to jail and suffer bankruptcy for their belief made such a powerful impression on Nathanson that “for the first time in my entire adult life, I began seriously to entertain the notion of God, a God who problematically had led me through the proverbial circles of hell, only to show me the way to redemption and mercy through His Grace.”

As we can see, if with God’s grace, Dr. Bernard Nathanson could overcome such obstacles, well, then so can the other citizens of our country. With the sorrowful anniversary ofRoe v. Wade around the corner, we need the witness of prophets like Nathanson to inspire us to continue our work for a culture of life. We can never underestimate the power of the example of our prayer and love.

Author’s Note: Part of the article above is adapted from a review I wrote for the Vatican Newspaper, Le Osservatore Romano in 1996.

First appeared at The Truth and Charity Forum on January 14, 2013.

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Christians in the Movies

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2012/11/30 at 9:11 AM

Dr. Peter Dans has written a remarkable book entitled Christians in the Movies. Dans, a medical professor at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, formerly wrote a well-received volume about Hollywood’s portrayal of doctors from 1931 – 2000. As a serious Catholic and long-time film aficionado, he decided to do the same for Christians.

Dans selected over 200 Christian-themed films produced from 1905 – 2005 and organized them by decade, with a brief historical overview for each section. Although he liked most of the films, he also included films that attacked Christians. In this way he was able to trace the steady decline, with some notable exceptions, of the generally positive film portrayal of Christian until, as he puts it, “all that orthodox clergy and believers were either vicious predators or narrow-minded, mean spirited Pharisees.”

Dans includes plenty of photos along with the plots and his analysis. And happily virtually all of the films are available on DVD. Doing his part to inspire a counter-revolution, Dans writes, “I also hope it will encourage orthodox Christians believers who have stopped going to the movies to get more involved in helping to shape this important industry, which all agree has badly lost its way.”

Joseph Bottum sets the stage in a Chestertonian turn in the foreword: “Film is a divided art. It wants to be spiritual even while it tries itself to be earthly. It wants to make the divine comedy even while filming the human comedy.” A worthy participant in the ongoing battle for the culture, Dans’ book should find a prominent place in every family’s home theatre.

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The Closing of the Muslim Mind

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2012/10/12 at 9:11 AM

by Robert R. Reilly – published by ISI Books, 2010

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey

Robert R. Reilly has written a book that may offer the key to both understanding and perhaps defeating the ongoing war of terror against the West. The book is entitled The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis. As Angelo Codevilla’s jacket blurb puts it: “Reilly shows what happens to a civilization when it fails to give reason its due. This book teaches and warns. Read it.” Paul Eidelberg describes it as “a book surpassing in depth even the best efforts of Bernard Lewis. You will not only be enlightened, but you may also see how the West might prevent a new Dark Ages.”

Reilly is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and a well-published writer with substantial government service, including a stint as Director of the Voice of America and senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Information in 2003. As a sideline, he is also one of our finest classical music critics.

In this book Reilly explains “why the restoration of reason to Islam is the only antidote to the spiritual pathology driving young men to attempted terrorist acts.”

The Closing of the Muslim Mind comes as we ask ourselves what in the world we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan nine years after the attacks of 9/11, spending billions of dollars taken from the America taxpayers and sacrificing thousands of American lives, not to mention the perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan lives. Are we there to save the Arab and Persian world by imposing democracy à la Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush and his advisors (with disastrous consequences so far)? Are we simply acting as a republic intent on defending our own shores? Or are we (as our enemies view us) perhaps an empire trying to extend our power to protect our “interests,” whatever they are?

Are we merely trying to exterminate Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and all forms of jihadist Islam, or are we, in the tradition of an eye for an eye, seeking payback for the almost 3,000 Americans who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

Although the answers to questions such as these do not lie in Reilly’s work, he marshals convincing historical evidence of the likelihood that the Christian West and the Muslim countries will remain incompatible, because we believe in man’s power to reason–and they don’t. And barring some sort of Islamic Reformation (which theologians such as Michael Novak do not rule out as impossible), jihadist Islam and the Christian West will remain in mortal conflict, as we have intermittently in the past. The difference now, however, is that Islamic nationalists may already be capable of using nuclear weapons, or else are on the verge of that capability, whether in war or as instruments of terror. Most worrisome, they have the will and the irrational theology to use them. In short, dialogue is not possible with those who are incapable of religious tolerance.

At the heart of Reilly’s book is his argument that the

“…denigration of dialogue is due to the demotion of reason that took place in the ninth century struggle between the rationalist theologians, the Mu’tazilites and their anti-rationalist theologians, the Ash’arites. Unfortunately, for those who prefer dialogue, the Ash’arites won.

The Ash’arites’ position was that reason is so infected by men’s self-interest that it cannot be relied upon to know things objectively. What is more, there is really nothing to be known because all created things have no nature or order intrinsic to themselves, but are only the momentary manifestations of God’s direct will. Since God acts without reason, the products of his will are not intelligible to men. Therefore, in this double disparagement, reason cannot know, and there is nothing to be known.”

All of this may prompt memories of the Islamic world’s outrage when the just-elected Pope Benedict XVI told his audience in Regensburg, Germany, that not only is violence in the service of evangelization unreasonable and therefore against God, but that a conception of God without reason or above reason leads to that very violence. The then-Cardinal Ratzinger in his 2005 Subiaco address said:

“From the beginning Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the “Logos,” as the religion according to reason. In the first place, it has not identified its precursors in other religions but in the philosophical enlightenment which has cleared the path of tradition to turn to search of the truth and toward the good, toward the one God who is above all gods.”

Reilly writes, “Ultimately this theological view developed into the realist metaphysics of Aquinas which became the metaphysical foundation of modern science, as Fr. Stanley Jaki, a Hungarian theologian and physicist, explained in his voluminous writings on the origins of modern science. Jaki laid out, as well, the reasons modern science was stillborn in the Muslim world after what seemed to be its real start.” Fr. James Schall of Georgetown University, states that “Jaki saw much of the rage in Modern Islam as due to its failure or inability to modernize itself by its own powers.”

Reilly asks, “Are [the Islamists of today] something new or a resurgence from the past? How much of this is Islam and how much is Islamism? Is Islamism a deformation of Islam? If so, in what way and from where has it come? And why is Islam susceptible to this kind of deformation?” You will have to read his book to find the answers.

The Closing of the Muslim Mind also draws on British author Hilaire Belloc, who is increasingly being rediscovered as a prophet for our times in areas including economics, marriage, and family, but most notably here in foreseeing the return of militant Islam.

Belloc wrote in his 1938 book The Great Heresies, “Since religion is the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralyzed but morally intensively alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable.” Later in the book, Belloc writes that “[Islamic] culture happens to have fallen back in material applications; there is no reason whatever why it should not learn its lesson and become equal in all those temporal things which now alone give us our superiority over it–whereas in Faith we have fallen inferior to it.” Perhaps Belloc intuited something like the control of a commodity like oil and the financial power that comes with it, or the possession of some fantastic weapon such as the atom bomb.

Reilly argues that “the denigration of reason and the primacy of force that developed within Islamic thinking after the suppression of the Mu’tazilites are what have produced the dismissal of dialogue.” Bin Laden quoted his spiritual godfather Abdullah Azzam, in a November 2001 video released after 9/11: “Terrorism is an obligation in Allah’s religion.” Reilly’s analysis is that “the restoration of the status of reason is the only antidote to the spiritual pathology behind this remark; it is also the only foundation in which real dialogue can begin- dialogue within Islam among its contending factions, and between Islam and the West.”

However, Reilly doubts that this restoration is possible or at least likely. Therefore, those who are considered as enemies by jihadist Muslims must act accordingly using their God-given gift of reason. Could it be however, that the question of Faith is even more important than that of Reason? Unquestionably, there are millions of adherents of worldwide Islam willing to die for their faith. In what is left of the once Christian West, are there as many? I have my doubts.

First appeared in the American Spectator in the October, 2010.

©CatholiCity Service http://www.catholicity.com  Re-published with permission.

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Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman: Why Is He Important Today?

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2012/09/20 at 9:11 AM

by Father John McCloskey

Newman is important today for so many reasons. It would take a very long article to number and develop them all. However, I would say that Newman’s revolutionary emphasis on the role of the layperson in the Church is his most important contribution. He abhorred clericalism and insisted on the need of a well-educated and active lay faithful, insisting that holiness and evangelization are the goals of all in the Church, and not power plays for dominance or redefining Church teaching. He was quoted in the preliminary documents in the preparation for the Second Vatican Council more than any other theologian. How did he come to these history-making insights?

Newman was a profoundly religious man by temperament. This much is quite clear from his autobiographical account. However, he did not come from a long line of clergymen, as did a goodly number of his contemporaries in the Oxford movement. During his university years he clearly felt a call to the clerical life and indeed even to celibacy, which was not all that common at that time. Yet in many other ways he was a man of the world. He drank deeply of the classics and history during his undergraduate years, formed many deep friendships, and had a keen interest in the world of music, literature, and politics. He chose the wine for his college. He played the violin, a hobby to which he returned in later life. He exercised vigorously with frighteningly long walks, enjoyed the fresh air of the sea by sailing (his close friend Hurrell Froude was to die of a chill caught as a result of one of those excursions). He was a poet, a novelist, a Latinist of the highest order. (Vatican curial officials were astonished at the level of his classical Latin in their correspondence with him. He was able to express in a paragraph what took them a page!) And he was arguably the greatest master of English prose style. All of this simply serves to emphasize that while Newman was eminently religious, he was not at all monastic.

His choice of the Birmingham Oratory as the best setting for himself and his followers to live their priesthood was predicated in part on the idea that the life of the Oratory was most suited for men from university backgrounds who chose to live their dedication more clearly in the world. Any follower of St. Philip Neri, the great Roman saint of the Baroque and the Catholic reformation, would clearly have a deep appreciation for the secular. In short, Newman was in the world, but not of it. As such, his views on the role of the laity were not simply theoretical, but based on experience and observation.

For Newman, the enemy was the world, the flesh, and the devil in its classical formulation. Certainly he waged a life-long struggle against liberalism in its religious sense, which he defined simply as religious indifferentism. Indeed he tells us at the end of his life, upon receiving the Cardinal’s hat:

And I rejoice to say; to one great mischief I have from the first opposed myself. For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. Never did holy Church need champions against it more sorely than now, when, alas! It is an error over spreading, as a snare, the whole earth. Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another…it is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion as true… revealed religion is not a truth but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective fact, not miraculous, and it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.

Newman’s call for a devout, educated Catholic laity was not set in a vacuum. He realized, in a truly prophetic way, the absolute necessity of holy lay people in the world–not only as a good in itself, but also in order not to let the world fall completely under the sway of liberalism. How at home he would feel waging the battles of the early 21st century as we approach the millennium! After all, he had clearly foreseen them all.

As Russell Shaw, a well known Washingtonian Catholic journalist put it:

Clericalism assumes that clerics not only are but are also meant to be the active, dominate elite in the Church, and laymen the passive, subservient mass. As a result, the laity is discouraged from taking seriously their responsibility for the Church’s mission, and evangelization is neglected. So are efforts to influence the structures of secular society on behalf of the values of the gospel–the evangelization of culture as it is called…Clericalism deepens the confusion about lay and clerical identity…perhaps as the most serious of all, clericalism tends to discourage laymen from cultivating a spirituality that arises above a rather low level of fervor and intensity. As the clerical mentality sees it, the serious pursuit of sanctity is the business of priests and religious. Minimalistic religious practice and legalistic morality are all that are asked of laymen and all many ask of themselves…”

As an example of his defense of the laity, in a notorious incident following the failure of Newman’s attempt to found an Oratory in Oxford as a sort of Catholic chaplaincy for the students, ultramontanists both in Rome and in England attacked Newman. He was supported in an open letter signed by 200 leading British Catholics, including all the Catholic members of Parliament, and nearly all the Catholic peers. This famed cleric was backed by a totally lay group of Catholics, whose defense reflected their appreciation for his teaching.

It was this incident that provoked the attacks of Msgr. George Talbot, an English curial official in Rome and enemy of Newman, to say in an hysterical outburst that “if a check be not placed on the laity of England they will be the rulers of the Catholic Church in England instead of the Holy See and the Episcopate…Laymen are beginning to show the cloven hoof.” Talbot then delivered his most famous lines:

What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain? These matters they understand, but to meddle with ecclesiastical matters they have no right at all…Dr. Newman is the most dangerous man in England, and you will see that he will make use of the laity against your Grace.”

Of course, Newman did not see the laity interfering in “ecclesiastical” matters, but certainly his conception of the role of the laity in the Church as well as in the world was on another level from that of Msgr. Talbot (who finished his days sadly in an insane asylum). At an earlier time, as a result of a controversy at The Rambler, Newman confronted his ordinary, Bishop Ullathorne of Birmingham. According to Newman, “[the bishop] said something like ‘Who are the laity?’ I [Newman] answered (not these words) that the Church would look foolish without them.”

Newman was not only a holy man, as now recognized officially by the Church, but also a revolutionary prophet as regards the laity. He looked backward to the primitive Christianity of the early centuries to recover a new paradigm for the 21st.

Would you like to pay him a visit? The Catholic Information Center at 15th and K Street, NW in Washington, DC has the only statue in town.

First appeared in Washington Post in the September 18, 2010 issue.  

©CatholiCity Service http://www.catholicity.com  Re-published with permission.

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The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2012/09/09 at 9:11 AM

by Michael Pakaluk – published by Ignatius Press, 2011

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey

Those of a certain age will remember Love Story, the best-selling weeper novel of the late sixties written by Erich Segal, a classics professor at Yale who spent a sabbatical at Harvard, the setting for the novel. The book was later adapted for a hit movie starring Ali McGraw as the Radcliffe College tragic heroine and Ryan O’ Neill as her lover at Harvard.

Segal never had to work again, and McGraw and O’Neill’s acting careers were moribund within a decade. But how could any viewer forget the immortal line, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry?” Although completely untrue, it sounded right and fit in that era of unhappy memory.

Here is another love story that begins at Harvard, where two young undergrads meet and fall in love—not only with each other, but also with Christ and his Church. It too proceeds to the death of one of the lovers but, at least from a Christian point of view, it ends in triumph.

The book is The Appalling Strangeness of the Mercy of God (Ignatius Press). That title quote comes from the brilliant and troubled Catholic convert and novelist Graham Greene in The Heart of the Matter. Edited by her widowed husband Michael Pakaluk, the book is, as its subtitle lets on, “the story of Ruth Pakaluk, Convert, Mother, Pro-life Activist.”

In one way, the book is a preparation for a full-scale biography of Pakaluk—one that should not yet be written. As her husband puts it, the book recounts the life “of an extraordinary human being taken away from her friends and family in an untimely manner by metastatic breast cancer, when she was forty-one years old. When Ruth died, her friends believed that the best among them had been taken away. It seem unjust that she should die and that we should continue to live, because the way she lived and her love of life, seemed to make her so much more ‘worthy’ of the gift of life.”

Following the brief biography of Ruth Pakaluk’s life is a selection of her letters, perhaps the clearest window to her life as a student, mother, wife, friend, intellectual, pro-life organizer, debater, and writer. Her husband Michael also includes a moving and at times surprising synopsis of life after Ruth (she is gone, he tells us, but not far).

The collection of Ruth’s letters read as her inadvertent autobiography, beginning with her life at Harvard and ending with the onset of her cancer. The most moving among them are those she wrote to her children as she knew she was slipping away. Finally, the book includes talks that she delivered to those she helped to form in the spirituality of Opus Dei, of which she was a member. Among them are the brilliant talks she delivered in her role as a pro-life advocate (and while already suffering from terminal cancer), having served two terms as president of Massachusetts Citizens for Life.

The well-known philosopher and Christian apologist Peter Kreeft, himself a convert from Calvinism, contributes the introduction, in which he describes Ruth as he knew her: “Utterly honest, human, “homely,” and humble. Simple. Direct. Full of the ordinary, but full of a light that shines on through ordinary life, a light that most of us simply don’t see twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And always cheerful.”

Kreeft also noted that she gave the clearest and strongest pro-life argument he had ever heard—an argument recounted in the book by her husband Michael, which I will leave for the reader to discover for themselves, and use with others.

The book is a tool for evangelization through the witness of Ruth’s life and her death. However, I believe its most important message also lies at the heart of the Second Vatican Council—the universal call to holiness. All of us, after all, are called to holiness, and by the ordinary means the Church has provided since its foundation—prayer, the Scriptures, the sacraments, self-denial, self-gift, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, and openness to the general and particular will of God.

But through the centuries, and particularly after the end of the early Christian era, it became a commonplace belief that holiness was largely reserved for those called to religious life and the priesthood, while laypeople could only aspire to a second-rate holiness, hoping to squeak into Purgatory. There have been many outstanding lay saints—St. Thomas More, for example—but even he was raised to the altar centuries after his martyrdom. That great doctor of the Church, St. Francis De Sales, in hisIntroduction to the Devout Life, opened the door to the aristocracy, but there was something more or less lacking.

In more recent times, the canonization of St. Josemaria Escriva, founder of Opus Dei, and the beatification of Blessed John Henry Newman, are ushering in the new springtime for the Church that Blessed John Paul II the Great foresaw. Newman has been called the invisible peritus of Vatican II and St. Josemaria the anonymous peritus. It is no accident that Ruth Pakaluk was deeply devoted to these modern examples of holiness, striving to put their teachings into practice in her daily life.

During his pontificate, Blessed John Paul II put out a strong call for worthy Catholic laymen and laywomen, preferably married, to be placed on the fast track in the Congregation of the Saints, raising them to the altar to emphasize the universal call to holiness. We leave the matter of a St. Ruth to the judgment of the Church.

First appeared on First Things, July 12, 2011.

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The Difference God Makes by Fr. McCloskey

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2012/08/16 at 9:11 AM

The Difference God Makes

by Francis Cardinal George – published by Crossroad Publishing Company

A Book Review by Father John McCloskey

Francis Cardinal George of the Archdiocese of Chicago has written an astonishingly perceptive book that is the best history of the Catholic Church in the Unites States from a theological point of view. In addition, it shows American Catholics not only to how to deepen their faith but also how to integrate it into their lives as citizens. The book is entitled The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion and Culture (The Crossroad Publishing Company, New York).

Cardinal George, a native of Chicago and currently president of the Unites States Conference of Catholic Bishops, is drawing near the age of 75 when he will be required to submit his resignation as head of the Archdiocese of Chicago. With this book, he takes his place with Orestes Brownson, John Courtney Murray, and Richard John Neuhaus as one of the outstanding intellectuals and theologians in history of the American Church. What sets him apart from the others, however, is his active and demanding pastorship of more than 2.3 million Catholics. In addition, he holds leadership positions in Rome with the religious Congregation he belongs to, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. At the same time, he is deeply engaged with intellectual life at its highest international level. Perhaps only Pope Benedict XVI can rival him in this regard. What struck me in reading George’s book was his reasonableness in striving to understand and articulate clearly and charitably opposing arguments. Rather than being a polemicist, George attempts to reconcile and win over with charity those who he thinks have erred in interpreting what the Second Vatican Council really meant.

The book itself is divided into three parts: 1. The Church’s Mission: Universal Communion, 2. The Church’s Life: Hierarchical Communion and 3. The Church’s Goal: Communion with God. Individual chapters deal with topics as diverse as the laity and priesthood; discussions with Judaism, Islam, and what is left of Protestantism; and worship and the liturgy (clearly one of Pope Benedict’s highest priorities, if not the highest priority of his pontificate). What I think will most interest his American readers are the first three chapters of Part One, devoted to Evangelizing American Culture, Sowing the Gospel on American Soil, and Making All Things New: Notes on a New Apologetic. George does a masterful job of analyzing the varied currents of American religions and their impact on our nation’s culture: individualism, emotionalism, and success seen as salvation flowing from both Calvinistic and Lutheran influences.

For Cardinal George, the answer to the problems confronting the Catholic Church in America is communio–communion, or as the Second Vatican Council succinctly puts it, making the “the sincere gift of self.” This phrase was used more often by Pope John Paul the Great more than any other from the Second Vatican Council. It encompasses putting family and friends above the individual, living for others and not for one’s own interests, pleasures, or achievements.

George writes:

The deepest truth that Catholics proclaim is that of ‘communio.’ All things and all people are ordered to God and ordered to love to one another. This truth informs everything we say about political, social, and economic and cultural realms. If we surrender this truth–either through ideological compromise or even out of concern for civility—we succumb to the culture of death.

George is neither optimistic nor pessimistic but rather positive and hopeful. He clearly believes that Christ and His Church provide answers that can assure relative happiness in this life and everlasting happiness in the next. As he puts it, “The Church finds herself in social, economic, and political structures that are increasingly universal. In such as a situation the Catholic Church is an agent of transformation that is, paradoxically, completely at home.” This book should not be relegated to every Catholic’s bookshelf but rather should be in their hands or on their Kindles or Ipods.

In the 1950s Notre Dame graduates were asked whether they considered themselves Catholics first or Americans first. The majority identified themselves as Americans first! Right there one could have foreseen the long purgatory of the American Church from 1965 to 2005 that we have suffered. Happily the new evangelization foreseen by Pope John Paul II is taking hold in our country, and pretty rapidly. The best is ahead, even if it involves bearing heroic witness and martyrdom. Cardinal George’s The Difference God Makes and Archbishop Chaput’s recent book Render Unto Caesar (Random House) show that the leadership of the Church in America is ready to make the case to both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans that this is indeed a “Catholic Moment” for our country and the world.

First appeared on Catholic Exchange in December, 2009

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Charity, grace, and force discussed by Chicago chapter

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2012/07/21 at 11:11 AM

Is Christianity compatible with libertarianism?

On a rainy Chicago evening on May 25th, we posed the question to The Reverend John C.J. McCloskey and AFF-Chicago chairman Richard Lorenc. The event was sponsored by AFF-Chicago advisory board member Bob Costello.

Lorenc began the conversation by showing a full-page ad placed into the Capitol Hill newspaper Politico by the organization Sojourners that asked pointedly of the federal budget, “What would Jesus cut?” After getting flak for appearing to claim the authority of Christ to advance a statist political agenda, Lorenc explained, Sojourners clarified that they believe Christian legislators should always question how the bills they pass affect the poor and vulnerable.

Libertarians, Lorenc argued, agree heartily with that advice. He quoted a passage in Henry Hazlitt’s ‘Economics In One Lesson,’ which reads, “The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

Explaining the basis of libertarianism, Lorenc said that a person can have socially conservative views and values and still be a libertarian. “Libertarianism doesn’t advocate drug use or liberal social values,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily even imply advocacy of capitalism. Where Christianity is first a moral doctrine that teaches eternal salvation through the grace of God and the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, libertarianism is only a political doctrine that is concerned with the proper use of force. One teaches how individual humans have the God-given ability to choose, love, and give, while the other merely concerns the way in which society is governed.”

Individuals require moral guidance to be able to recognize the proper use of force, Lorenc said. And given Jesus’ teachings that salvation must be chosen freely, Christianity is eminently compatible with libertarianism.

Fr. McCloskey also delved into what defines libertarianism and how, from a Catholic perspective, the two can be compatible. On the notion of social justice, he observed that many infer that it requires a large, active state. He disagreed with that interpretation, citing two components of Catholic theology to make the case for the superiority of private charity over government welfare programs.

The first component is the idea of “solidarity,” or “for everyone with regard to everyone,” as seen in the movement led by Lech Walesa against the authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union. The second component was the idea of “subsidiarity,” or the principle that problems need to be solved in the least centralized way, beginning with the individual and the family, and then into the community.

“The beauty of this principle is that it provides for charity only as needed while encouraging self-reliance as possible,” said Fr. McCloskey. “Whether this assistance comes from the government at the local or federal level, from private charities, from the Church, or simply from relatives, it should normally be limited to getting people or families back on their feet, rather than fostering prolonged dependency — the compelling counterexample being the tens of millions of Americans on food stamps.

Fr. McCloskey read passages from a recent piece he authored in Crisis Magazine entitledPrivate Charity Versus Government Welfare. In it, he wrote, “…private charity is preferable to public welfare, in that it satisfies the principles of subsidiarity, solidarity, and gratuitousness, or self-giving, which ennoble those who provide it and enable those who receive it as needed.”

“Private charity,” Fr. McCloskey said, “allows for the growth of grace.”

After opening statements, members of the audience asked questions. Following Q&A, Fr. McCloskey remained to address questions with AFFers individually.

You can watch a webcam video recording of this event here.

©CatholiCity Service http://www.catholicity.com  Re-published with permission.

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Private Charity Versus Government Welfare

In 04 Fr. John McCloskey on 2012/07/05 at 9:11 AM

by Rev. C. J. McCloskey III

Less than three years has passed since the publication of Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical, Charity in Truth. As some readers may remember, the encyclical caused quite a stir both in secular and religious circles — as have many of the past papal encyclicals dealing with economic questions, going back to Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking 1891 exposition of social justice, Rerum Novarum.It appears that the redaction and publication of the current encyclical was speeded up to address the ongoing global economic crisis — and that it does. This article, however, will instead take a brief look at the proper roles of private charity and government welfare in pursuing the integral development of persons, families, and countries.

Encyclicals are magisterial. That is, they are meant to be studied, prayed over, and applied to the subject at hand. However, in questions of social justice, while the Holy Father and the bishops in communion with him may teach with authority, ultimately it is the laity’s role to apply the teaching to the concrete circumstances of particular countries, economies, and societies. It is at this level that there can be legitimate and perhaps diverging opinions on the ways to apply the teachings in particular cases. Rarely will there be any perfect solution.

In Charity in Truth, Pope Benedict cites Pope Paul VI, who

had an articulated vision of development. He understood the term to indicate the goal of rescuing peoples, first and foremost, from hunger, deprivation, endemic diseases, and illiteracy. It meant their evolution into educated societies marked by solidarity; from a political point of view, it meant the consolidation of democratic regimes capable of ensuring freedom and peace.

However, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict both emphasize the principle of solidarity, which can be defined as “a sense of or responsibility on the part of every one with regard to everyone.” Benedict is clear that this cannot be delegated to the state alone. It seems, given his insistence on the virtue of caritas – love — that one cannot see the State as the principal caretaker of welfare or so-called “social justice.” Benedict insists again and again on what he terms “gratuitousness,” which is a reference to the long-time heart of Joseph Ratzinger’s theology: the emphasis on the sincere gift of self. We could also translate this as the “self-gift,” and find in this formulation a second meaning, since through it a person finds his true self in charity. Private charity is preferable because it is a means of growing in grace for the donor. Clearly this cannot be the case of the Leviathan government, which has no moral subject.

Pope Benedict maintains that Market plus State is simply not enough; such a reduction of social relationships is corrosive of society. We must remember that both John Paul and Benedict lived under totalitarian states that persecuted religion and were responsible for tens of millions of deaths and many martyrs. They knew that perhaps the most important factor in the slow but sure growth of early Christianity was the self-gift of early Christians and their families to those around them, which contrasted so strongly with the brutality and coarseness of the gradually decaying Roman State. Speaking of the early Church, Pope Benedict says in his first encyclical, God is Love, that,

As the years went by, and the Church spread further afield, the exercise of charity became established as one of her essential activities: love for widows and orphans, prisoners, and the sick and needy of every kind is as essential to her as the ministry of the sacraments and preaching of the Gospel. The Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more than she can neglect the Sacraments and the Word.

Today, the Church continues to be the world’s largest private agency of charity to the indigent, as it has been through the centuries, spearheaded by figures as well known as St. Vincent de Paul, Frederic Ozanam, and Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

Along with solidarity, Benedict — and indeed all of his predecessors who taught on human development and the justice of economic systems — insists on the principle of subsidiarity. He writes:

A particular manifestation of charity and a guiding criterion for fraternal cooperation between believers and non-believers is undoubtedly the principle of subsidiarity, an expression of inalienable human freedom. Subsidiarity is first and foremost a form of assistance to the human person via the autonomy of intermediate bodies. Such assistance is offered when individuals or groups are unable to accomplish something on their own, and it is always designed to achieve their emancipation, because it fosters freedom and participation through assumption of responsibility.

The beauty of this principle is that it provides for charity only as needed while encouraging self-reliance as possible. Whether this assistance comes from the government at the local or federal level, from private charities, from the Church, or simply from relatives, it should normally be limited to getting people or families back on their feet, rather than fostering prolonged dependency — the compelling counterexample being the tens of millions of Americans on food stamps.

Benedict notes: “The principle of subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa since the former without the latter gives way to social privatism while the latter without the former gives way to paternalistic social assistance that is demeaning to those in need.”

The pope then applies these principles to foreign aid. “Such aid, whatever the donors’ intentions, can sometimes lock people into a state of dependence and even foster situations of localized oppression and exploitation in the receiving country.” He goes on to stipulate that “Economic aid, in order to be true to its purpose, must not support secondary objectives.”

It is clear from Benedict’s tour de force survey of the current state of human development that private charity is preferable to public welfare, in that it satisfies the principles of subsidiarity, solidarity, and gratuitousness, or self-giving, which ennoble those who provide it and enable those who receive it as needed.

On the other hand, government assistance generally should serve as temporary help when private charity is not available or effective — the proverbial safety net — but not as a form of bribery for political purposes or as a means of gaining power over people, as if oppressive taxation and inflationary monetary policy were not means enough. After all, as the saying goes, what the government can do for you, it can also do toyou.

I will let Pope Benedict have the last word:

The greatest service to development, then, is a Christian humanism that enkindles charity and takes its lead from truth, accepting both as a lasting gift from God. Openness to God makes us open towards our brothers and sisters and towards an understanding of life as a joyful task to be accomplished in a Spirit of Solidarity.

Tagged as: Benedict XVI, Catholic Social Teaching, development, economics, Love, Rerum Novarum, Subsidiarity, Truth

The views expressed by the authors and editorial staff are not necessarily the views of
Sophia Institute, Holy Spirit College, or the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.

©CatholiCity Service http://www.catholicity.com  Re-published with permission.

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