Of Meteors and Conclaves

I am so glad the Mayans were wrong about the world ending in 2012. Because 2013 has barely begun and it is already far more interesting.

It really isn't every day that a massive chunk of space rock comes tumbling headlong into our atmosphere and explodes. Even more amazing is the fact that the 10,000 ton space rock careened to earth over a populated area and, though injuring many with the massive blast, killed no one. It is enough to make an unbeliever reconsider the concept of guardian angels.

In my mind, however, what was even more amazing about last week was not this natural event but a human and divine one. That would be the now famous address in which Pope Benedict XVI announced his upcoming renunciation of his papal office. It was a stunning move, to say the least. This incidentally occurred on the same day that the Vatican dome was struck by lightning. Twice.

Whether the strike be a sign from God or not (a sign of what we aren't told), it certainly marked a momentous day. No pope in 600 years has abdicated his throne. It would be a first in recent history, at a time when the Catholic Church has reached a critical point in her ad the world's history. Even putting aside the more egregious examples of the mostly secular, mostly political, and mainly awful mainstream media coverage of the entire affair, one theme has emerged in a resoundingly clear crescendo:

The Catholic Church is the only institution left that has not altered its official stance on the issues that dominate the modern world: abortion, contraception, homosexual sex, Marxism and capitalism. For the Church to remain relevant, it MUST CHANGE ITS VIEWS. NOW.

Implicit in that unified outcry is the assumption that the new pope, chosen from a pool of cardinals hand-picked by men who championed against these issues, will do nothing to "move the Church forward." For the journalists, politicians, and activists who are doing the crowing about progressivism in the Church, they couldn't be more right.

Thank God.

Their beef with the Church is really quite silly when you think about it. The Church has been a monument of rock-solid permanence for the past 2,000 years or so. She has seen empires rise and fall, has watched great men flare up and burn out, has born through fierce storms of mankind demanding violence and change. And yet here she still stands, still unmoved by those pleas to alter her first principles. In a way that the secular world is unable to understand, the Church does not change not because she will not, but because she can not. When her identity contains within itself the bearing witness to an unchanging truth, then consequently being untrue to that truth would make her cease to exist. It is just that simple.

But this is only half the silliness of the world's beef with an unchanging Catholic Church. The other half is why the secular world gets its pants into such a collective bind when the Church once again, for example, mildly insists that we will never see women priests. For such an enlightened, reasonable world where democracy reigns supreme and tolerance is the byword of the day, why then is there such a problem with the Catholic Church?

The problem appears to be a simple one of identification. When a man of the modern world devotes himself to secularism, he thinks that he is simply extricating himself from the noxious tangle of religion and belief in God in order to put himself on a higher plane of understanding than the rest of humanity. From this higher plane he can view the world from a truly enlightened angle and judge impartially what is best for it. Reality, sadly for him, is somewhat different. What the secularist does not realize is that on the natural level he can never become a detached observer of his own kind, because he himself is of that kind and probably knows just as little about humanity's ultimate good than any other human. This inevitably will lead him to clash with religion because his imagination has become his own religion.

The Catholic Church, meanwhile, adds another layer to this assessment by giving us the supernatural reason that the secularist has a beef with unchanging truth. Mere men in many ways would not have such a burning hatred of the truth if it were merely they that were engaged in the battle. Leaving each other to believe as they please only works for so long. The Church's unwavering doctrine of Satan and his power are as true today as they have always been, as well as the teaching that the Devil hates humanity with all of his heart and desires to egg them on against the truth with all of his might. So the secularist, in his indifference to truth, becomes its enemy and by default the ally of a host of evil spirits that are engaged in an epic war against said truth.

Author Steve Jalsevac, in an excellent article on LifeSiteNews.com, quotes Vatican observer Robert Moynihan as saying this:

“Are there facts the Pope has weighed in making this decision that we simply don't know about, or don't know fully? … Does the Pope have information about the possible course of events in the months ahead that led him to conclude that he needed to allow a younger, more energetic man to take over his office from him, so that the Church's highest authority could take action quickly and decisively as events unfold?”

I am becoming more and more convinced that Moynihan has hit on something extremely important here. Whether it be the need for stronger discipline of the Church's errant leaders, as Jalsevac suggests later in his piece, or the ominous rising tide of American-style sexual liberation by government coercion, or something else entirely (or all of these things), I am in admiration of a move by Pope Benedict that I think will be perceived only later as the brilliant move that it is. It is a move that I imagine will create a counter-crescendo to the rising cacophony and blathering disunity of secularism.

It is a move of unity, continuity, humility, and permanence.

The new pope (whomever he shall be) will only proclaim one thing, the truth. It shall be the same obnoxiously immovable and unchangeable truth as it always has been, no matter how many or how few people adhere to it. The media loves its facts and figures concerning the average Catholic's attitude towards the Church's teaching; what they fail to realize is that waning church attendance and liberal attitudes about contraception and abortion are not signs of the Church's irrelevance. A drought is not a sign of the irrelevance of rain, but of the desperate and all-encompassing need for it. So it is with the Church and her truth.

God bless Pope Benedict XVI, and bless all the cardinals as they meet to discover which of them shall sit on the throne of Saint Peter next. I will be waiting with baited breath.


Panorama of St Peter's Square in Vatican City. Photo by François Malan, via Wikipedia.

Aluminum Foil Hats Off Now!

There is a wonderful book written by the great G. K. Chesterton, called The Ball and the Cross, which I read for the first time at college and couldn't put down until I was finished. It is the story of a hard-core atheist who is completely convinced of the truth of his atheism, and has a shop set up with inflammatory anti-Catholic posters in the windows in order to attract somebody of a religious persuasion to debate. The world passes him by for a good portion of his life, being too self-involved in its own ennui to give a care, until one day a Catholic man sees the shop and in a fit of righteous rage smashes the window, challenging the atheist to a duel in defense of the honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The atheist is so happy to finally meet someone who will take him up on his challenge that he drops everything and the two try to find a nice quiet spot to duel with swords.

Only they never actually do much fighting at all, because they are constantly being interrupted by busybodies and the authorities. But the various people they encounter only fuel their passion to cross verbal and literal swords in a spiritual duel.

If you think I relate this story in order to defend or tear down one side or the other, then you would be mistaken, this time anyways. I do in fact believe one of these men's positions to be true and disbelieve the other, but at the moment that is unimportant. The point is that each man believed in his own position so thoroughly that they were willing to do what was necessary to defend it and propagate it, and that is what got them both in trouble with the rest of the world. They unfolded their philosophies to the bitter end and only one position withstood the test of truth. I will not tell you which, you have to read the book and find out for yourself.

Let us all take off our political, ideological, social, and religious aluminum foil hats for the moment and set them aside. The world has need of opinions and positions and views well enough, but it needs something else first, something that has been most desperately lacking in the modern world. Brutal, unforgiving honesty.

The Catholics of the United States received a shock of brutal, unforgiving honesty just a couple of months ago, when the Department of Health and Human Services declared that religious institutions were required to purchase services that they were morally opposed to. It was a backhanded slap in the face for anyone in this country who gives a damn about conscientious objection. But it was straightforward and out in the open, not underhanded and guarded. The president and his HHS secretary threw down the proverbial gauntlet and demanded that the Catholic Church comply. I can only imagine that this demand arises purely from the president's own ideology concerning what rights he thinks women have and how they are allowed to exercise said rights.

In a weird way it is a breath of fresh air. Now the spiritual fistfight can occur out in the open for everyone to see. Finally our ennui has been broken by a good old fashioned brawl. In the same spirit as the president, the Catholic Church and many other religious leaders have accepted the challenge with fighting words. Chesterton's passionate Catholic man in the book is against everything the atheist believes, and yet still calls the atheist a real man for being willing to do battle over those beliefs. We should respect our enemy in the same way.

In a similar way, a reputable medical journal has just published a piece putting forward a justification for the killing of children outside the womb, as opposed to simply in the womb like with an abortion. They use the rationale that we kill a child inside the womb, so what makes being outside the womb any more special? All one needs is a weak economic or psychological reason and voila! killing may commence. I actually applaud this piece of journalism, not for the good or evil of its content, but that the people who want to justify killing children have finally taken the intellectually honest step of justifying the killing of children at any stage, not just in the womb. If life has no sacred quality to it, who gives a damn where the killing happens, to whom it happens, and for what reason. Now these same people just need to go the next logical step and justify removing murder from the books as a crime, since every murder has an understandable reason and the life being taken is not sacred. Right? That would be the endgame of their line of thinking.

Can I be any more clear? If you are going to be one thing or the other, believe one thing or the other, then go the whole way with it and don't hold anything back. Don't be a half-hearted murder justifier, proclaim it from the rooftops! What's stopping you? If you are going to defend life at all stages, then make sure everyone knows it, whether you be labeled saint or lunatic. If you believe the rights of conscience should be trampled willy-nilly, then be as willy-nilly as you possibly can. If you believe in justice and the punishing of real evil, then pursue it with all your might. Whether your position unravels in the end is dependent on how much of the truth it contains, but intellectual brawling tends to squeeze out the truth.

If you are going to pick a position, then make it count and make it real. The president has done it, in many ways even as a hindrance to his reelection campaign, but he has done it. We may despise him or love him for it, but at least he is finally being honest about his disregard and there is no mistaking it. He is merely playing out his philosophy to its bitterly logical end. We should deign to answer that sort of honesty with our own.

Nobody should be afraid to do battle for what they believe. The catch is that we must know where that belief will take us and go the distance to make sure we follow through. Every argument has an end, let's be gutsy enough to battle to that point. We will all be better off if we do.

(I am saving my comments against the infanticide justification for a later date. It is a morally abhorrent case that needs answering; I simply wished to use it as an example of following one's own argument to its logical conclusion.)

The Truth and Its Shadow

There is a funny line in the film The Trouble with Angels, where the generous donor of band uniforms to a Catholic girl's school is scolded by the mother superior for the immodesty of the uniforms' cut. The mother superior proclaims indignantly that she runs a Catholic school, to which the donor replies without even blinking, "Band uniforms are non-sectarian."

Besides the belly laugh I got out of the line, it actually got me to thinking. The word "Catholic" really only means one thing: universal. In its application to the Catholic Church, the word encompasses the universality of both its message, its scope, and most importantly, its truth.

The humor of the line for me comes from the oxymoron of the Catholic Church being a sect. A sect would suggest a splinter group, an organization possessing a certain truth, rather than all of the truth. A sect requires comparison to some other thing for its identity. The Catholic Church has no such need.

But I will let someone far more eloquent than I expound further on this topic, mainly because he has captured precisely what I have always thought but could never verbalize. This article is extraordinarily moving in its beautiful defense of the truth and in what way the truth must be understood.

Alec Baldwin and the Children

Alec Baldwin rubs me the wrong way. He just does. Sure, he can be kinda funny sometimes (the movie Elizabethtown comes to mind), but he is to me like petting a cat the wrong way (the cat being me, of course.) So I naively thought that I could escape the man by simply not watching any movies or shows he is in. I was wrong.

Random Cute Non-Obese Child

I was listening to some radio program recently on my local station, and the commercial break came up. And lo and behold, a PSA came on starring (you guessed it) my favorite star. His Baldwinian gravelly opening words were something like, "Like any parent, I worry about the health of our nation's children." He went on to talk about obesity rates among children and eating healthy, and ended by plugging whatever foundation was sponsoring him.

Once the mind-numbing effect of the PSA wore off (they all seem to be mind-numbing, regardless of their content), I was left with an oddly uneasy feeling. What was wrong?

Welcome. And Be Aware.

It has taken me approximately a year and a half for this project to gestate in my tangled mind, but now it seems that the spigots of the brain have gotten leaky and the project has begun to ooze out more or less on its own. I have a somewhat dull day job and it leaves plenty of time for solitary thought and deep reflection on issues and problems that are important to me. I like to think thoughts about politics, about religion, about society. I like to reflect on wealth and poverty and what they mean, and I like to contemplate the reaction of different people to all of the aforementioned things.

All of these things I find fascinating. What frustrates my enthusiasm (or whets it sometimes, maybe?) is the lack of coherent thought concerning the issues of the day. Pontificating news anchors and posturing politicians, televangelists and talk show hosts; they are all guilty of muddying the proverbial waters at one point or another in their careers. The muddying has never helped before, and it helps even less especially now with a precariously balanced country, a tanking economy, and a youth run amuck.

We are a society that came from somewhere and is going to somewhere; in short, we are a social continuum. Let us have a conversation about who we are, where we are trying to go, and how we plan on getting there, and let us have that conversation in a setting that encourages real thought processes rather than wild conjecture and name calling. I love a heated argument, but not an unreasonable one!

Let us be intellectually honest with ourselves. An argument that is born in well-founded reasoning and ends in a well-reasoned conclusion is a true argument, and truth demands acceptance. So welcome, and Be Aware!