Social justice

Pius XII and the question of transsexuality

At First Things, there is a translation of an article by Christian Spaemann, a psychiatrist and the son of the German theologian Robert Spaemann, about the Holy Father’s recent comments on individuals who identify as transgender or transsexual. It seems that our old friend, Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., translated the piece for First Things. Dr. Spaemann’s essay is well worth reading and considering in full; however, he makes one point that is sure to cause controversy:

The suffering of those who feel themselves to be transsexual can be so great—to the point of making them suicidal—that from the perspective of the Church one can hardly categorically forbid surgical and hormonal measures to reduce their suffering, as a last resort after attempting other measures. The proscription of self-mutilation must here be weighed against the good of reducing suffering.

(Emphasis supplied.) We note that Pater Waldstein, at Sancrucensis, has stated that he is not sure that he agrees fully with the point, but Spaemann’s essay (and some other writing on this subject) have given him reason to consider it more seriously. And, indeed, given the increasing prevalence of issues related to persons who identify as transsexual or transgender, such consideration is merited.

You may recall that the Holy Father has been outspoken and steadfast in his opposition to what he calls, somewhat vaguely, gender theory. However, it must be said that the Church’s magisterium on this subject is a little vague. (In distinction to the clear, unchanging teachings of the Church for persons who suffer from same-sex attraction.) Nonetheless, there is one pope who laid the groundwork for this discussion. You may think that it’s St. John Paul II with his Theology of the Body, which is occasionally mentioned in this context. But you’d be wrong.

None other than Pius XII—the mild, saintly man who has been defamed posthumously as the embodiment of all that is reactionary and oppressive in the Church—laid the groundwork for a serious consideration of the question in the light of the magisterium in a 1953 speech to a convention of Italian urologists. It is, we note in passing, a crying shame that Pius’s extensive magisterium on scientific and medical matters is not more widely discussed in the Church. Just as Papa Ratti was a prophetic voice on matters of morality, so too was Papa Pacelli a prophetic voice on matters of science. We have only found this speech in French on the Vatican website, and we have not found a good translation anywhere. To spare you the combination of machine translation and our desultory Latin and our comical attempt at French several years ago, we present the relevant passage of the original:

La première question, vous Nous l’avez posée sous la forme d’un cas particulier, typique cependant de la catégorie à laquelle il appartient, c’est-à-dire l’amputation d’un organe sain pour supprimer le mal qui affecte un autre organe, ou du moins pour arrêter son développement ultérieur avec les souffrances et les dangers qu’il entraîne. Vous vous demandez si cela est permis.

En ce qui concerne votre diagnostic et votre pronostic, il ne Nous appartient pas d’en traiter. Nous répondons à votre question, en supposant que tous les deux sont exacts.

Trois choses conditionnent la licéité morale d’une intervention chirurgicale qui comporte une mutilation anatomique ou fonctionnelle : d’abord que le maintien ou le fonctionnement – d’un organe particulier dans l’ensemble de l’organisme provoque en celui-ci un dommage sérieux ou constitue une menace. Ensuite que ce dommage ne puisse être évité, ou du moins notablement diminué que par la mutilation en question et que l’efficacité de celle-ci soit bien assurée. Finalement, qu’on puisse raisonnablement escompter que l’effet négatif, c’est-à-dire la mutilation et ses conséquences, sera compensé par l’effet positif : suppression du danger pour l’organisme entier, adoucissement des douleurs etc.

Le point décisif ici n’est pas que l’organe amputé ou rendu incapable de fonctionner soit malade lui-même, mais que son maintien ou son fonctionnement entraîne directement ou indirectement pour tout le corps une menace sérieuse. Il est très possible que, par son fonctionnement normal, un organe sain exerce sur un organe malade une action nocive de nature à aggraver le mal et ses répercussions sur tout le corps. Il peut se faire aussi que l’ablation d’un organe sain et l’arrêt de son fonctionnement normal enlève au mal, au cancer par exemple, son terrain de croissance ou, en tout cas, altère essentiellement ses conditions d’existence. Si l’on ne dispose d’aucun autre moyen, l’intervention chirurgicale sur l’organe sain est permise dans les deux cas. La conclusion, que Nous venons de tirer, se déduit du droit de disposition que l’homme a reçu du Créateur à l’égard de son propre corps, d’accord avec le principe de totalité, qui vaut ici aussi, et en vertu duquel chaque organe particulier est subordonné à l’ensemble du corps et doit se soumettre à lui en cas de conflit. Par conséquent, celui qui a reçu l’usage de tout l’organisme a le droit de sacrifier un organe particulier, si son maintien ou son fonctionnement cause au tout un tort notable, qu’il est impossible d’éviter autrement.

(Emphasis supplied.) Given the whole scope of Dr. Spaemann’s commentary, we suspect that he is well aware of Pius’s thinking on this topic. However, it seems to us that the sixty-year-old speech of a pope to an Italian association of urologists may not be at the tips of one’s fingertips as one reads and ponders Dr. Spaemann’s point.

Digressing briefly, we note, too, that St. Thomas Aquinas’s teachings, particularly in ST IIa IIae q.65 a.1 co. & ad 3, have an important bearing here, too. However, we are more concerned with, at this opportune moment, reminding you, dear reader, that the great Pius XII left us, in his wisdom, an excellent magisterial source for discussing this topic.

As it has become more common to assess the magisterial weight of papal teachings, especially those teachings not contained in more formal documents like encyclicals or apostolic letters, we should add that it is clear that the 1953 speech was intended by Pius as a formal act of the ordinary papal magisterium. Indeed, Pius thought that this was an important intervention on this topic and part of a broader pattern of papal teachings in response to questions of the age, noting a year later in a speech to the World Medical Association,

You are fully qualified to deal with the medical, as well as the technical and administrative aspects of these questions, but we would like to call your attention to several points which pertain to their moral and juridical nature. Many of the problems with which you are presently concerned have equally been of concern to Us, and been made the subject of special discourses on Our part. Thus, on September 14, 1952, we spoke (at their request) to those who took part in the First International Congress on the Histopathology of the Nervous System on the moral limits of modern methods of research and treatment. Our remarks were linked to a study of the three principles from which medical science derives justification for such methods of research and treatment: the scientific interest of medicine, the interest of the patient, and that of the community – or, as it is commonly designated, the common good, the «bonum commune» (Discorsi e Radiomessaggi, vol, XIV, pp. 319-330). Again, in an address to the members of the Sixteenth International Congress of Military Medicine, We spoke of the basic principles of medical ethics and medical law, and discussed their origin, their nature, and their application (October 19, 1953, ibid, vol. XV, pp. 417-428). The Twenty-sixth Congress of the Italian Association of Urology, in turn, had asked us the widely discussed question: Is it morally permissible to remove a healthy organ in order to prevent the progress of a milady which jeopardizes human life? Our reply to this question was contained in an address delivered on October 8 of last year (ibid, vol. XV, pp. 373-375). And, finally, We had occasion to touch upon the questions which are of particular concern to you in the present Congress those relating to an ethical evaluation of modern warfare and its methods –in an address given on October 3, 1953, to those participating in the Sixth International Congress of Penal Law (ibid, vol. XV, pp. 337-353).

(Emphasis supplied.) And, of course, his 1952 speech to the histopathology association is a major intervention in Pius’s magisterium, providing a broader framework for medical research and treatment. The upshot of all of this is that Pius certainly thought he was exercising his ordinary magisterium to clear up questions that were vexing the medical professionals who approached him for advice.

Though we are reasonably certain that Pius was teaching for the benefit of the Church, we doubt strongly that Pius XII imagined that his comments in 1953 would be drawn into a debate like this, and we doubt more strongly that Pius XII would have considered his analysis to be a justification for something like the surgical and hormonal measures that Spaemann discusses. However, Pius certainly would have thought that he was proposing general moral principles of universal applicability, and it is in that dimension that his comments are most useful. Certainly it is, we think, difficult to have a serious discussion about these surgical and hormonal measures without having a discussion along the lines Pius indicates. It would be interesting, we think, to see someone articulate, in broad strokes, such a discussion. Elliot Milco once wrote a funny little dialogue broadly on this topic, though focusing more on the natural law than the magisterial interventions. And it is well worth reading. But, as Paul VI teaches us, the Church has the authority, given to her by Christ, to authentically interpret and guard the natural law. Thus, Pius’s magisterial action, clearly seen by him as a magisterial action, ought to be considered as part of a broader discussion of this topic.

We do not propose an answer to this question here, however. If thinkers like Christian Spaemann and Pater Edmund Waldstein have cause to ponder these matters carefully, we will not rush in to offer our opinion without weighing it more carefully. Instead we propose a ressourcement of the Church’s existing magisterium, both to point toward a resolution of these questions and to provide a hermeneutic key to current papal statement.

John Podesta’s Catholic connections

The secret is out. As part of Wikileaks’ ongoing leak of the emails of John Podesta, a 2011 email exchange between Podesta and a fellow named Sandy Newman was released. Ordinarily, nothing could be less interesting than the shop talk of a couple of veteran Democratic operatives. However, this email exchange is interesting because it states—it doesn’t suggest, it states—that Podesta was involved in setting up Catholic organizations that, well, putting it charitably, advocate essentially for Democratic viewpoints within the Church. The exchange implies, in fact, that these groups have as a goal undermining the Church’s hierarchy and doctrine. As Podesta’s boss advances toward the White House, the exchange takes on new relevance. And it ultimately ought to give Catholics very serious pause when they evaluate organizations claiming to represent constituencies in the Church.

You can read the whole exchange at Wikileaks, but the thrust of it is this: Newman was complaining to Podesta about the perceived intransigence of the Catholic bishops on the Obamacare contraceptive mandate. Newman called for a “Catholic Spring,” a reference to “Arab Spring” and other similar movements, which conceivably would involve rank-and-file Catholics rising up and demanding that the Church change its infallible teaching regarding contraception. Podesta responded to Newman with something very interesting; he says, “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United.” (Emphasis supplied.) A staff reporter from the Catholic Herald provides a very good overview, too, of the emails and the implications.

Podesta is, of course, a major figure in Democratic politics. Currently, he is a top official in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But, before that, he was a player in Bill Clinton’s administration, finally becoming White House chief of staff toward the end of Clinton’s presidency. After that, he was a Democratic lobbyist and think-tank boss. But he remained in the Clintons’ orbit. And when Hillary Clinton announced her current—potentially successful—bid for the presidency, he came on board as the campaign’s chairman. In other words, John Podesta has been a very heavy hitter in Democratic circles for a very long time. And there is, therefore, every reason to believe that Podesta knows what the Democratic establishment has and has not done as far as establishing so-called astroturf (i.e., fake grassroots) organizations. We are not inclined to dismiss Podesta’s statement out of hand.

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, which purports to be “[p]romoting Pope Francis’s politics of inclusion throughout the United States,” is led by Christopher Jolly Hale. It takes a range of positions, and generally tries to stake out a pro-life position within the Democratic Party. Catholics United, which does not appear to be a going concern at the moment, was the project of Chris Korzen and James Salt. Based upon publicly available information, it seems to have been largely an advocacy outreach by the Democratic Party to Catholics. For his part, Chris Hale has put out a predictably outraged statement, which reads in part:

When I woke up this morning, I never thought our organization would get caught up in WikiLeaks drama.

Prominent commentators have used a stolen e-mail from 2011 (while I was a 21-year-old college student) about our organization in an attempt to impugn both our integrity and our organization’s work.

So let’s set the record straight: every day, my colleagues and I work tirelessly to promote the social mission of Pope Francis and the Catholic Church in American politics, media, and culture.

Politics is messy. Lived faith is messy. So this work isn’t always easy. You’re bound to make everyone mad at least once.

(Italics in original; emphasis supplied.) It is, of course, ironic that Hale would claim the mantle of Pope Francis, who, while archbishop of Buenos Aires, was locked in more or less perpetual combat with the president of Argentina. But, for reasons well known to any reader of Semiduplex, the first thing progressive dissenters do when they want to enervate the Church’s teachings is wrap themselves in Francis’s mantum.

But back to the matter at hand. It may be worth noting that at no point in the press release does Hale actually deny Podesta’s statement that Catholics in Alliance was founded by Democratic operatives to advance a Democratic agenda inside the Church. He just claims that he was in college when Podesta wrote the email. This is, of course, a non sequitur. One has very little to do with the other. At any rate, as leader of the organization, Hale ought to know—the Catholic Herald was able to find out, any rate—that Catholics in Alliance was founded in 2005 by Tom Periello. (One assumes that Chris Hale was in high school or whatever then.) Currently its chairman is a man named Fred Rotondaro. The Catholic Herald reports that both Periello and Rotondaro are senior fellows in Podesta’s think tank. In other words, in addition to Podesta having some authority by virtue of his position in Democratic politics, solid reporting shows that Catholics in Alliance was founded by people very close to Podesta. To put it in legal terms, the circumstantial evidence corroborates very strongly Podesta’s statement.

For some reason, Hale neglects to mention this in his press release. Of course, if his best argument is that he was in college when Podesta’s close associates set up an organization Podesta claimed to have set up, we can understand why Hale wouldn’t want to talk about it. But no problem ever went away by ignoring it, and Hale most certainly has a problem.

And Hale’s problem is not limited to the founding of the group. He claims that Catholics in Alliance has no intention of dividing the Church against itself. However, that is not quite the same thing as saying that Catholics in Alliance does not seek to contradict the doctrine of the Church of Rome. In fact, whether Catholics in Alliance exists to undermine the doctrine of the Church is something you’ll have to judge for yourself, after reading the press clippings the group makes available so kindly on its website. Certainly Rotondaro himself, as the Catholic Herald reports, has taken positions in stark contrast to the Church’s, not only on contraception but also on women’s ordination (Hale, of course, is an enthusiastic supporter of deaconesses) and homosexual behavior. In this context, Hale says,

Many of our fellow Catholics disagree with some of our politics. And they should. That’s a sign of a healthy culture within the Church.

But I can say with strong conviction that we love our Catholic faith and the Church. Contrary to what others have said, my colleagues and I would never try to divide the Church against itself for political ends.

Judge us by our fruits. We’ve time and again challenged both Democrats and Republicans—often at some political cost—to be better stewards of the common good.

You can question our politics, but don’t ever question the sincerity of our faith or our love of the Catholic Church.

(Italics in original; emphasis supplied.) We agree with Hale, “The proof is in the pudding.” (Italics in original.)

Furthermore, we know, from other revelations, that other people in Podesta’s circle have not an enormous amount of use for the Church’s teachings. Addie Mena, a reporter for Catholic News Service, has reported on another of Podesta’s emails leaked by Wikileaks. In a 2011 email exchange, John Halpin and Jennifer Palmieri complained about conservative Catholics. Halpin is apparently a senior official at Podesta’s think tank. Palmieri is Hillary Clinton’s communications director. Halpin complained that conservative Catholics bastardized the faith and simply threw around Thomism and subsidiarity to appear clever. Palmieri attributed even less elevated motives to her coreligionists. At some level, it is not a surprise that these men and women are essentially progressive Catholics who are not hugely impressed with the Church’s traditional teachings. Just as the First Things crowd seeks a fusion between Catholics (and others) and the Republican Party, these people seek a fusion between Catholics and the Democratic Party. Of course, while a faithful Catholic has a passing hard time being a good Republican, a faithful Catholic simply cannot be a good Democrat.

One could assume that much. But what the Wikileaks releases indicate goes beyond mere contempt on the part of Democratic elites for the Church’s traditional teaching. It suggests that Democratic operatives have set up organizations in an attempt to bring the Church’s teaching in line with Democratic orthodoxy. These operatives are now in the circle of a woman who is, if the polls are to be believed, quite likely to be the next president of the United States. Do they intend to use these organizations to advocate for President Hillary Clinton’s policies? We already know that Clinton wants to advance the cause of abortion and contraception in the United States by repealing the life-saving Hyde Amendment. The bishops are sure to resist. Will White House employees use their connections with organizations like these, or any others that just happen to spring up, to urge Catholics to resist the Church’s teachings on these points. It is a frightening picture, to say the least. Bishop Richard Umbers, the auxiliary bishop of Sydney, Australia, and a prelate who understands social media, puts the matter succinctly in a tweet, calling the idea of a “Catholic Spring,” “[w]orrying signs of a desire for state interference in church creed & organisation.”

At the very least, Catholics now have good reason to be suspicious of advocacy groups that come along—claiming to represent “ordinary Catholics” or Pope Francis or any other constituency—who ultimately propound positions contrary to the settled teachings of the Church. Catholics are, of course, used to dissenters in our midst; indeed, the history of the Church since, oh, 1962 or so, has been one long process of dissent and reaction. But we have always assumed that progressives dissent simply because they do not actually like the Church all that much, and seek to make a church for themselves as doctrinally coherent and vibrant as the liberal Lutherans, the Anglicans, or the United Methodists. However, all of this suggests that some dissenters might have altogether more worldly motives.

On Alan Jacobs’s Christian intellectuals

At Harper’s Magazine, Alan Jacobs has a lengthy essay, “The Watchmen,” more or less bewailing the disappearance, as Jacobs has it, of Christian intellectuals from the American scene. The problem with Jacobs’s piece, as we see it, is remarkably simple: when it isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, it’s pointless. He sets for himself a big project and then, apparently, decides that he’d rather not make a go of it. (He also has some weird ideas, at least from a Catholic perspective, as we’ll see, about Catholicism.) Political liberals, Jacobs explains, are living an increasingly reactionary world, and they are without the means of understanding the reaction that befuddles and terrifies them. Christian intellectuals, Jacobs says, who were most prominent in the middle of the 20th century, could explain the reactionaries to the liberals. What?

No, really. What?

We have not seen any desire among political liberals—and Jacobs never clarifies what he means by that term until it’s too late—to have Donald Trump, for example, explained to them in Christian terms. Political liberals already know what they think of Trump and the voters that have propelled him to the Republican nomination. They don’t need Christian intellectuals to explain these trends. And that’s assuming that Christians could explain the broader trends. Even conservative Christians seem to be divided on Trump, with many Christians adopting an exhausted, “think of the Supreme Court” approach to Trump. Which is not exactly a robust approach to a new political movement, for what it’s worth. (And recalling Scalia’s Obergefell dissent, about which we have changed our mind in recent months, it is strange to imagine Christians voting for Trump in the hope that he’ll find another proceduralist to replace Scalia.) So, we wonder why Jacobs thinks that Christian intellectuals are necessary to interpret the Trump trend—or any of a whole host of trends—to centrists or leftists.

And Jacobs never really answers that question. Indeed, he quickly abandons the idea of the intellectual-as-interpreter. Instead, he seems to conceive of the Christian intellectual as someone who gives political liberals a religious explanation for things they were predisposed to believe. (Though why he thinks political liberals want a religious justification for things they already believe is, again, beyond us.) Jacobs explains:

Oldham’s Moot and Finkelstein’s Conference shared a pair of beliefs: that the West was suffering a kind of moral crisis, and that a religious interpretation of that crisis was required. The nature of the problem, the believing intellectuals agreed, was a kind of waffling uncertainty about core principles and foundational belief. Faced with ideological challenges from the totalitarian Axis powers and from the communist Soviet Union, democracy did not seem to know why it should be preferred to alternatives whose advocates celebrated them so passionately and reverently. What democracy needed was a metaphysical justification — or, at least, a set of metaphysically grounded reasons for preferring democracy to those great and terrifying rivals.

In was in this context — a democratic West seeking to understand why it was fighting and what it was fighting for — that the Christian intellectual arose. Before World War II there had been Christians who were also intellectuals, but not a whole class of people who understood themselves, and were often understood by others, to be watchmen observing the democratic social order and offering a distinctive interpretation of it. Mannheim, who was born Jewish but professed no religious belief, joined with these people because he saw them pursuing the genuine calling of the intellectual. Perhaps Mortimer Adler felt the same way: it would otherwise be difficult to explain why he, also a Jew by birth and also (at that time) without any explicit religious commitments, would think that the West could be saved only through careful attention to the thought of Thomas Aquinas.

(Emphasis supplied.) Whatever this process is, it is not explaining to political liberals the forces of reaction. Instead, it seems like a process of explaining to political liberals why the forces of reaction are not just wrong in the hic et nunc, but wrong in the only analysis that matters, the religious analysis. One doubts—we doubt, at any rate—whether such they need the help.

But who are these voices? W.H. Auden, Reinhold Niebuhr, C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and a few others. In other words, for the most part, sort of high-church protestants from the middle of the 20th century. Auden died in 1973, Niebuhr in 1971, Lewis in 1963, and Eliot in 1965. On Twitter, Matthew Sitman, associate editor at Commonweal, makes the point that these men did most of their most important work in a short time, mostly in the context of actual war. We draw very different conclusions than Sitman, but his series of tweets is well worth reading. His most cogent point is that, by the 1950s, the men Jacobs discusses had moved on to more personal, perhaps less compelling, projects. (By way of example: Little Gidding appeared in 1942 and the collected Four Quartets appeared the United States in 1943. [They would appear in England in 1944.]) And he’s right. If you consider the Christian intellectual project as winning the peace by finding a religious justification for western liberal democracy—and that seems to be Jacobs’s definition—it lasted about 25 years in the middle of the 20th century (1945–1970). And by returning to this brief period—which is probably briefer than we say, since, as Sitman notes, Niebuhr’s last great book was published in the 1950s—Jacobs lays himself open to the charge of sentimentalism and nostalgia. And, we suppose, to high-church liberal protestants, there is much to lament with the passing of that moment in the public discourse.

Catholics might feel otherwise, since from October 1978 to April 2005, the Church was led by John Paul II, who was very much a Christian intellectual of a very different stripe than the ones Jacobs wants to talk about—recall Wojtyla’s corpus from Love and Responsibility to the Theology of the Body discourses to his major encyclicals as pope, whatever one makes of any particular contribution in that vein. The point is clear: the intellectual discourse in the Church, both about Christianity and how Christianity relates to a world hostile to it in many respects, especially moral, remained at a high level. But, Jacobs, for some reason, makes clear that the Christian intellectuals he admires so much did not necessarily include Catholic voices:

To be sure, in America the Fifties were a time of public emergence for many Catholic intellectuals, especially writers of fiction: J. F. Powers, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy. But these figures were almost assertively apolitical, and when Catholics did write politically, it was largely in order to emphasize the fundamental compatibility of Catholicism with what John Courtney Murray — a Jesuit theologian who was the most prominent Catholic public intellectual of that time — called “the American Proposition.” Murray was not wholly uncritical of the American social order, but his criticisms were framed with great delicacy: in a time of worldwide conflict, he wrote, “there is no element” of that proposition that escapes being “menaced by active negation, and no thrust of the project that does not meet powerful opposition.” Therefore, “America must be more clearly conscious of what it proposes, more articulate in proposing, more purposeful in the realization of the project proposed.” The American idea is in no sense mistaken, though Americans might need to be “more articulate” in stating and defending that idea. This Murray was willing to help us do, by explaining that the Catholic tradition of natural law was the very same principle that the Founding Fathers appealed to when they declared “that all men are created equal [and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” It is wholly unaccidental that Murray’s book We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition was published in 1960, when a Roman Catholic named John F. Kennedy was standing as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president of the United States.

(Emphasis supplied.) This is a strange point to make, though fundamentally correct: the Catholic intellectuals of the immediate postwar period spent a lot of energy trying to make American-style liberal democracy compatible with Catholicism. Yet, Jacobs seems to miss the deeper connections between that project and the sort of Christian intellectualism he would like to see restored to the public sphere.

Beginning with Pius IX, whose great Quanta cura and Syllabus Errorum condemned propositions that many red-blooded protestant Americans would have considered essential to American democracy—and continuing through Leo XIII’s great encyclicals on social affairs, including Testem benevolentiae nostrae, a warning about Americanism (narrowly defined) and Pius XI’s own, towering contributions to the social teaching of the Church—the good and holy popes of the modern age critiqued aspects of American-style democracy, while on the whole encouraging the American experiment. (Cf. Leo XIII, Encyclical on Catholicism in the United States Longinqua oceani, Jan. 6, 1895.) The upshot of all of this is that, for a Catholic adhering to these teachings, as a Catholic must, there are aspects of American-style democracy that were (and remain) questionable propositions at best. And this is where Jacobs misses his own professed point when discussing the Catholic intellectuals of the postwar period.

We said that Jacobs abandons his original thesis pretty early on, and this a good example of that. He says that Christian intellectuals are necessary to relate reactionary trends to liberal democrats. From an American perspective, few things are as reactionary as the Church’s pre-conciliar teaching on the proper relationship of Church and state, as well as religious freedom and toleration. (From a traditional Catholic perspective, they are far from reactionary and instead represent a deeper liberty, but that is a debate for another time.) Seen in that light, Murray represents a better example of the sort of intellectual that Jacobs wants: showing Catholics that American-style democracy was ultimately compatible with Catholic principles. And Murray was ultimately successful, since the Council’s declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis humanae, represents a partial victory for his thinking. (For an example of what he thought, see his 1964–65 article, “The Problem of Religious Freedom”, or this article from America.) Perhaps the direction is reversed—certainly Murray didn’t spend a lot of time explaining the Church’s historic position on indifferentism to liberal democrats—but the basic idea is the same, and it cannot be denied that Murray’s project was more concretely successful than simply giving liberal democrats a theological dimension for their preexisting belief in liberal democracy.

Jacobs’s weirdness on Catholicism doesn’t stop there, either. Jacobs turns to the life of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, the tremendously influential publisher of First Things, to illustrate a point about the Christian intellectual’s reaction to the trends of the 1960s and 1970s. But again Jacobs draws a weird point. Jacobs’s point is this: Neuhaus, previously known for socially progressive politics, was shocked, as any thinking person was, by the horror of abortion loosed after Roe v. Wade in 1973. He hoped that the antiwar and civil-rights tendencies within American Christianity would join him in opposing abortion. That did not happen, and, in fact, Neuhaus lost his access to the mainstream media. So he went and started First Things, which Jacobs calls a “subaltern counterpublic,” which began arguing for mutual toleration through separatism. Maybe Jacobs’s narrative is right, but his perspective is one sided. To many traditionally minded Catholics, however, Neuhaus’s project is essentially a fusion of Catholics, evangelicals, and Jews to articulate, essentially, basic conservative politics. This project may have had its roots in the prolife movement—since horror at abortion was by no means confirmed to Catholics—but its scope is broader than that. It encompasses most of the major goals of the American political right. In other words, no less than John Courtney Murray, Richard John Neuhaus represents an attempt to make American politics compatible with Catholicism. Thus, it is not surprising that Jacobs misses Neuhaus’s greater significance.

How, then, does Jacobs fail to understand that, more than the liberal protestants he focuses on, Catholics have been performing, though perhaps in different ways, the role of the Christian intellectual? Indeed, even after the death of the men he mentions, there have been prominent Catholic intellectual figures, like Neuhaus, or Robert George or George Weigel or Rusty Reno or whoever, who have performed the basic thing Jacobs wants to see. So why doesn’t he see it? The key to all of this, really, is this paragraph:

It was the Sixties that changed everything, and not primarily because of the Vietnam War or the cause of civil rights. There were many Christians on both sides of those divides. The primary conflict was over the sexual revolution and the changes in the American legal system that accompanied it: changes in divorce law, for instance, but especially in abortion law. (Many Christians supported and continue to support abortion rights, of course; but abortion is rarely if ever the central, faith-defining issue for them that it often is for those in the pro-life camp.) By the time these changes happened and Christian intellectuals found themselves suddenly outside the circles of power, no longer at the head table of liberalism, Christians had built up sufficient institutional stability and financial resourcefulness to be able to create their own subaltern counterpublics. And this temptation proved irresistible. As Marilynne Robinson has rightly said in reflecting on the agitation she can create by calling herself a Christian, “This is a gauge of the degree to which the right has colonized the word and also of the degree to which the center and left have capitulated, have surrendered the word and also the identity.”

(Emphasis supplied.) Ah. There it is. Jacobs is only interested in liberalism in the American political sense, not in the sense we more regularly see it used in Catholic circles. (Not as in, for example, liberalism is a heresy.)

And this is, we think, explains everything. On one hand, it explains the nostalgic tone. The Christian left in the United States is not an especially powerful force. Part of this has been the collapse of the mainline protestant denominations, and part of it has been the remarkably durable coalition of Catholics, evangelical protestants, and Jews on pro-life issues, which has translated into the substantial alignment of that coalition with the Republican Party. There has also been, at least from 1964 to the present, the rise of the organized political right in the United States, which has long included a strong religious element. One could probably plot all the trends on the same graph—presuming one could find statistics to represent the trends—and they’d line up pretty neatly. Jacobs, then, is nostalgic for a time when Christians on the political left had popular prestige and widespread influence, neither of which do they have in any quantity today.

On the other hand, it explains the weirdness about Catholicism, which has never lined up neatly on either side of the American political spectrum, though in recent years Christ’s Church has found herself on the right more often than the left. Certainly some of that shift can be attributed to John Paul’s general direction, especially on moral questions. But even during the Cold War years—which are, it seems, Jacobs’s preoccupation—the Church was engaged in various projects, such as the Second Vatican Council and the major reforms following the Council, that only incidentally lined up with the interests of the American political left. (One wonders, and we suppose that a historian would have the answer, what effect “Seamless Garment” ideology propounded by John Cardinal Dearden and others had on the American left more broadly; it always seemed like an attempt to import conventional leftism into the Church, not the other way around.) It makes sense, therefore, that Jacobs has strange notions about what was happening in American Catholicism, to say nothing of an apparent desire to minimize its importance, since what was happening was, as we say, only incidentally related to what Jacobs is talking about.

In all of this, Jacobs never answers the question we started with: why do political liberals want or, indeed, need Christian intellectuals to explain these trends to them? Especially since Jacobs’s idea of the Christian intellectual does not include voices—mostly Catholic—who might be able to explain the sense of loss and alienation from the culture that Trump voters allegedly feel. Jacobs seems to want liberal protestants around to comment on these trends. But he does not consider that the insights—or lack thereof—of liberal protestants might explain in part why there aren’t too many liberal protestants around any more.

EDIT: After publishing this piece, we noted a few mistakes that we did not want to leave in this piece. We have gone back and cleaned them up, but we have not changed the substance of this essay. – pjs

A comment on deaconesses

The Holy Father, following up on a promise he made in a Q&A to some nuns or some such, established a commission to study the question of deaconesses or women deacons, particularly the role of deaconesses in the early Church. Archbishop Luis Ladaria Ferrer, S.J., the secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is the president of the commission, and its members are frankly a mixed bag. For example, American Professor Phyllis Zagano has been appointed to the commission, and she has been a longtime advocate for ordination of women as deacons. However, other members are allegedly somewhat more traditional in their mindset.

The argument—which can be seen at some length in the 2002 International Theological Commission study of the diaconate—is that there were deaconesses in the early (i.e., patristic-era) Church, though there remains some question about the nature of their ordination and their duties. Thus, the argument goes, notwithstanding Ordinatio sacerdotalis, the Church can return to the practice of the early Church by blessing or ordaining women to serve as deacons. Of course, in Mediator Dei, Pius XII warned us about the archaizing mindset—an “exaggerated and senseless antiquarianism”—so often adopted by progressives in the Church:

The same reasoning holds in the case of some persons who are bent on the restoration of all the ancient rites and ceremonies indiscriminately. The liturgy of the early ages is most certainly worthy of all veneration. But ancient usage must not be esteemed more suitable and proper, either in its own right or in its significance for later times and new situations, on the simple ground that it carries the savor and aroma of antiquity. The more recent liturgical rites likewise deserve reverence and respect. They, too, owe their inspiration to the Holy Spirit, who assists the Church in every age even to the consummation of the world. They are equally the resources used by the majestic Spouse of Jesus Christ to promote and procure the sanctity of man.

Assuredly it is a wise and most laudable thing to return in spirit and affection to the sources of the sacred liturgy. For research in this field of study, by tracing it back to its origins, contributes valuable assistance towards a more thorough and careful investigation of the significance of feast-days, and of the meaning of the texts and sacred ceremonies employed on their occasion. But it is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive tableform; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifix so designed that the divine Redeemer’s body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; and lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See.

Clearly no sincere Catholic can refuse to accept the formulation of Christian doctrine more recently elaborated and proclaimed as dogmas by the Church, under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit with abundant fruit for souls, because it pleases him to hark back to the old formulas. No more can any Catholic in his right senses repudiate existing legislation of the Church to revert to prescriptions based on the earliest sources of canon law. Just as obviously unwise and mistaken is the zeal of one who in matters liturgical would go back to the rites and usage of antiquity, discarding the new patterns introduced by disposition of divine Providence to meet the changes of circumstances and situation.

(Emphasis supplied and paragraph numbers omitted.) Of course, Good Pope Pius’s argument, despite its evident authority, has not uniformly carried the day in the Church, especially since dear Archbishop Bugnini and his industrious Consilium relied on its understanding (or, occasionally, as in the case of Eucharistic Prayer 2, what it claimed as its understanding) of the antiquities of the Church to justify so many of its most egregious quote-unquote reforms. Indeed, since 1947 there has hardly been an enormity or outrage propounded by the progressives in the Church, many of whom so obviously yearn to make of the Church an ecclesial community as vibrant as the Anglicans and liberal Lutherans, that is not justified by some or other practice of the early Church.

All that having been said, we wish to contribute in a small way to the discussion by rescuing the meat of a lengthy post we had written once commenting and expanding upon a series of fascinating posts by Fr. John Hunwicke about the true nature of the diaconate. The thrust of the post was that Amalarius of Metz (Liber officialis 2.12), citing a letter of St. Jerome to Evangelus (No. 146, PL 22:1192), points out that the Levites of the Old Testament were the forerunners of the deacons of the New Testament. Amalarius then goes through the Book of Numbers at some length to outline what the duties of the Levites were, coming finally to the point that the deacons of the Church of the New Testament are responsible first for guarding, bringing, and arranging the vessels to be used on the altar during the Mass. Amalarius even views the evidence of Acts 6 as evidence that the diaconate was constituted primarily for service at the altar. Of course, there are other roles of the deacon, such as the reading of the Gospels and service as a servant in the Church, but Amalarius, citing the earlier evidence of Jerome, focuses on the deacon as a liturgical assistant to the bishop and the presbyter. St. Jerome, of course, lived in the fourth and fifth centuries, and Amalarius in the eighth and ninth. Thus, if we are being exaggerated, senseless antiquarians, we ought to be consistently so and consider their evidence, too. If we wanted to be especially polemical we would ask whether there were female Levites and whether tradition is also a means of revelation, leading you inexorably to a certain conclusion.

Once upon a time, if we wanted to be especially polemical, we would have remarked about the unity of the orders of bishop, presbyter, and deacon, but, as we learned to no small chagrin and even mild horror today, among the canon law changes implemented by Benedict XVI’s Omnium in mentem was a change to canon 1008 severing, to a greater or lesser extent, the diaconate from the episcopate and presbyterate, implying strongly that deacons do not act in the person of Christ the Head. (What precisely the deacon does when he proclaims the Gospel, thus, is somewhat mysterious to us.) Therefore, we will refrain from discoursing upon that subject, though with perhaps a haunted look over our shoulder to the older tradition of the Church.

And we have no wish to be hugely polemical on this subject—in part because others will play that part better than we could, in part because every time questions have been asked under the Holy Father, the discussion always seems to tend, as if by magic, to a particular conclusion—only to point out some interesting resources that might inform you, dear reader, as you grapple with these changes. Also, we did not want to lose forever our work with the resources of Jerome and Amalarius on the question of deacons. We are not without our vanity, it seems.

Supranational government and the demographic question

Last night, we noticed on Twitter a discussion about our piece, The ghost at the Brexit feast, that seemed to focus on our assertion that supranational government has to be founded upon Catholic principles. Of course, that is not really our assertion; it is the inescapable conclusion of the teachings of St. Pius X, St. John XXIII, and Benedict XVI. Setting that to one side, the discussion included the fact that Catholics are only 17.8% of the world population. The implication being either that Catholics are not in a position to establish supranational government along Catholic lines because there aren’t enough Catholics to do it or that Catholics need to convert the nations. Either way, the implicit criticism is that supranational government founded upon Christ and His Church is not possible due to demographic problems.

Ordinarily we do not respond to Twitter discussion of our posts. (We recall that we promised to reconsider our comment policy here, which we are still doing, albeit very, very slowly.) However, this Twitter discussion seemed to raise some interesting points, not least since we did not consider the demographic angle when we wrote our original piece. However, the discussion was very interesting and led us to work through some of the implications of the demographic issue on the question of supranational government.

In short, we think the best response is along the lines of the point that Henri Grenier (and Pius XII, at the very beginning of the Second World War) made: all nations, Catholic or not, are bound together with mutual and reciprocal moral and juridical bonds. And, whether Catholics constitute a demographic minority or not, this interaction and interrelationship of all nations exists and is ultimately founded upon the divine law. Pius XII observed:

[I]t is indispensable for the existence of harmonious and lasting contacts and of fruitful relations, that the peoples recognize and observe these principles of international natural law which regulate their normal development and activity. Such principles demand respect for corresponding rights to independence, to life and to the possibility of continuous development in the paths of civilization; they demand, further, fidelity to compacts agreed upon and sanctioned in conformity with the principles of the law of nations.

The indispensable presupposition, without doubt, of all peaceful intercourse between nations, and the very soul of the juridical relations in force among them, is mutual trust: the expectation and conviction that each party will respect its plighted word; the certainty that both sides are convinced that “better is wisdom, than weapons of war” (Ecclesiastes ix. 18), and are ready to enter into discussion and to avoid recourse to force or to threats of force in case of delays, hindrances, changes or disputes, because all these things can be the result not of bad will, but of changed circumstances and of genuine interests in conflict.

But on the other hand, to tear the law of nations from its anchor in Divine law, to base it on the autonomous will of States, is to dethrone that very law and deprive it of its noblest and strongest qualities. Thus it would stand abandoned to the fatal drive of private interest and collective selfishness exclusively intent on the assertion of its own rights and ignoring those of others.

(Emphasis supplied.) All of this is to say, then, that there are connections between all nations that create a community of mankind. The common good of this community requires supranational government insofar as there are major issues confronting the community of nations that are too great for any one country to solve. Christ and His law, Pius XII teaches us, are the very foundation of these connections. This, of course, makes perfect sense in light of what St. Pius X teaches us in Notre charge apostolique: Catholic charity is the only foundation for meaningful, effective solidarity. Thus, Catholics may only constitute 17.8% of the world population, but that does not change the fact that Christ and His Church are the very bedrock of the international community and the only hope for effective international solidarity. The demographic issue is, strictly speaking, simply not relevant.

However, that is a profoundly unsatisfying answer, because, in concrete terms, demographics do matter. (Just ask anyone who ever lost an election.) It is, of course, important to think in concrete terms when considering questions like supranational government, especially a supranational government that challenges some of the assumptions currently governing supranational authorities. To put it another way: if Catholics are to think about what must be done, the consideration of how it must be done is hugely important. And, in politics, how it must be done often involves a serious consideration of demographics. Yet, at the same time, we must avoid giving the impression that the teachings of the good and holy popes of the modern age—indeed, the teachings of Christ and His Church more generally—are but one voice among many, competing in the marketplace of ideas. That is manifestly not the case.

Thus, we can say that the demographic consideration, while not strictly relevant to the basic doctrinal approach to the question of supranational government, is an important one in concrete terms. How one grapples with demographics is, of course, a different question altogether, and one somewhat more difficult. However, to propose a potential line of inquiry, we wonder whether it might not be more productive to consider Catholics as a percentage of a given country, rather than as a percentage of total population. When considering supranational government, a country either joins and submits to the authority’s jurisdiction or it does not. Thus, the number of Catholics as a percentage of a given country’s electorate is more important, we think, that the number of Catholics as a percentage of the world’s total population.

The ghost at the Brexit feast

We begin with an apology for letting Semiduplex lie fallow so long. We had been accustomed to posting more regularly, but other factors have intervened, work and otherwise. We had intended on discussing the Holy Father’s recent comments, shocking to some, about the possibility of widespread nullity of marriage, and the responses of his some of his notable critics, no less shocking. But the prospect was simply too depressing. However long the Holy Father reigns—and long may he reign—the basic paradigm of his reign is pretty well set in stone. At this point, we suspect that he could give a speech consisting solely of excerpts from Pascendi, and it would still provoke outrage.

We were perhaps fortunate not to have waded into the swamps surrounding the Holy Father’s remarks, because something much, much more interesting has happened: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, including Scotland and Wales, voted in a referendum to withdraw from the European Union. David Cameron, prime minister of the United Kingdom, has announced his intention to resign later in the near future as a result of this vote. Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, has announced her intention to renew Scottish independence efforts. The decision comes after recent polling and betting markets showed the “remain” option edging out “leave.” It seems that, in the doing of the thing, Wales and rural England voted strongly to leave, while London and Scotland voted to remain.

In other words, not only has the United Kingdom’s future as a member of the European community been called into serious doubt but also its future as a united kingdom. It is, then, a Big Deal, even as the twenty-four-hour news cycle turns everything into a big deal.

However, Catholics ought not to cheer too loudly England’s rejection of the European Union, especially insofar as it represents a rejection of supranational government. To be sure, the technocratic, neoliberal bureaucracy in Brussels is not a good supranational government. However, Catholics ought not to object to supranational government per se. Indeed, as we will see herein, the Church has taught for some time that supranational govermnent is necessary. Thus, as Catholics process Brexit and its consequences, they ought to consider that, while the European Union did not turn out to be an especially good idea, we need something like the European Union (or the United Nations or whatever) to serve properly the common good.

This is, then, the ghost at the Brexit feast. The European Union is a problem, as we said, and countries can find ample justification for leaving the European Union. But when it comes to finding justifications for rejecting the idea of supranational government altogether, it is a different question. Indeed, as we will see, there is simply no compelling justification for rejecting supranational government altogether. Thus, we have been a little perturbed by the response to Brexit among some Catholics, especially traditionally minded Catholics.

The basic reason for supranational government is this: some problems are bigger than individual nation-states. Indeed, in an increasingly interconnected world—globalized, we suppose, is the unfortunate word for it—individual nations are simply not competent to handle certain issues. Consider, for example, international crime—the drug trade, sex trafficking, or any of a whole host of similar evils. Certainly, it is possible to address the issue in each country, but we have seen that that simply does not work. Drugs are produced in one country, trafficked across several countries, and sold in another country still. But remember the idea of subsidiarity as outlined by Leo XIII in Rerum novarum and Pius XI in Quadragesimo anno, we see that the smallest competent unit ought to handle a given issue bearing upon the common good.

Consider further international finance and banking, as we were led to do by a very sharp acquaintance of ours in another venue. The effects of Brexit upon the British economy were front and center in the argument by advocates of remaining in the European Union. Apparently, membership in the European Union makes it easier for financial firms based in England to do business on the Continent. (We’re not experts at this, so we’ll take their word for it.) And this international character makes regulating financial firms difficult. There have been efforts to do this, one way and another, but they involve bilateral agreements and the grinding work of international diplomacy. And certain countries prefer to bolster their economies by avoiding these regulations and giving financial firms an out. One hears about tax havens and offshore corporation havens and asset protection trust havens—or one hears about them whenever something especially egregious takes place involving one of them, such as the so-called Panama Papers. In other words, prescinding from illegal conduct like the drug trade, one can find it impossible to regulate coherently and consistently the lawful activities of international organizations. Thus, the nation-state, as we conceive of it today, is not the smallest competent unit. Supranational government is necessary.

Of course, American Catholics on the political right will no doubt reject the idea that supranational government is necessary. However, when they do so, they set themselves against the teaching of the good and holy popes of the modern age. Recall what Benedict XVI said in his great (and misunderstood) social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate:

In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth. One also senses the urgent need to find innovative ways of implementing the principle of the responsibility to protect and of giving poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making. This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity. To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago. Such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good, and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth. Furthermore, such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights. Obviously it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums. Without this, despite the great progress accomplished in various sectors, international law would risk being conditioned by the balance of power among the strongest nations. The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater degree of international ordering, marked by subsidiarity, for the management of globalization. They also require the construction of a social order that at last conforms to the moral order, to the interconnection between moral and social spheres, and to the link between politics and the economic and civil spheres, as envisaged by the Charter of the United Nations.

(Emphasis supplied and footnotes omitted.) In other words, Benedict recognized that some problems are too big for any one nation-state to resolve; a given country is not the smallest unit competent to address the global economy and financial institutions, to say nothing of the environment, migration, or international peace and disarmament. In order to address these issues, all of which bear upon the common good in a very serious way, something bigger than an individual country is necessary.

In support of his argument, Benedict cited St. John XXIII’s 1963 encyclical on world peace, Pacem in Terris, in which that saintly pope observed, wisely:

In our own day, however, mutual relationships between States have undergone a far reaching change. On the one hand, the universal common good gives rise to problems of the utmost gravity, complexity and urgency—especially as regards the preservation of the security and peace of the whole world. On the other hand, the rulers of individual nations, being all on an equal footing, largely fail in their efforts to achieve this, however much they multiply their meetings and their endeavors to discover more fitting instruments of justice. And this is no reflection on their sincerity and enterprise. It is merely that their authority is not sufficiently influential.

We are thus driven to the conclusion that the shape and structure of political life in the modern world, and the influence exercised by public authority in all the nations of the world are unequal to the task of promoting the common good of all peoples.

Connection Between the Common Good and Political Authority

Now, if one considers carefully the inner significance of the common good on the one hand, and the nature and function of public authority on the other, one cannot fail to see that there is an intrinsic connection between them. Public authority, as the means of promoting the common good in civil society, is a postulate of the moral order. But the moral order likewise requires that this authority be effective in attaining its end. Hence the civil institutions in which such authority resides, becomes operative and promotes its ends, are endowed with a certain kind of structure and efficacy: a structure and efficacy which make such institutions capable of realizing the common good by ways and means adequate to the changing historical conditions.

Today the universal common good presents us with problems which are world-wide in their dimensions; problems, therefore, which cannot be solved except by a public authority with power, organization and means co-extensive with these problems, and with a world-wide sphere of activity. Consequently the moral order itself demands the establishment of some such general form of public authority.

(Heading in original, emphasis supplied, and paragraph numbers omitted.) St. John’s argument is interesting especially since it draws a connection between the moral order, the common good, and competence. The moral order requires that an authority be competent to pursue the common good insofar as possible. This raises, we note in passing, the interesting notion that governments mired in partisan dissension and inertia contravene the moral order, as they are thereby incompetent to pursue the common good. A sobering thought for those in Congress. At any rate, one may say, with St. John, that a supranational political authority is morally necessary, in addition to being practically necessary.

No doubt American Catholics on the political right will maintain their objection, presuming they don’t dust off their old trick of declaring (heretically) that the pope has no authority to pronounce upon these matters, pointing next to intrusions on national sovereignty and self-determination and individual liberty. Ah, they say, any supranational government must necessarily become, sooner or later, the Soviet Union. But St. John identifies the solution to that objection (hint: it’s something near and dear to Pius XI’s heart, which means it’s near and dear to ours):

The same principle of subsidiarity which governs the relations between public authorities and individuals, families and intermediate societies in a single State, must also apply to the relations between the public authority of the world community and the public authorities of each political community. The special function of this universal authority must be to evaluate and find a solution to economic, social, political and cultural problems which affect the universal common good. These are problems which, because of their extreme gravity, vastness and urgency, must be considered too difficult for the rulers of individual States to solve with any degree of success.

But it is no part of the duty of universal authority to limit the sphere of action of the public authority of individual States, or to arrogate any of their functions to itself. On the contrary, its essential purpose is to create world conditions in which the public authorities of each nation, its citizens and intermediate groups, can carry out their tasks, fullfill their duties and claim their rights with greater security.

(Emphasis supplied and paragraph numbers omitted.) There are, of course, problems that do not require supranational political action. And the European Union has proved to be most alienating in its technocratic insistence upon regulating these issues, too. In other words, the European Union went beyond creating conditions under which the governments of its member states could flourish individually to attempting in some measure to replace the governments of its member states. (We recall, especially, the brutal austerity regime imposed upon Greece during its financial crisis in the not-too-distant past.) This clearly contravenes subsidiarity.

But the American Catholic on the political right might press the point, complaining, since he no doubt heard it regularly at a recent seminar, that absolute power corrupts absolutely. (A comment, by the way, about papal infallibility, we recall being told.) And this is where a point by Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., comes in. At his wonderful blog Sancrucensis, he notes that St. Pius X addressed the real problem here:

Now that Brexit has become Brexibat, and the supposed ‘direction’ of European history has been called into doubt, Pope St. Pius X (if he were still alive today) might be forgiven for saying “I told you so.” In his Apostolic Letter Notre Charge Apostolique, St. Pius X rejected the idea that “universal solidarity” or “fraternity” could be established on any firm basis apart from the Catholic Faith. Fraternity founded on “the love of common interest or, beyond all philosophies and religions, on the mere notion of humanity” is soon swept away by “the passions and wild desires of the heart.” No, he writes, “there is no genuine fraternity outside Christian charity.” Indeed, even if it could succeed a fraternity merely based on enlightened self-interest and a common recognition of humanity would not even be desirable:

By separating fraternity from Christian charity thus understood, Democracy, far from being a progress, would mean a disastrous step backwards for civilization. If, as We desire with all Our heart, the highest possible peak of well being for society and its members is to be attained through fraternity or, as it is also called, universal solidarity, all minds must be united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ. But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal civilization.

(Hyperlinks in original, emphasis supplied, and block quote slightly reformatted.) When one looks, then, at failed supranational governments—the Soviet Union, the European Union perhaps—one sees, as Pater Waldstein points out at length in his essay, that they are founded not upon Christ and His Church, but upon secular notions of brotherhood.

Thus, if supranational government is to be successful—that is, if it is to live up to its obligations under the moral law—it must be founded upon Christ and His Church. Only Catholic charity, as St. Pius tells us, provides a sure foundation for the solidarity of peoples and the progress of civilization. Anything else falls far short one way and another, usually horribly, as the last hundred years have shown repeatedly.

It may well be right for Catholics to cheer Brexit, or any other withdrawal from the technocratic Brussels regime. The philosophical underpinnings of the European Union are simply inadequate to provide a framework of solidarity and progress, insofar as they are essentially secular, Enlightenment ideals. But, St. John XXIII and Benedict XVI teach us, supranational government is necessary to serve the common good, given the international character of some of the major problems confronting the common good. And St. Pius X tells us that the only sure foundation for such a government is Christ’s Church and the charity she teaches us. So, as Catholics cheer Brexit, they ought to give some thought to how to bring about the sort of supranational government the Church teaches us that we need.

It would be a big project, to say the least. Big enough to take a little bit of the edge off the celebration, no?

You’ll remember you belong to me

At First Things, George Weigel has decided that what America really needs is a return to authentic Catholic social teaching (he has also decided that the voters have made a colossal mistake, but we could have guessed that):

It’s become a cliché to say that “no candidate and no party fully embraces the vision of Catholic social doctrine.” True enough. But previous election cycles gave Catholic voters a prudential choice between candidates who embodied at least some of the major themes of the social doctrine. What is the thoughtful Catholic voter to do when neither of the presidential candidates is even minimally committed to human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity, as the social doctrine understands those concepts? When one party has elevated lifestyle libertinism to the first of constitutional principles (and is prepared to kill unborn children, jettison free speech, and traduce religious freedom in service to hedonism), while the other is prepared to nominate a fantasist who spun grotesque fairy tales about an alleged connection between an opponent’s family and Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before he closed the deal?

(Emphasis supplied.) However, Weigel’s point would be more interesting, we suppose, if we were not pretty sure that by “Catholic social doctrine,” Weigel means, more or less, pre-Trump Republican orthodoxy.

Remember Weigel’s March statement against Trump in National Review (co-written by Robert George and co-signed by all the best Catholic Republicans)? The one where he said:

In recent decades, the Republican party has been a vehicle — imperfect, like all human institutions, but serviceable — for promoting causes at the center of Catholic social concern in the United States: (1) providing legal protection for unborn children, the physically disabled and cognitively handicapped, the frail elderly, and other victims of what Saint John Paul II branded “the culture of death”; (2) defending religious freedom in the face of unprecedented assaults by officials at every level of government who have made themselves the enemies of conscience; (3) rebuilding our marriage culture, based on a sound understanding of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife; and (4) re-establishing constitutional and limited government, according to the core Catholic social-ethical principle of subsidiarity. There have been frustrations along the way, to be sure; no political party perfectly embodies Catholic social doctrine. But there have also been successes, and at the beginning of the current presidential electoral cycle, it seemed possible that further progress in defending and advancing these noble causes was possible through the instrument of the Republican party.

That possibility is now in grave danger. And so are those causes.

(Emphasis supplied.) We pause, of course, to note that religious freedom and subsidiarity-as-limited-government are perhaps not the most traditional causes at the center of Catholic social concern, not least because, well, religious freedom remains a live controversy and John Paul’s notion of subsidiarity departed in some interesting ways from Leo XIII’s and Pius XI’s. But those are discussions we have had elsewhere. The point is that Weigel plainly identifies Catholic social teaching with policies that are entirely consonant and compatible with mainstream Republican orthodoxy.

Our question (comment?) is this: what if Catholic social teaching is not entirely consonant and compatible with mainstream Republican orthodoxy? What if it’s not even a little compatible?

Then Weigel (and the other neocon, neo-Cath thought leaders) are in real trouble.

Countering the consensus against St. Joseph the Workman

At Opus Publicum, Gabriel Sanchez has an interesting comment about the feast of St. Joseph the Workman, which begins, in relevant part:

The author’s latest target is the Latin feast of St. Joseph the Worker (San Giuseppe Comunista!), a mid-1950s invention which most traditional Catholics today regard as either imprudent or unnecessary. Those who have been exposed to the Gregorian hymns for this occasion know full well that they fall pretty darn short of “the mark” when it comes to the beauty and richness of the Roman Rite and some of the propers are not exactly inspiring. However, to howl on about the feast being a “modernist invention” is a bridge too far, particularly when one understands that the primary intent and purpose behind the feast was to dislodge May Day as an exclusively secularist (and communistic) holiday. Did it work? Well, of course not, but not because the liturgical texts themselves are riddled with theological error or bumped the feast Ss. Phillip and James (a feast many Catholics have all but forgotten about). Let’s not forget, however, that the feast was introduced during a period of time when the great 19th and 20th century popes took it upon themselves to speak forcefully on matters concerning labor, economics, and society, with stern reminders being issued by the likes of Leo XIII, St. Pius X, and Pius XI on the justice due to laborers. In fact, this teaching is captured nicely in the feast’s introit: “Wisdom rendered to the just the wages of their labors, and conducted them in a wonderful way: and she was to them for a covert by day, and for the light of stars by night, allelúja, allelúja.”

(Emphasis supplied and quotation marks reformatted.) And the author Sanchez discusses is not the only author to criticize at great length the feast of St. Joseph the Workman. Fr. John Hunwicke, for example, has had several lengthy posts in the last couple of weeks, mostly directed to the fact that the new feast of St. Joseph the Workman replaced the feast of Ss. Phillip and James. (Or, more precisely, displaced, since Phillip and James were moved to May 11.) And Fr. Hunwicke is not alone in his distaste for St. Joseph the Workman. Part of the low regard in which the feast is held is, we think, a function of the fact that a broader sense is emerging that the liturgical reform that culminated in the Novus Ordo really began in earnest under Pius XII. (Though that attitude fails to take into account that the Breviary was reformed almost constantly from the moment Quod a nobis was signed.) And St. Joseph the Workman is seen as part and parcel of that reform.

But Sanchez makes a point that—we confess—had not occurred to us before; that is, the feast of St. Joseph the Workman fits into the broader context of the great pronouncements of Leo XIII and Pius XI on social-justice issues. And, aside from the twin pillars of Rerum novarum and Quadragesimo anno, these issues were very much in the Church’s mind in the first half of the twentieth century, the two world wars notwithstanding. The Church’s developing social teaching was very much present in Pius X’s Notre Charge Apostolique, though that encyclical was directed to more concrete circumstances in France. And, of course, Pius XII himself made significant contributions to the Church’s social teaching with his radio address, La solennità della Pentecoste, some of which found its way into his document on migrants, Exsul Familia Nazarethana. All of this is to say that the question of workers and justice for workers was very much a live question for the Church in the first half of the twentieth century. And, certainly, one cannot remove Pius XII from this context. And, therefore, it makes sense, as Sanchez suggests, that Pius XII would introduce a major feast addressing in a liturgical way the issues that he and his immediate predecessor had grappled with.

Now, it is an open question whether the implementation of St. Joseph the Workman was well done. One of the comboxers at Sanchez’s site points out that the readings at Matins are not uniformly hugely edifying. And it is true that one of the three nocturns consists of the acta of Pius XII regarding the implementation of the feast, though the other two nocturns seem more or less okay, especially the readings from Genesis. But, setting that to one side, is the office of St. Joseph the Workman worse in any objective sense than the offices of any of the important saints whose third-class feasts consist of the psalms and antiphons of the day, the usual hymns, chapters, and antiphons from the common, and one reading at Matins unique to the saint (with the bulk of Matins being given over to the occurring readings)? We have a hard time seeing that it is, especially since, when one gets into a long run of confessors-not-bishops as one is apt to do in tempus per annum, the offices blend together. One does not necessarily excuse the other, of course, but let us not, out of condemnatory zeal, act as though St. Joseph the Workman is a blight on an otherwise traditional Breviary. By 1960 the trajectory toward Pope Paul’s Liturgia Horarum, with its horror of repetition and its strong (almost unalterable) presumption in favor of the occurring psalmody, was largely marked out.

With the chummy relations between the Holy See and the Society of St. Pius X, we are, of course, hopeful that full canonical regularity will be established, ideally in the form of a personal prelature or some other juridical structure that preserves, insofar as possible and desirable, the independence of the SSPX. But one of the issues that will have to be addressed at some point is the question of the liturgical books. Lefebvre’s choice of the 1960/1962 books was not necessarily a deeply ideological decision, as we understand it, and there may well be little reason to cling to them once the SSPX is regularized. Perhaps at that time, with so much in the air, a complete overhaul of the calendar would be in order. The differences between the 1960/1962 calendar and the current calendar are especially acute on this subject: St. Joseph the Workman is not a solemnity in the new calendar (having been drastically downgraded to an optional memorial), and Ss. Phillip and James are no longer celebrated on May 11, but May 3.

Read Sanchez’s whole post. A couple parts we did not quote are well worth thinking about.

Bernie Sanders addresses “Centesimus annus” conference

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, currently running for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, had this to say today:

I am honored to be with you today and was pleased to receive your invitation to speak to this conference of The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Today we celebrate the encyclical Centesimus Annus and reflect on its meaning for our world a quarter-century after it was presented by Pope John Paul II. With the fall of Communism, Pope John Paul II gave a clarion call for human freedom in its truest sense: freedom that defends the dignity of every person and that is always oriented towards the common good.

The Church’s social teachings, stretching back to the first modern encyclical about the industrial economy, Rerum Novarum in 1891, to Centesimus Annus, to Pope Francis’s inspiring encyclical Laudato Si’ this past year, have grappled with the challenges of the market economy. There are few places in modern thought that rival the depth and insight of the Church’s moral teachings on the market economy.

(Emphasis supplied.) He went on to observe:

The essential wisdom of Centesimus Annus is this: A market economy is beneficial for productivity and economic freedom. But if we let the quest for profits dominate society; if workers become disposable cogs of the financial system; if vast inequalities of power and wealth lead to marginalization of the poor and the powerless; then the common good is squandered and the market economy fails us. Pope John Paul II puts it this way: profit that is the result of “illicit exploitation, speculation, or the breaking of solidarity among working people . . . has not justification, and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man.” (Para43).

(Emphasis supplied.)

Sanders was at the Vatican, you may remember, for a conference marking the 25th anniversary of Centesimus annus, hosted by the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences. There was some controversy about Sanders’s visit to Rome, since the invitation, made at the behest of Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, though that’s not really the interesting part of the story. The interesting part of the story—at least for us—is that an American presidential candidate traveled to the Vatican to discuss Centesimus annus, Rerum novarum, and Catholic social teaching more generally.

A notable new book on the Church’s social teaching

At The Distributist Review, Thomas Storck reviews Daniel Schwindt’s new book, Catholic Social Teaching: A New Synthesis. Storck’s review is, in the main, positive, and we have ourselves added Schwindt’s book to the list of books we want to buy. (An ever-expanding list that is, we admit, more aspirational than anything else!) We encourage you to check it out, and if we get around to buying it and reading it, we will be sure to share our impressions. We note particularly a couple of points that Storck makes that encourage us greatly.

First, Storck observes that:

Following these preliminary points, the author discusses what he calls “permanent principles,” which are: the common good, the universal destination of goods, private property, solidarity and subsidiarity, freedom and justice. The inclusion of freedom in this list raises some questions, however. The freedom of choice with which man is endowed accompanies him everywhere, indeed is inseparable from his nature, regardless of his political or even penal situation. In the Anglo-American tradition, however, it is not this inherent freedom which preoccupies us but freedom in the political order, which is widely seen as the chief political good. But this is surely incorrect. Rather it is justice which is the chief political good, and it is justice which rules and determines the other principles listed here, such as property, solidarity and subsidiarity. Obviously political freedom is good to a degree, but it is subordinate to both justice and the common good.

(Emphasis added.) This seems to us to be a very good capsule summary of much of what is wrong with modern America, economically and otherwise. And it seems to us further to be a really very good way of summarizing the fundamental disagreement between those who are faithful to the whole of the Church’s social teaching and those who part ways with the Church. Obviously, there is nothing incompatible with justice and freedom necessarily, provided that both are understood properly. However, when freedom becomes disordered and ossifies into liberalism, it is indeed often flatly incompatible with justice. Now, this might not be the end of the discussion, but it seems to us that it’s a fine elevator pitch.

Second:

Although, as he notes, the popes have called for cooperation and just dealings between capitalist owners and workers, still “the Christian aversion to the concentration of ownership and wealth has ancient roots.” If ownership and work are not divorced, it is more difficult for such concentrations of wealth to arise. Schwindt quotes Leo XIII pointedly, the “law … should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” This, of course, is exactly what Distributism aims at—the widest diffusion of productive property, in large part to prevent that fatal separation of ownership and work which leads to so many evils, both societal and even personal. Also worthy of note is Schwindt’s discussion of guilds. The guild system, suitably updated to take account of contemporary conditions, is one of the foundations of Catholic social thought, for it avoids the twin rocks of state control of the economy and the injustices and chaos produced by competitive capitalism.

(Emphasis added.) This is, of course, very interesting, since guilds (or syndicates or trade unions or what-have-you) featured heavily in the popes’ early social teaching, especially Quadragesimo anno. Indeed, one could argue that subsidiary function is most functional in an environment where there are robust guilds and similar organizations. However, this line of the Church’s teaching has sort of fallen into disuse, if not outright oblivion. It will be interesting to see Schwindt’s treatment and whether he makes any concrete proposals for reinvigorating the notion of guilds.

Finally:

I call attention also to Schwindt’s discussion of taxation, and in particular of progressive taxation. He quotes Pius XI’s encyclical Divini Redemptoris that “the wealthy classes must be induced to assume those burdens without which human society cannot be saved nor they themselves remain secure.” As Schwindt notes, “the exact application of this principle could take various forms, but one can say without much risk of error that the system known as the ‘progressive tax’ is a fairly straightforward and appropriate means of realizing this goal.” In the last few decades in the United States conservative politicians have somehow persuaded large numbers of people that a flat tax is more fair than a progressive tax, even though it should be obvious that a rich man has much more disposable income than a poorer man, and hence can rightly afford to give up a larger percentage of his income in taxation. Despite what some people claim, there is absolutely nothing in Catholic teaching or tradition that would prohibit a progressive income tax.

(Emphasis added.) Enough said.

If you have any impressions that you’d like to share with us—and we note that correspondence received will likely be anonymized and published here—feel free to drop us a line at our email address or on Twitter.

	FRIDAY EDITION… on Popular sovereignty and the oa…
	THVRSDAY EDITION… on A notable new book: Sohrab Ahm…
	Zapier Big Pulpit Ne… on A notable new book: Sohrab Ahm…
	THVRSDAY EDITION… on Robert Grosseteste’s integrali…
	MONDAY EDITION… on Another debate over integralis…