Catholic bishop prevent LGBT group from using church for meeting

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has prevented a pro-LGBT group from using St. John the Evangelist Church's parish center during the World Meeting of Families. Since when did the Church start limiting the use of its facilities to, like, things it actually supports?

Pretty soon the Church will start refusing the use of its facilities by Muslims, Hindus, and Wiccans. The ban could end up extending to atheists and pagans. Pro-abortion groups could be excluded, fortune-telling banned, and idols prohibited. Eventually, even child sacrifice could be disallowed.

Oh, wait. We already mentioned abortion, didn't we?

No telling where it could end.

We interrupt the propagation of anti-religious historical falsehoods for the following important announcement

Even otherwise intelligent atheists commonly can be commonly found portraying the Galileo affair as a confrontation between religion and science. This myth has been refuted repeatedly, but that doesn't stop them from repeating it again, and again, ...

Most people understand the trial of Galileo Galilei as a key example of religious bigotry clashing with the advance of science and the textbook case of "Medieval" ignorance and superstition being superseded by reason and science.  In fact, the whole rather complex affair was not the black-and-white "science vs religion" fable of popular imagination and the positions of both Galileo and of the various churchmen involved were varied and complex. 

... and again.

Read more here.

Conservatives who think the Church has changed its view on same-sex marriage need to get a grip

Moral ailments, like physical ones, don't respond well to panic. Yet this seems just the cure some conservatives have in mind for what they are told by the liberal media is the new liberal position of the Catholic Church on marriage.

In fact, it was serendipitous that the Ebola scare and the conservative reaction to the release of a preliminary account of discussions at an extraordinary synod in Rome written by a liberal bishop hit on the same week. They were both examples of the same impulse: to lose all perspective in the face of a threat.

The reaction of the good folks at Front Porch Republic—who referenced Rod Dreher who referenced Damon Linker—was representative of the general conservative response.

These are all among my favorite people, of course, but their responses betrayed a disturbing level of what, in his recent book Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff has called "digiphrenia": a disordered condition of mental activity resulting from too much exposure to digital media.

This is a result of what Rushkoff calls "reality on tap," when "everything happens now." We are informed instantaneously about every news event and respond instantaneously so that we begin to think that there is no other reality than the present one. Everything is considered from a short-term perspective and the long-term begins to have no meaning for us.

The upshot is that we think in instantaneous terms and lose any historical perspective.

These are all good people, but its hard being in the same philosophical vehicle with them sometimes because a few of them have a habit of grabbing the dashboard and shouting "We're all going to die!" every time someone pulls out in front of us 1,000 yards ahead. All it took in the present case was a few news reports that a report out of a Catholic Church synod was hedging on the issue of same sex marriage and, without stopping to think how this might be being mis-portrayed and without digging deeper to see what was actually going on, conservatives went into full panic mode.

Folks, get a grip. Put down your smart phones, shut off your 4G, turn off your satellite TV, and think for a moment about what you're dealing with here.

You're talking about a 2,000 year-old institution that issues important documents in a language that hasn't been widely spoken by anybody but a few nerdy classics majors for several hundred years, that indicates who it has elected its leader by what color smoke it sends out of an old stove pipe in Vatican City, and that still worries on a daily basis about the Great Schism of 1054 AD.

This is an institution whose leader tweets. In Latin.

The Catholic Church doesn't think or operate like a modern institution, largely because it isn't one.

When changes are necessary, a committee is formed, which meets the next year. It has meetings and issues memos, which takes about another year. Then it breaks for a couple of years to think about it. Then it reconvenes again the next year to discuss a recommendation. It takes another six months to type the recommendation out on an old manual typewriter on triple-layered carbon paper, which urges that another committee be formed which will take another several years to deliberate on what it will recommend to the Pope. But by then the Pope is dead, so they have to appoint another pope and start the process all over again.

This is why I like the Catholic Church: It's so hard to get anything done that only the most important things actually get done and only the changes that are absolutely necessary ever get made.

The Presbyterian Church, USA or the Northwest Eastern Convention of Southern Independent Evangelical Baptists may decide to allow the ordination of bald lesbian Wiccans over the weekend, but this is just not the way the Catholic Church operates.

In fact, part of the problem here is that conservative protestants are reading their church paradigm, according to which these decisions can be made fairly quickly, onto the Catholic Church, where these paradigms simply don't fit.

The process the Catholic Church uses is admittedly long—and undeniably messy. But that's part of its tradition. And it's a long  tradition which is also a tradition of longness. But Peter Daniel Haworth at Front Porch Republic assures us:

Belief that the Holy Spirit invariably leads the Roman Catholic Church to what is true requires one to suspend reasonable skepticism about the typical dysfunction and fallibility of humans and human institutions.

It's a little hard to tell exactly what this sentence is saying, but I think what he means is that we're all supposed to doubt whether God works through processes of doctrinal change and formulation that involve a lot of disagreement, infighting and various other kinds of messiness, one of the things a few Catholics have advised outside observers to consider. Fr. Robert Barron, for example, warned his readers in a recent post about the "saugage-making" aspect of Church gathering like the one this last week.

"Those who love the barque of Peter," he quotes Cardinal John Henry Newman as saying, "ought to stay out of the engine room!”

Modern institutions are all supposed to operate like the George Pompidou Centre in Paris is built: with all the structure on the outside for everyone to see. So now we see the sausage-making aspect of the Church from the inside and think there must be something wrong. It would be interesting if Haworth were to apply his doubt about God working through human imperfections to other historical events in Church history. If he is a Christian, then he adheres to a creed (or the substance of it, even if he is "non-creedal") that was fashioned at the Council of Nicea, where ecclesiastical delegates not only engaged in prolific beard-pulling, but where St. Nicholas (yes, that one) allegedly slugged Arius right in the kisser.

Somebody had to do it. It might as well be Santa Claus.

The only difference between now and then is that there weren't reports on internal discussions being issued and then broadcast worldwide instantly.

And then maybe he could exercise his "reasonable skepticism" on Jesus' genealogy, which includes murderers, prostitutes, adulterers, and one person who was the product of incest. Now there's some serious dysfunction and fallibility.

And then there is this paragraph, again fashioned by Haworth:

... one can question whether mere theoretical searching for contradictions in RCC dogma is a sufficient test for the soundness of the First Vatican Council’s strong claims about papal authority–i.e., the Pope being infallible when speaking ex cathedra on faith and morals. One should be wary (if not dismissive) of a papal authority that appears to be on the brink of effectively undermining its church’s long-held doctrinal tradition (possibly through new pastoral directives), albeit without explicitly changing its parchment doctrine so as to hide the reality that such a de facto change is actually occurring. And, when an individual Christian (even one who is within the RCC) comes to this point, it is reasonable for him or her to also evaluate what to do (or where to go) next.    

Now I have applied various methods of interpretation to this paragraph--as well as to trying to figure out everything set off with an em-dash (and the parts in parentheses), and have tried to determine why he uses so, many, commas, and have concluded that Haworth would probably make more sense if, rather than simply using occasional Latin expressions, he had simply said the whole thing in Latin.

But what Haworth seems to be saying is that the doctrine of Papal infallibility makes it easier for the Pope to change Church doctrine, something I have read numerous other places.

Well, you can use all the relative clauses you want (although quite frankly, I think Haworth has exceeded the limit), but the problem is this: The doctrine of papal infallibility does not make it easier for one pope to change the doctrines of his predecessors: It makes it harder. This was one of the reasons that Pope John XXII opposed the doctrine in the 14th century and actually condemned it in a bull. The Franciscans thought he was trying to change what they believed a long-held teaching to which the Pope was in disagreement, and they appealed to the doctrine of papal infallibility to demonstrate that the pope could not change the doctrine of his predecessors.

If pope's are infallible (in regard to the limited kinds of things that that doctrine applies to), then later popes, far from having greater ability to change the doctrines of their predecessors, have far less.

Admittedly it is not easy for a Catholic like myself to suffer the indignity of a New York Times editorial praising the Church, but all we know from last week's Extraordinary Synod is this: that, a) if the Obama administration hasn't used up all the available czars, the Vatican could use one to manage its communications office; b) that there are liberals trying to influence Church doctrine; c) that they're very vocal; d) that they've got cheerleaders in the media; e) that some conservatives place too much credence in the liberal media's portrayal of Church events; and f) that using this many semicolons in one place could give Haworth ideas.

All of which is to say that the Catholic Church has not caved on the same-sex marriage issue and that conservatives—particularly conservative protestants—who are now performing last rites over the Church need not only to put reports from the liberal media in better perspective, but need to better understand how the Church operates before they jump to conclusions.

Sorry liberals, the Catholic Church has NOT changed its position on same-sex marriage

If the secular media's coverage of preliminary deliberations in Rome on marriage weren't so tragic, they would simply be comic. In fact, maybe they're both.

It's not as if we didn't know how badly the media customarily get it wrong. Just on the basis of stories about the Catholic Church I've read over the last five years, it would seem that they are more likely to get it wrong than to get it right.

The biggest problem is obviously just journalistic sloppiness, but the chief aggravating factor is the lack of understanding by secular journalists about how the Church works. To even think that the whole teaching of the Church can be changed by one set of meetings over the course of a week and the issuing of a document by bureaucratic underlings is preposterous on its face to anyone who has even the remotest idea of how the Church works.

But the ADHD, quick news-cycle, go-on-to-the-next-story mode of the modern instant media doesn't have time for important distinctions, nor do liberals feel any restraint in doing end zone dances when no one has even started a play yet if it looks like they will benefit from appearing to have won.

And it doesn't help that the Vatican's communication bureaucracy is not taking this into account when it issues documents. When you're talking to people who have an attention span of about five seconds and are lacking a shred of historical knowledge, you've got to craft your message to take that into account and the Vatican needs to start doing this.

So now we have this meme going around that the Church has changed its position on the same-sex marriage issue, which is absolutely, positively, 100 percent, no-question-about-it wrong.

Robert P. George today said it best:

The relatio, then, is raw material for this week’s discussion, which will prepare for next year’s discussion, which may provide fodder for a document by the Pope. 

So it’s conducive to something preparatory to something (possibly) advisory. 

It has no teaching authority whatsoever.

What’s more, it proposed no changes—none—in the doctrine or moral teaching of the Church.

Sheez. Read the rest here.

UN lectures the Vatican on being nice to children, except if their not born yet

Wait, the United Nations is still operating? Who let that happen?

Turns out it is still around and lecturing other people on their behavior despite its sorry record of corruption. This is the organization, remember, which elected Sudan to its Human Rights Commission, which is sort of like appointing Joseph Goebbels to conduct relations with the Jews.

Oh, darn. Did I say "the Jews"? I better be careful about that because the UN doesn't seem to like them very much.

One organization which has suffered the indignity of being rebuked by these questionable people is the Vatican, which was told last week by the UN's Commission on the Rights of the Child that it has not properly handled child abuse by priests and that it needs to shape up—something which the Church has already acknowledged and been working on for almost fifteen years now with no help from the UN thank you very much.

Interesting, the Commission also demanded that the Vatican drop its opposition to abortion. Under the UN's definition of "child abuse," the actual killing of a child apparently doesn't count and, in fact, counts in your favor.

Oh, and then there were the demands that the Vatican change its position on contraception and homosexuality in order to meet its obligations under the Convention despite the fact that these positions are not actually, you know, in the Convention.

Will somebody please inform these people that they are an embarrassment and need to cease operations immediately?

Thanks for your help.

Pope against gay adoption. Liberals shocked. World amused.

It is rather interesting to watch the reaction of liberals as they discover that there are people in this world who disagree with them. They were apparently unaware that this was allowed.

A journalist at the Guardian has discovered that Pope Francis is opposed to gay adoption. Just wait until he finds out that he's also in favor of God, against the Devil, and kind of partial to holy water.

That'll really shake him up.

The comments by the Pope to the Maltese Archbishop have rocked the world of those in the Politically Correct community who had convinced themselves that he was actually a Western secular liberal bent on turning the Church upside down. Damien Thompson (Hey, wasn't "Damian" the name of the Anti-Christ in the movie, "The Omen"?) criticizes Time magazine for not doing its research before naming him "Person of the Year."

I mean, if they had only known the Pope was a Catholic. What were they thinking?

Isn't there a television show we can kick him off of? On the other hand, maybe that's not such a good idea: His family is slightly larger than the Robertsons.

Rush Limbaugh criticizes Jesus for being a Marxist ... er, wait a second

A prominent conservative pundit today condemned Jesus Christ for expressing what he said were clearly Marxist sentiments in a recent statement. According to a reporter named "Matthew" (no last name was included in the byline), Jesus said "You cannot serve both God and mammon." The comment has set off a firestorm of protest from prominent conservatives.

On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh responded, "This is just pure Marxism coming out of the mouth of the Savior of the world." He criticized Jesus' understanding of economics and added, "If it weren't for capitalism, I don't know where Christianity would be."

Limbaugh went on to ....

Um, wait. Let me check this again. Hmmm. I, ... er, think maybe I've got a couple things wrong here.

It wasn't actually Jesus Limbaugh was criticizing. It was actually the Pope he was taking to task ... for saying pretty much the same thing.

Never mind.

Liberal media discovers source of false reports that Pope is changing everything about the Catholic Church

The liberal media is now beginning to react to the almost universal misrepresentation of the Pope as someone bent on the wholesale change in Church dogma and practice. When he was installed as Pope, we began hearing that Francis was going to overturn all prior Catholic Church precedent that came before previously. 

In addition to changing a whole lot of things it believed in the past antecedent to the present.

So for months we have been subjected to reports that the Pope is doing things the Church has never, ever done before in the history of existence. Not even once.

Such as helping the poor. Reaching out the underprivileged and downtrodden. Empathizing with sinners.
And preaching the gospel.

The Catholic Church? Preaching the gospel? Who woulda' thunk it?

But through what must have been some pretty involved sleuthing, the liberal media has now discovered, not only that the Pope has not repudiated the Church's past beliefs—not only that the things he is saying have actually been said and done before, but it has also discovered who is responsible for the widespread belief that he has.

That's right: The liberal media has finally isolated the source of the erroneous reports about the Pope. The perpetrator of these falsehoods is ...

... Now let me just verify this here just to make sure its is accurate ... hmmm. Now this is interesting. The source of the mis-portrayal of the Pope, according to the liberal media, is ... The liberal media!

That's right.

The Atlantic Wire runs a Reuters report that takes Time Magazine to task for perpetuating the myth that the Pope is engaging in a wholesale makeover of the Church in its article naming the pontiff "Person of the Year":

Francis, a socially conservative religious leader, was chosen as the most influential person on Earth in the same year as a landmark Supreme Court decision throwing open the doors for equal marriage rights in the U.S., a right that Francis, and his church, officially oppose. In a just few short months since his election, the new Pope has transformed how many people, including the media, talk about the Church — without actually modifying what the church believes. 

... The Pope's tenure so far includes a series of highly symbolic moments and quotes that seem to challenge and sometimes rebuke Church tradition. ... The power of those symbolic moments dwells in anticipation of what the Pope might do in the coming years. His most media-friendly moments haven't translated into the reforms many on the left seem to assume are around the corner. There have very few official pronouncements from his office, and none have deviated greatly from previous Popes. And chances are, they won't. 

The report points out that Time had to issue a correction of its previous report: ""An earlier version of this post suggested that Pope Francis rejected some church dogma. He does not."

Well, I guess that's all cleared up. Now that the liberal media has discovered that Francis is actually just riffing off of what the Church has always done, they won't ever misrepresent him again. Ever.

Promise.

Reports of the Pope's death greatly exaggerated

Despite all the cultural dirt heaped upon the Catholic Church, it somehow manages to elude the perennial pronouncements that it is dead.

In my RSS Reader today I have at least three blog posts from prominent atheists bemoaning today's naming of Pope Francis by Time Magazine as "Person (we can no longer say "Man") of the Year." How can this be? asks Larry Moran: "It's hard to think of anyone who's more irrelevant to my life or the life of my friends and neighbors."

Time editors apparently neglected to consult Larry as to who is relevant to his life—and completely forgot to survey the people who live on his block.

And then there is the inimitable P. Z. Myers, in dire need of a mother to wash his mouth out with soap:

You have got to be ****ing kidding me. They’ve got this great pulpit with mass media attention to actually highlight the important events and people on the planet, and they pick the pablum-spewing head of an antique organization that demands its followers adhere to obsolete and dangerous beliefs, and this is what they say about it?

I mean, how does this guy rate anyway? Helping the poor? Championing the cause of the dispossessed? How does that add anything to the world?

If atheists want to convince people the Pope is irrelevant, then they might want to stop talking about him so much.

Conservatives and the Religion of the Free Market

Russell Kirk often used to make the point that conservatism (properly so called, as George F. Will would say) is not an ideology. This was implicit in his deeming of conservatism as the "politics of prudence." An ideology is a political philosophy operating like a religion: It is apocalyptic, messianic, utopian, and radical.

You know you are a ideologue if, solely on the basis of your political views, you can fill in the blank of the following question: "The world will be brought to perfection when ____________."

A conservative can complete this statement on the basis of his religion, but he cannot answer it on the basis of his politics. From a political perspective, he has to completely beg off. The world, until it is redeemed by something transcendent, will never be perfect. It is the place of imperfection. It is a place of good and evil and the good we can only see through a glass, darkly.

Modern left-wing liberalism has always been ideological in this sense. They can complete the statement above. For them, the world will be perfect when the society no longer interferes with our advance toward self-fulfillment. There can be a utopia if we take radical action to bring it about. It will be established in that Last Battle, when the forces of political darkness (conservatives) are defeated by the forces of the political light (left-wing liberals). In the meantime, we must settle for passing government programs.

This is what William F. Buckley (quoting Eric Voegelin) meant when he accused liberals of "immanentizing the eschaton": They want to bring about in the here and now what can only be brought about in the afterlife or in the religious apocalypse that will ensue before a Last Judgment they don't believe in.

Left-wing liberalism being a religious belief masquerading as a political one, it only makes sense that its most central belief would be theological: The denial of Original Sin. Left-wing liberalism is the political analog of the Ghost Dance movement, the cargo cults, and the Shakers, only without the religious trappings. They all sought a heaven here on earth and thought that through their actions they could either prepare for it or help bring it about.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, not Karl Marx, is the left-wing liberal's patron saint. Rousseau's "natural man," uncorrupted by civilization contrasts with the conservative idea that civilization is the only thing keeping man from destroying himself and everybody else.

Left wing liberalism's view that utopia is possible and that man is perfectible--and that all this can be accomplished through the right policies--is an idea that is increasingly characteristic of modern conservatism. And this is why we had the knee-jerk reaction of so many so-called conservatives to Pope Francis' comments that the free market was not sufficient to accomplish what needed to be accomplished with the poor.

The idea of the free market now serves the same role for many conservatives as government action serves for many liberals: It has become the policy by which we can reach an earthly Nirvana. Conservatives now seem to see the right set of policies as the route by which we can reach terrestrial perfection. The way to do this, they say, is a completely free market.

Traditional conservatives do not view the free market in this way. It does not view it as a cultural panacea. Free market capitalism is indeed the most efficient economic system, but that doesn't mean that it's perfect. It is the worst economic policy ever developed by mankind, to borrow an expression from Winston Churchill about systems of government, except all the other economic policies that have been developed from time to time throughout history.

All the Pope was trying to say was that the free market was not a panacea and it didn't release us from the obligation to help the poor. Many conservatives interpreted this as the Pope attacking the free market per se. But an attack on the idea that the free market is not a panacea is not an attack on the free market. It is an attack on a mistaken belief about the free market.

It is a plea from a religious leader not to make politics (or economics) into a religion.

This is why many conservatives do what traditional conservatives would never have done: called their political position an ideology--a "conservative ideology." They too place celestial faith in earthly things. Conservatism is not an ideology and when it becomes one, then it isn't conservatism any more.

It's Not About the Pope: Modern conservatives need to get back in touch with their traditional economic selves

The Pope's comments in an official Vatican document yesterday are being portrayed as an indictment of free market economics by the liberal media—and the misrepresentation has been swallowed whole by many conservatives. They're wrong. In fact, it isn't the Pope who's a liberal: It's conservatives who have abandoned their own traditions and whose liberalism on economic issues is now being shown up.

Any school of philosophical thought suffers from popularity, and conservatism is no different. Ever since conservatism grew out of its remnant status about 35 or 40 years ago, it has been in a process of degradation that continues to this day. It has been victimized by its own success.

The conservatism that produced Ronald Reagan and that in large part dominated the old National Review magazine until somewhere along in the 1990s has been beset with what can only be called a liberal infection.

The conservatism of Edmund Burke has been quietly traded in by modern conservatism for the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. The problem is aggravated by the fact that, due to almost universal philosophical illiteracy, most modern conservatives don't even know who these thinkers are.

Utilitarianism has replaced respect for custom and tradition. Raw libertarianism has replaced ordered liberty. Free market ideology has replaced a common sense economic liberty that once understood the difference between the empirical laws of economics and the normative obligations of a Christian culture.

The process has been helped along by conservative talk radio and now Fox News. People like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, right as they are on many issues, are now seen as the standard bearers for conservatism when, in fact, their political philosophies are at serious odds with the conservative tradition itself.

A large part of the problem with modern conservatism has to do with the fact that conservatives have forgotten their own tradition. Just look at the most popular conservative books (and weep). No movement that takes as its chief intellectual nourishment itself on people like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Bill O'Reilly deserves to be taken seriously.

This was not the case with the old conservatism. There were no popular conservative authors back in the conservative day, so we couldn't be corrupted by them. We had to resort to Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Michael Oakeshott, and F. A. Hayek, and T. S. Eliot for our political nourishment. Even the conservative journalists were intellectuals, not former disc jockeys and beauty queens: Wilmore Kendall, Frank Burnham, Joseph Sobran, and William F. Buckley, Jr.

These were people who a) knew what they were talking about, and b) actually authored the books that they claimed to author.

Modern conservatives can see conservatism from their house.

I have a simple rule for any conservative who wants to learn better what conservatism is: Don't read any book by anyone claiming to be a conservative that purports to explain it who didn't actually write the book that bears their name.

That would eliminate just about every popular conservative author with the exception of Charles Krauthammer, a liberal-turned-conservative (what we used to call a "neoconservative") who only had to change half his political philosophy in order to fit in to the new modern "conservatism" that is only half conservative. And we'll make an exception for Ann Coulter, any of whose lapses from true conservatism are more than made up for in sheer wit.

Allan Bloom once famously divided the political public into right-wing liberals and left-wing liberals. Modern conservatism is right-wing liberalism.

And this is why so-called conservatives have a problem with Pope Francis: He has challenged the liberal element within their thinking that has developed during a 40 year-long gestational period and has now experienced a coming out like the monster in the movie "Alien."

Conservatism has traditionally fought for a proper balance between justice, order, and freedom; and a belief in an economy that is free, but still subordinate to these goals. They believed freedom was a means, not an end.

What modern conservatism has done is to subordinate every other aspect of political conservatism to one thing and one thing only: free market economics. Everything else is dispensable.

Marriage for example.

Just look at the number of "conservative" leaders who, as soon as the political winds changed, abandoned ship on conservatism's central cultural position. It's pretty sad.

You can take my culture, but don't mess with my free market economics.

Once upon a time, conservatives advocated ordered liberty—both as a political and an economic principle. They were never in favor of unrestricted market actions. Never.

What the current critics of Pope Francis who think they are conservatives need to do is take account of Russell Kirk, the author of the most influential and authoritative book on conservatism, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (the Ur text of modern conservatism), and legendary defender of the free market, who writes in another book:

Sometimes, indeed, vociferous American devotees of "American capitalism" and the "American standard of living" do more mischief and benefit to their own cause, generating more heat than light, and substituting facile slogans for first principles ... 

... We ought not to exaggerate the importance of our economic arguments or of our American economy. In many ways the free market economy of the United States is a good thing in itself; yet it is not the whole of life. No economy, however productive materially, could be a good thing if it were founded upon injustice, disorder, slavery, and dishonor. The slave-labor camps of the Soviet Union were efficient, after a fashion—but only because they took no reckoning of human lives or moral principles. Thus our American economy, though good in itself, is important not merely for its own sake: its real importance is the contribution it makes to our justice and order and freedom, our ability to live in dignity as truly human persons. Our "standard of living," though often enjoyable in itself, is not the be-all and end-all of life. Economic production is merely th e means to certain ends. One of those ends is the satisfaction of man's material wants. And there are other ends served by this means of economic production: the satisfaction of certain profound desires in human nature, such as the desire for fruitful work and sufficient leisure and hopeful competition, for one; and the maintenance of a decent society for another.

Now take this view and the read what Pope Francis said again, and ask yourself where there is any contradiction between this and what the Pope said.

Modern conservatives have made a religion of the free market in a way traditional conservatives never would have done. The free market is not the sum and summation of conservatism; it is rather one principle to be balanced with others. As C. S. Lewis once said, "Second things suffer from being put first." This is what modern conservatives have done with economics.

Conservatism is not an ideology, it is a set of political first principles in constant tension. There's a big difference.

So-called "conservatives" get in on the act of misrepresenting the Pope

The supply of mischaracterizations about today's remarks on economics by Pope Francis is creating an even greater demand for people to point out what the Pope actually said.

Todd Zywicki at the Volokh Conspiracy takes the Catholic Church to task for being against free market economics on the basis of remarks Pope Francis made in an Apostolic Exhortation earlier today opposing the idea that invisible hand of the free market is sufficient for the bringing about of justice:

It appears that he is agin’ it (full document here). 

I’m not going to go into the wrongheaded economics here. Instead, what I think is curious about this document is a longstanding peeve of mine. Ever since the Galileo incident, the Catholic Church has generally tried to be careful to get its science right before it opines on ethical matters related to science. It takes seriously questions of bioethics and has developed internal expertise on those issues. Yet when it comes to economics, the Church seems to have no qualms about opining on issues of economics without even the slightest idea of what it is talking about.

Now first of all let's take note of the assumption implicit in this charge: that economics is some kind of hard science. Really? I would love to hear the argument for that. Economics is surely a moral science (Adam Smith was, after all, a moral philosopher), but it is hardly a hard science. If it were, you wouldn't see the wide divergence of economic opinion on even basic economic questions.

But  more importantly, Zywicki's criticism betrays the fact that he isn't to make even basic distinctions. The Pope is primarily making a moral point here, and where he does make economic assertions (as he does about the empirical fact that a free market does not automatically produce a just society), they're clearly accurate.

Of course Zywicki, who claims the intellectual high ground in relation to the Church, doesn't even bother to argue that the Pope is wrong--either on the ethical fact that we should take some kind of action in addition to just letting the free market work or on the economic fact of what the free market does and doesn't inevitably do. All he does is make snide remarks over what he thinks the Pope said.

In instead of an argument Zywicki simply employs and assumption about what the Pope said that is clearly inaccurate. The title of his post was "The Pope doesn't heart the free market." And he links to an equally inaccurate post titled, "In which the Pope informs us that the free market is very, very bad."

But the Pope didn't say the free market was bad; he said the free market was insufficient.

In order to criticize something, you have to be accurate about what you are criticizing. The Pope thinks that a just society requires more than just watching the invisible hand do its work. So what's Zywicki's refutation of this? He needs to offer one if he wants to appear as something other than what many supposedly conservative economic thinkers seem to be, which is not advocates for the free market, but apologists for large corporations.

Economics in its limited, social science sense has to do with the "laws" (as that word is loosely used in economics) of production, consumption, distribution, and so on. If a person or group of persons does X, then Y happens. But economics, in the larger sense of being a moral science, has to do with the normative decisions we make on the basis of these economic "laws." The former is empirical, the latter is ethical.

Writers like Zywicki would do well to understand the difference.

Joseph Pearce coming to Louisville this weekend

One of the best Catholic writers now writing is coming to Louisville for a conference this weekend at Immaculata Academy. Here are the specs from Immaculata:

Please join us for an upcoming conference with guest speaker Joseph Pearce! Mr. Pearce is an world-renown author and speaker on Catholicism, literature, education, and other related topics. He will speak on Education and Catholic Culture at our first Immaculata Conference on Friday evening, October 25th and Saturday evening, on the 26th.

The title of the conference is, "Reclaiming Catholic Culture: A Focus on the Family and Education." As part of an ongoing service to the wider community, this free event is hosted and sponsred by Immaculata Classical Academy and WLCR 1040AM Holy Family Radio.

The conference begins on Friday, October 25th from 7:00 — 8:30 pm with an opening talk entitled: "Reclaiming Catholic Culture: The Battle Begins in the Home." The conference continues on Saturday morning, October 26th from 9:00—12:00 pm with two talks entitled, "The Catholic Cultural Revival: Teaching our Children their Cultural Hertitage"; "A Matter of Life and Death: The Battle for True Education."

The wrong way to sell the Church's position on homosexuality

It seems ironic that in one and the same article, Aaron Taylor applauds a piece of communication despite the fact that it was widely misrepresented and then turns right around and counsels Christians not to use certain kinds of communication precisely because they will be misrepresented

Taylor offers advice on how the Church can more effectively articulate its position on homosexuality, the chief of which is to abandon language that uses expressions like "intrinsically disordered." Such language, which Pope Francis avoided in his Rio comments (which were grossly distorted by the secular world), lends itself to being grossly distorted by the secular world.

In fact, the media reaction to the Pope's comments, comments with which Taylor begins his remarks, offers a lesson exactly the opposite to that which Taylor gives us.

But in addition to the inherent inconsistency of Taylor's article, this kind of perspective (a perspective which seems be one part creative theology and five parts public relations) is a dangerous stance from which to offer advice to the Church. Obviously the Church has to take account of how its message is received, which it does every time it issues a pronouncement in a language other than Latin. But crafting the message should never compromise its content.

It is easy for the kind of advice offered by Taylor to lapse into a kind of consequentialism that would inevitably result in the Church acting in ways that misrepresent its position--and worse.

In addition, it is not clear to me that because Aquinas says in one place that the act of sex outside of marriage is “intrinsically disordered” that he therefore believes that homosexual proclivity is itself not intrinsically disordered in a way that heterosexual fornication is not.

In fact, Aquinas draws a distinction in Question 154 of the Second Part of the Summa Theologica between some lustful vices, which are natural but not in accord with right reason, and other acts (e.g., masturbation, bestiality, homosexuality, and unnatural sexual relations between heterosexuals), which are not only not in accord with right reason, but which are, in addition, unnatural.

Both fornication and homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered,” but the latter are, in addition, according to Thomas, unnatural. This is, of course, backed up by the words of Paul in Romans, where he calls homosexual acts sin “against nature.”

I realize the subject here is whether we should use the term “intrinsically disordered,” but appealing to Thomas will only make things worse, since, in addition to being intrinsically disordered, Thomas would have us also calling them “unnatural,” a term not exactly designed to fix the PR problem Taylor is so concerned to fix.

And so it is hard to fathom, in a discussion in which Aquinas is apparently considered authoritative, how Taylor can say, “the real moral absolute for Catholics in the domain of sex is the one against non-procreative acts, regardless of either the gender or the sexual orientation of the participants.” There really are no other particular (or “real”) moral distinctions the Church draws?

I suggest Taylor spend a little more time in the Summa, where numerous other important distinctions are drawn. It would cure him of this misconception fairly quickly.

Then there is the discussion of the advantages of using expressions such as “exceptionless moral norms” and “moral absolutes,” which takes us from John Stuart Mill (who lurks behind the first part of Taylor's post) to Kant (who seems to haunt the second part).

Taylor thinks the Kantian approach will do the PR trick, which, whatever the advantages he thinks it has (which are questionable), have the additional disadvantage of distorting the traditional moral teaching of the Church. Traditionally, the Church's ethical teaching has been neither consequentialist (as would be the result of the PR emphasis) nor deontological (which his language of “moral absolutes” would promote).

The Church’s main ethical tradition is that of virtue ethics, which is founded on the idea (derived both Aristotle and Aquinas, as well as the Apostle Paul) that certain things are natural and unnatural—which is why it can speak an ethical language with terms like “intrinsic.” This is the tradition which Taylor would have us abandon.

I sympathize with Taylor's motivations and I’m sure there are better ways to present the truths of the Church than many are now doing. But the fact is that as long as the Church opposes homosexuality in any way, shape, or form, any statement by the Church or its members is going to be ill-received by the “gay community”-- a group of people with which, as a group, Taylor seems to be so concerned that the Church have good relations.

There may be a way to do things differently when it comes to a public dialogue on homosexuality, but abandoning the traditional moral categories the Church has used for centuries is not the way to do it. And if we're going to lose the public battle on this issue, which looks likely, we might as well do it with our moral theology intact, so that, in a better time, when the "gay community" will have been swept away by history, the Church can speak it anew.

NEWS FLASH: Pope Francis endorses Catholicism

The media suffers from Pope Envy Syndrome (PES).

The press is having another of its Pope Francis Spasms in which they listen carefully to what the pope says, try to see if there is any way they stretch what he says to make it sound like he agrees with them, and then announce that he has endorsed one of their Approved Opinions.

And what better belief to make it sound like the pope agrees with you on than gay rights? Homosexuality is the Chief Dogma of the Secular Creed. One must believe that there men and women are interchangeable for purposes of social and sexual interaction. Of course, this dogma is grounded, as are all the beliefs of secularism, in hard scientific evidence.

Just look at the studies.

Why there's that study out of the University of ... hmmm, where is that study? Well, how about the research from that country somewhere, the name of which I can't remember?

Well, shoot, surely there's some study from Sweden that proves this.

Why is it, anyway, that the secular world seems to in need of the pope's credibility? Why do they seem so Hell-bent on trying to make it sound like the pope agrees with them?

Of course, all Francis did was basically take 2 cups of "hate the sin, love the sinner," mixed it with a teaspoon of "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God," and microwaved it for about a minute. The press then give it a taste and announce that it was made of ingredients no pope has ever used before.

In fact, he wasn't even talking specifically about gay priests.

The narrative is that this pope is completely different than all previous Popes: He loves the poor; he loves sinners; he actually cares; etc, etc. Things that no other pope has ever done, since all Francis' predecessors hated the poor and the sinners and never cared.

I mean, of all the things for Francis to be, you'd think he could find something else to do than to be ... I don't know, ... Catholic.

Catholic Beach Party

The decline of religion, much in the news, continues at a rapid  pace, with large numbers of people leaving the church. As if to underscore the problem, huge crowds of Brazilians fled to the beach to avoid the Roman pontiff, who was making a visit to the South American country.

The large crowds ...

Uh, wait a minute ... Scratch that: It was 3.2 million people flocking to see the pope.

Never mind.

When President Obama sees real diversity, he doesn't like it

Once again, we have a so-called liberal criticizing diversity in the name of Diversity.

We go now to Geoffrey Norman at the Weekly Standard:

On his trip to Europe, the president accomplished a sort of synthesis of these contrary impulses, stigmatizing his enemies in the name of unity and harmony. The enemy, in this case, being the Catholic church. Or, at least, its tradition of establishing schools. As Charlie Spiering writes in the Washington Examiner, the president told an audience in Northern Ireland: 

“If towns remain divided, if Catholics have their schools and buildings, and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden, that encourages division.” 

One wonders if the president is willing to push his argument to its logical conclusion and lecture Muslim audiences as to why they should close the madrassas.

Just another indication that the "diversity" the Tolerance Police are talking about is only diversity if they agree with you.

The Pope's Twitter Feed

When I heard that the Pope was going to start tweeting, I was skeptical. But now that I found out he is tweeting in Latin, I'm all for it.

Here is Pope Francis' Twitter Feed: https://twitter.com/Pontifex_ln

Since when do they teach Catholicism in a class that says that's exactly what they do?

Turns out the comparative religion crowd is long on diversity and short on basic reading skills:

At the end of a Wednesday evening class last semester, one of my students approached me to ask a question. After hesitating somewhat, he proceeded in the following manner: “Professor, I really have enjoyed your class, but you always teach as though Catholicism is true. You rarely talk about other religions, of which I was actually hoping to learn more about.” I reminded the troubled young man that he should re-read the syllabus, since “Teachings of the Catholic Church” is actually the official course title. The humorous encounter reminded me of Walker Percy’s response to the question of why he became a Catholic: “What else is there?” How ironic, yet typical of most university students, that someone would be taking a course on Catholicism and simultaneously be disgruntled that this is precisely what he is getting.

Read the rest here.

Vatican Shocker: New pope is old, Catholic

Okay, so I've been on the road and without Internet for a few days, and haven't been able to comment on the election of the new pope by the College of Cardinals.

I will have to say that the best two hours of comedy I have heard in years I experienced while driving to South Carolina last Wednesday, when the decision was announced. The secular commentary on the BBC was truly amusing.

You had three or four liberal journalists (what's the opposite of an oxymoron?) trying to figure out the doings of this ancient institution and the only way they could make sense of it was to impose their own assumptions and expectations on it, which, of course, completely obscured the nature of the thing they were trying to understand.

Thousands were gathered in St. Peter's Square waiting for the announcement by the College of Cardinals there in conclave. Coverage began when white smoke began coming from the chimney, the traditional sign that the selection had been made. For any other institution to announce an important decision this way would seem utterly preposterous, but it is the entire allure of the Church that it not only is an ancient institution, but that it acts like one.

And yet, despite the antique grandeur that was the only reason hundreds, perhaps thousands, of journalists descended on Vatican City from all over the world, they spent half their time talking about how the Church needed to "modernize" itself.

For the World to ask the Church to modernize itself is nothing terribly remarkable. But to do it at the very moment at which it is mesmerized by the very fact that it isn't modern is positively farcical.

The World is always demanding that the Church become more like itself. It's the one way to ensure the Church's irrelevance. The more the Church becomes like the World, the less necessary it is to the World. You already have the World.What need is there for something else that acts exactly like it?

The only reason the World pays any attention to the Church at all is precisely because it is not the World.

The minute the Church ditches the smoke in favor of Twitter is the minute everyone stops paying attention. No microphones. No cameras. No network coverage. And no more 150,000 people showing up, some traveling from the other side of world to see the event.

I'm trying to remember the last time hundreds of journalists were camped out in front of the Unitarian Universalist Church headquarters waiting for the announcement of their new leader.

And this is true not only of the manner in which the Church conducts Herself: It is also true of the message it transmits in such a traditional way.

The BBC commentators talked on and on of the need for the Church to modify its beliefs on everything from marriage to contraception to priestly celibacy. It's the sex thing. That's all the World really cares about. It has sex on the brain, which, as Malcolm Muggeridge once pointed out, is a very uncomfortable place to have it.

And when the announcement was made that it was Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, there was a noticeable groan. "Well," said one of the reporters, "this is a surprise." "This, of course, will come as a disappointment to progressives." And "He is an older man."

Really? This is the first thing to say when they announce a new pope? That he's too old and too Catholic?