Daytime Prayer Sanctifies Our Labor (LOH 9)

It is fitting, in a way, that this post on Daytime prayer comes last in the series, because Daytime Prayer (actually the three separate hours of Midmorning Prayer, Terce, Midday Prayer, Sext, and Midafternoon Prayer, None) is the most overlooked part of the Divine Office.  Without it, however, we do not enjoy the fullest experience of the daily Liturgy.

     As I mentioned above, Daytime prayer has traditionally contained three separate prayer hours, whose names come from the old Roman mode of designating time by counting the hours after dawn: Terce at the third hour (tertius is “third” in Latin), approximately 9:00 A.M., Sext at Noon, the sixth hour (in Latin sextus), and None from the Latin nonus, ninth, at that hour of the day (around 3:00 p.m.).   These hours are less prominent than the others in the overall scheme of the Liturgy, and so are considerably shorter: just three relatively short psalmodies (with their antiphons), a brief scripture reading (no more than one or two verses) and a closing prayer.

   Their brevity is appropriate to the period of the day when most of us are the busiest with our worldly occupations, and many people would find it impossible to fit in longer prayers.  They are also designed to be flexible: the psalms change according to the four-week cycle for only one of these three prayer hours every day and, except for some feast days, we can choose at which of the three hours we want to pray the cyclical psalms, and so we won't miss any of the psalms if we pray just one on a given day.  If we also pray one or both of the other two hours we use fixed psalms (called the Complementary Psalmody) that are the same every day.  Even the busiest layperson can normally find time to pray at least one of these brief hours during the day, and many of those under obligation to pray the Liturgy of the Hours are not required to pray all three. We should take the ease and flexibility of Daytime Prayer as an indication, not of its insignificance, but of how important it is, since the Church is so concerned that we observe at least part of the Divine Office in the midst of our working day.
   And that is a great part of the value of these prayer hours.  It is possible to pray all the other hours before work in the morning and after were finished in the morning, leaving the greater part of our day, the part that most occupies us mentally and physically, untouched by our sacred project of “sanctifying time”.  The very fact of interrupting the normal flow of things, even briefly, to turn our thoughts to God, and to pray with the sacred scriptures, draws together our fuller prayers in the morning and the evening to cover the whole day.

     We also find an emphasis in the psalms and prayers of Daytime Prayer that helps us to put whatever we do throughout the day into an “eternal” perspective.  We see many images of work, harvest, and, at None, the home life to which we are about to return.  Many of the psalms also emphasize God’s grace, mercy, and involvement in our lives.  For instance, the Complementary Psalmody for Midday Prayer includes Psalm 125, which begins:

            Those who put their trust in the Lord

            Are like Mount Zion, that cannot be shaken,

            That stands forever. . .   

The concluding prayer often directs our attention to the divine perspective on that particular part of our working day.  At the end of Terce on Monday of Week I, for instance, we are directed toward our labors to come:

            God our Father,

            work is your gift to us,

            a call to reach new heights

            by using our talents for the good of all.

            Guide us as we work and teach us to live

            in the spirit that has made us your sons and daughters,

            in the love that has made us brothers and sisters.

Then at Sext, when we are in the midst of our labors:

            Father,

            Yours in the harvest

            and Yours is the vineyard:

            You assign the task

            and pay a wage that is just.

            help us to meet this day’s responsibilities,

            and let nothing separate us from your love.

Finally, None’s  prayer begins:

            Lord,

            You call us to worship You

            At the hour when the apostles went to pray in the temple . . .

As the last prayer on Monday connects the hour of the day with that hour in Salvation History, so the prayers for Friday of Week I give us an almost hourly recapitulation of the events of Good Friday.  The pray for Midmorning begins:

            Lord Jesus Christ,

            at this hour you led out

            to die on the cross

            for the salvation of the world . . .  

Then at Midday Prayer:

            Lord Jesus Christ,

            At noon, when darkness covered all the earth,

            You mounted the wood of the cross . . .

And finally, the prater at Midafternoon begins:

            Lord Jesus Christ,

            You brought the repentant thief

            From the suffering of the cross

            To the joy of your kingdom . . .

     No discussion of Daytime prayer would be complete for me if I didn’t mention two of my favorite psalms, 127 and 128, which we find in Midafternoon Complementary Psalmody.  Both help us look at the work day that is nearing completion in the context of God’s abundance and mercy, and remind us that He rewards those who rely upon Him.  Psalm 127  begins with an image of a house under construction to represent our need for God’s help: “If the Lord does not build the house/In vain do its builders labor”; the last half of the psalm depicts God’s abundant blessings, as represented by our children:

            Truly sons are a gift from the Lord,

            A blessing, the fruit of the womb.

            Indeed the sons of youth

            Are like arrows in the hand of a warrior.

Psalm 128, the final Psalm of Daytime Prayer, beautifully encapsulates the whole day of work by pointing to its end, in which we see the whole chain of love and abundance, in which our “yes” to God’s love for us finds fruitfulness in our work under His care, which is reflected in the fruitfulness of our wife, who is compared to a flourishing vine, and that abundance is in turn passed on to our children and our children’s children.  I can think of no better closing for this essay than to reproduce Psalm 128 in full:

O blessed are those who fear the Lord

and walk in his ways!

By the labor of your hands you shall eat.

You will be happy and prosper;

the wife like a fruitful vine

in the heart of your house;

Your children like shoots of the olive,

around the your table.

Indeed thus shall be blessed

the man who fears the Lord.

May the Lord bless you from Zion

all the days of your life!

May you see your children's children

in a happy Jerusalem!

On Israel, peace!     

Dispatches From The Culture Of Death, Part One

The Culture of Death     

There are those who say that St. John Paul II was exaggerating, or at least being unduly harsh, when he coined the term “Culture of Death” in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae.  If only that were true. The secular world simply insists on offering death as the “compassionate” response to all sorts of things: suffering at the end of life, difficulties at life’s beginning and, increasingly, trouble in between.  Today I’d like to explore one recent example of the Culture of Death at work, and a second next week.

The Architect of Obamacare

     Let us consider  Ezekiel Emmanuel, brother of President Obama’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel.  Ezekiel, one of the prime architects of the ironically named Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), published a piece in The Atlantic last fall called “Why I Hope To Die At 75” [here].  The wide-ranging essay explores at great length the disadvantages of old age: reduced productivity, lessened vitality, the host of physical ailments that proliferate as we age, but, interestingly, doesn’t focus on the effect of these things upon the sufferer:

Doubtless, death is a loss . . . But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.[my italics]

It is selfish of us, you see, to force others to experience our decline: the compassionate thing is to quit while we are ahead.  Emmanuel is most emphatic that he is not advocating euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, quite correctly pointing out that “the answer” to the desire to actively bring about one’s own death “is not ending a life but getting help. I have long argued that we should focus on giving all terminally ill people a good, compassionate death—not euthanasia or assisted suicide for a tiny minority.”

Just One Man's Opinion?

     So what is he advocating? He claims that he will refuse any “life-prolonging” treatment of any sort: “I will stop getting any regular preventive tests, screenings or interventions.  I will accept only palliative – not curative – treatments if I am suffering pain or other disability.”   After a lengthy recitation of the routine treatment he intends to forgo, Emmanuel says “I will die when whatever comes first takes me.”

     We could just dismiss this as no more than one opinionated man’s personal view, and Emmanuel encourages us to do just that:

I am not saying that those who want to live as long as possible are unethical or wrong. I am certainly not scorning or dismissing people who want to live on despite their physical and mental limitations. I’m not even trying to convince anyone I’m right. . . And I am not advocating 75 as the official statistic of a complete, good life in order to save resources, ration health care, or address public-policy issues arising from the increases in life expectancy.

But he gives the game away when he adds:

What I am trying to do is delineate my views for a good life and make my friends and others think about how they want to live as they grow older. I want them to think of an alternative to succumbing to that slow constriction of activities and aspirations imperceptibly imposed by aging. Are we to embrace the “American immortal” or my “75 and no more” view? [my italics]

There Are Opinions, And Then There Are Opinions

And what is the point of getting others to think of alternative ways to live (and die) if not to persuade them to change their behavior?  In truth, underneath the welter of medical facts and figures and the personal focus, we see two very familiar arguments: the “quality of life” argument (i.e., a “diminished” life isn’t worth living) and the “appeal to compassion” (we should spare our family and society the “burden” - including the financial burden - of our  infirmity).

Ezekiel Emmanuel

     Nonetheless, isn’t that just his opinion?  No, because when a prominent man, one with a “Dr.” in front of his name, expresses his opinion, buttressed with all sorts of impressive medical sounding data, and in very engaging and (truth be told) well-crafted prose, it has an impact.  The more often such opinions come from such sources the less unthinkable such opinions become in the wider world, until they eventually become commonplace.  We have seen this strategy employed to perfection in recent years in the campaign to redefine marriage (more on that next week). 

     There is also the fact that, despite his disclaimers, Ezekiel Emmanuel is still has a great deal of influence on public policy: in addition to his well-known public connection with Obamacare he is the director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the National Institutes for Health.  Add it all together and, as Ben Shapiro points out in a piece on the Breitbart site [here],

                 . . . his opinion carries weight.

Enough weight that the same day Emanuel’s piece published, a 21-member Institute of Medicine panel announced that we need to revamp our end-of-life care. “The current system is geared towards doing more, more, more, and that system by definition is not necessarily consistent with what patients want, and is also more costly,” said David M. Walker, former US comptroller general and chairman of the panel. The panel also encouraged end-of-life conversations with as many elderly folks as possible, and that costs could be slashed by thinking about aging differently.

           

That's a rather curious coincidence, don't you think?  And perhaps its no coincidence, as Shapiro points out, that "Ezekiel Emmanuel was elected in 2004 to the Institute of Medicine". 

     Finally, while Emmanuel explicitly opposes euthanasia and suicide (and I don’t doubt his sincerity), the attitude towards aging that he is validating and encouraging will inevitably make those “options” more and more acceptable; and if the public thinks there’s nothing wrong with it, why shouldn’t the government facilitate it . . . or require it? I am reminded of Blessed Paul VI’s warning about birth control measures (if we change Paul's reference to "married" people to "ordinary" poeple) :

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by [ordinary] people. . . ? (Humanae Vitae, 17)

The slope is getting more slippery all the time.

Next Week: What could be funnier than abortion?

(This Throwback was first published in September, 2014)

Our Pre-Cana Adventure (Worth Revisiting)

This Worth Revisiting post was originally published on February 9th 2014; it is co-written by my Lovely Bride, Linda. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers visit Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

A True Story

The Miracle at Cana

     A few years ago we were invited to talk to a group of engaged Pre-Cana couples at a local parish.  The woman responsible for lining up speakers had done charitable work with Linda and thought that we would be well suited to talking to the soon-to-be married couples about the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality, and the place of natural family planning (NFP) within it. You should be aware that our instructions stressed that this wasn't to be a class on the exact details of how to practice NFP;  There were several couples in the diocese qualified to teach such a class, but we were not among them, and the woman who invited us knew this.

     Needless to say, we were pleased to be asked.  We leapt into preparations: we read Pius XI’s Casti Connubii, Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, articles by people like Janet Smith from the website One More Soul, Kimberly Hahn’s Life-Giving Love, information on John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and much else besides. We did include NFP, but in the context of the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality, which, you’ll remember, is what we were actually asked to do.  It was, if we may say so, a dynamite presentation.

Not Everyone Was Pleased

      Strange to say, the reaction was not as positive as we had hoped.  Monsignor seemed satisfied with our presentation, but our target audience seemed a little, well, stunned.  While we certainly didn’t accuse anyone of anything, we did share the fact that cohabitation, consummating relationships outside of marriage, contraception, etc. were gravely wrong (i.e., sins). It’s a fair bet that a number of the couples, most likely the majority (and quite possibly all of them), were doing at least some of those things, so it wasn’t welcome news, however gently  and non-confrontationally we put it (which we assure you we did).We did get one mildly positive comment from one of the women; the only other question was “How many children did you say you have?”  To our answer, “five”, the response was “and how reliable did you say NFP is supposed to be?”  They seemed unconvinced that none of our children were due to a “failure” of NFP, that all were expected and welcomed.  They had never been taught, or at least never absorbed, that having children is the norm (we used to call them “a Blessing”!), avoiding them the exception.  In their written feedback afterwards, they related that they liked us personally, but found our presentation too “judgmental”, too "black and white".

     The gentle and kindly woman who had asked us seemed as stunned as the couples.  Apparently, she thought we had gone too far by actually saying that contraception was a sin; her vision of the presentation was that we would talk in glowing terms about how natural NFP is, how free from chemical side-effects, etc. and we would somehow win them over to NFP by sheer green-appeal.  Then, having been won over to NFP by its greenness, they might someday be inclined to learn more about the theology behind it and the fullness of the church's teaching on the blessing of children.  We answered that we could not, in good conscience, go in to talk about the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality without, you know, talking about the Church’s teaching on marriage and sexuality.  Linda recalls saying with incredulity, "But they're all getting married in a few weeks, and this is supposed to be the official instruction they are receiving from their church about contraception.  If we don't tell them now, when are we going to tell them?  Are we going to wait and let St. Peter do it at the gate?"  Really, if they never knew any better, they wouldn’t be the ones breaking out into a cold sweat when giving an account of themselves someday.  As we were "hired" for this job, and knew better, if we didn’t share the fullness of the Church's teaching with them, we were the ones who would have some explaining to do (see Ezekiel 3:18-20).

A Failure To Communicate?

     This all happened seven or eight years ago. Would you be surprised if I told you that, despite the fact that they claimed to be desperate to find speakers willing to help out with this topic, we haven’t been asked back?

     So, as they say, what have we learned here?  If you’ve read many of the posts on this site, you know that we take the importance of the family very seriously.  On the level of Natural Law, it is the essential building block of a healthy society; as Catholics, we know that it is an image, an icon, however imperfect (even in the best families), of the perfect love of the Trinity.  Let me amend that: as Catholics, we should know.  I am truly sorry to say that in my experience, most Catholics really don’t.  Linda at one point gave a copy of Kimberly Hahn’s Life-Giving Love to a young mother, a faithful Mass attendee, after she heard her talking to another regular Mass-goer, also a young mother, and it was clear that neither knew anything about the Catholic teaching on contraception, sterilization, and our proper disposition toward child-bearing.  I’m sure both young women were trying to be faithful Catholics, but having absorbed the secular “conventional wisdom” about having babies, they were unaware of a serious alternative.      

     Some will criticize priests for not preaching on this topic, and there’s some justice to the complaint: neither of us can recall hearing a single homily in our adult lives so much as mentioning contraception (although there are some bishops who have spoken out boldly, particularly the incomparable Archbishop Charles Chaput, link here).  Many priests will respond that, in this skeptical age, they simply lack the credibility to say anything too demanding about marriage; and they also have a valid point.  We can hear it now (and in fact we have heard it, many times): “Who is he to tell me about sex?  He’s a celibate male!”  What’s the solution?

Learn It, Live It, Etc.

     It seems apparent that, given the age in which we live, a large part of the initiative in this area has to come from the laity.  We do need the explicit support of the clergy, yes, but right now they’re talking to a blank wall (when they’re talking at all).  We lay Catholics, especially those called to marriage, need to learn about the true nature of marriage and the true place of sexuality (St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body is a great place to start).  We need to live according to that knowledge, joyfully receiving the children the Lord sends our way (using NFP, if we discern that it’s appropriate, according to the principles laid out by the Church), publicly demonstrating the importance we place on our families, and always remembering that we are to be an Icon of Love; never underestimate the Power of Example.  The power of example, however, is not enough: after all, to many people our traditional family, however loving, will appear to be simply another “lifestyle choice” among the many on offer (“That’s fine for them, of course, but not for us”).  We need to be willing to share the content of Catholic teaching, in a loving way that respects people where they are, with the goal of lifting them up.  If more priests feel that they have the support of a large part of the laity, they will be able to speak out with more confidence.

     The state of the family is not a tangential matter, it is a key component of every major problem facing both the Church and society at large.  We have the truth:  we need to live it.

Resources:  this is not a full bibliography from the talk we describe above, but these are links to sources mentioned in the post:

Pope Pius XI’s Casti Connubii – amazingly relevant eighty-three years later:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii_en.html

Bl. Paul VI's “notorious” Humanae Vitae – the encyclical that launched a thousand dissents - read it and see how accurately Pope Paul predicted the baleful results of wide-spread contraception:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html

Janet Smith’s One More Soul – well worth the time you spend there:

http://onemoresoul.com/

Kimberly Hahn’s Life-Giving Love – an excellent popular resource on the Catholic vision of marriage:

http://www.amazon.com/Life-Giving-Love-Embracing-Beautiful-Marriage/dp/1569552924

There is no one resource to go to for the Theology of the Body, but the USCCB site is a good place to start – closely follows John Paul the Great’s series of talks on TOB from 1979-1984:

http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-action/marriage-and-family/natural-family-planning/catholic-teaching/theology-of-the-body.cfm

Text of Pastoral Letter published in 1998 by Charles Chaput, then Archbishop of Denver (Currently heading the See of Philadelphia) – absolutely the best explanation of Humanae Vitae I’ve come across by anyone, cleric or layperson:

http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/~dewolf/chaput.htm

Monteverdi's Beatus Vir & Weekly Roundup

I love this performance of Claudio Monteverdi’s magnificent Beatus Vir.  The piece is a musical setting to Psalm 112, which begins

Blessed is the man who fears the LORD,
who greatly delights in his commandments! (Psalm 112: 1)

It goes on to detail all the various ways in which a man is blessed if he fears the Lord, whereas

The wicked man sees it and is angry;
he gnashes his teeth and melts away;
the desire of the wicked man comes to nought. (Psalm 112: 10)

As it happens, a number of my posts from the past week (see links below) deal with the fact that human flourishing depends on our acknowledging the Lordship of God, and following his commandments; the same eternal truth is captured in Monteverdi’s ageless music.

Weekly Roundup

It’s starting to feel like summer here at Principium et Finis World Headquarters.  This last week saw some old stuff (but Worth Revisiting, as they say), and some new.  The theme for the week seems to have been the corruption of this world but, also, the saving Grace of God.  After all, our Hope is in The Lord, not in our human institutions . . . thanks be to God.

“Living in the Age of Esau”  [HERE] Bowl of pottage, anyone? 

“Compline: For Tonight and Forever” [HERE] Night Prayer prepares us for our evening rest, and for our eternal rest 

"Does It Need To Be ‘As Bad As Iran' To Be Bad Enough?” [HERE] We ought to resist the growing trend toward marginalizing Christians and Christianity, even if it’s not as bad here in the West as it could be . . . yet

“Who Dares To Tell The Emperor He’s Naked?” [HERE] L’affaire Jenner leads to a discussion of where we are heading as a society . . . and it’s not good 

“St. Peregrinus, a bishop who gave his life in the cause of peace” [HERE] St. Peregrinus is but one example of what Jesus meant when he said his followers would be persecuted for his sake  

Mozart Requiem Mass "Benedictus" & Weekly Roundup

Mariotto Albertinelli, The Holy Trimity

     How about some beautiful sacred music on this blessed Sunday on the verge of summer? Several of my posts from the past week linked below deal in various ways with the ugliness of our world, but above and beyond the sin and pain of this existence the God who is Love, the source of all goodness and beauty, holds sway.  In the Requiem, a funeral mass and Mozart's last great work before his own early death, the love of God shines through in the loveliness of the music.

"This is the day that the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice in it." (Psalm 118:24)

Weekly Roundup

It’s starting to feel like summer here at Principium et Finis World Headquarters.  This last week saw some old stuff (but Worth Revisiting, as they say), and some new.  The theme for the week seems to have been the corruption of this world but, also, the saving Grace of God.  After all, our Hope is in The Lord, not in our human institutions . . . thanks be to God.

“Living in the Age of Esau”  [HERE] Bowl of pottage, anyone? 

“Compline: For Tonight and Forever” [HERE] Night Prayer prepares us for our evening rest, and for our eternal rest 

"Does It Need To Be ‘As Bad As Iran' To Be Bad Enough?” [HERE] We ought to resist the growing trend toward marginalizing Christians and Christianity, even if it’s not as bad here in the West as it could be . . . yet

“Who Dares To Tell The Emperor He’s Naked?” [HERE] L’affaire Jenner leads to a discussion of where we are heading as a society . . . and it’s not good 

“St. Peregrinus, a bishop who gave his life in the cause of peace” [HERE] St. Peregrinus is but one example of what Jesus meant when he said his followers would be persecuted for his sake  

St. Peregrinus: Pilgrim & Martyr for Peace

     Over the past two millenia the Church has seen an endless flood of inspiring Saints.  Most of these heroes of The Faith are not officially recognized, but thousands of them are commemorated with a feast day (in most cases, the date of the saint’s death, which is to say the anniversary of when he or she joined God in Heaven).  The major commemoration today, of course, is for the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  It is also the feast day of St. Anthony of Padua [here], one of the great Saints and a Doctor of the Church. But it is also the feast of St. Augustine of Huy, one of the Vietnamese Martyrs, of whom most of us westerners know far too little (the bio of the saint [here] on Catholic.org tells us that somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Catholics have been martyred in Vietnam over the past two centuries, both under the imperial government of the nineteenth century and the more recent communist regime, and often by horrific means: St. Augustine of Huy was literally sawed into pieces while still alive).  There are also saints about whom little more than the name has survived, such as the Irish St. Damhnade and the African Saints Fortunatus and Lucian.

     One of the lesser-known saints commemorated today is St. Peregrinus [bio here], whose actual name was Cetteus.  We are warned that his biography is largely unverifiable, but it seems believable enough.  He was bishop of the Italian city of Amiternum in the 6^th century.  There was a feud between two of the invading Lombards, one of whom was threatened with death.  The bishop successfully pleaded to save his life, for which reason the other, assuming the bishop was simply taking his rival's side, had him thrown into a river with a large stone tied around his neck.  Cetteus was called "Peregrinus" (which means "pilgrim" or "traveler") by the fishermen who discovered his body, who knew he was a bishop by his vestments, but did not know his name.
     Several things stand out from the story of St. Peregrinus.  One, of course, is that Christ's followers would "be hated by all" (Matthew 10:22), even for doing nothing more than trying to spread peace. We don't need to look back to the early centuries of the Church to see the truth in that. We also see, in the Lombard chieftain whose imagination could not conceive of any motives higher than his own ambitions, the truth of St. Paul's assertion that "The wisdom of this world is folly with God" (1 Corinthians 3:19). The Saint's adopted name also reminds that, as St. Paul tells us (Phil. 3:20), our true citizenship is not here, but in heaven.  St. Augustine adds that "We are but travelers [peregrini] on a journey without yet a fixed abode . . ."
     Peregrini is sometimes translated as "pilgrims", because we are travelers on our way to a Holy Place (in our case, we hope, the Holiest of Places).  Let us ask St. Peregrinus to pray for us on our earthly journey, so that we might enjoy with him eternity in the Presence of Our Lord.

Who Dares To Tell The Emperor He's Naked?

The Emperor’s New Body

    I’m sure we’re all becoming a little tired of hearing about Bruce Jenner and Caitlyn, his new female identity, but I can’t simply ignore a cultural (well, maybe “pop-cultural”) event that is both so large and so perfectly captures the spirit of the age.  I’m not speaking so much of Jenner himself, however (except to offer the suggestion, as others have done, that he is very much in need of our prayers), I’m more interested in the reaction from the elite opinion makers, the media, and society at large.  They remind me of the well-known story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, but with an important difference.  Most of us are familiar with the old fable of the foppish monarch deceived by con-men who exploit his vanity to convince him that he is wearing a splendid new set of clothes, when in fact he is strutting about stark naked.  None of his subjects dare to say anything other than agree that his new “clothes” are indeed magnificent, except for one innocent little boy who blurts out the truth that the emperor is wearing nothing at all.  That breaks the spell, and the emperor and his subjects, realizing how foolish they have been, come to new wisdom.

Bruce Jenner in simpler times

    The first part rings true.  The news media and the arbiters of the conventional wisdom are falling over themselves to call Bruce Jenner “she” and tout his purported bravery, even though he is not really a woman at all, but a man whose outward appearance has been altered by plastic surgery and breast implants. So far, life imitates art. But back to the story: imagine that, instead of sheepishly admitting their foolishness, the emperor’s subjects instead grab the little boy by the scruff of the neck, throw him over the town wall into the moat, and then go back to congratulating the deluded emperor.  That’s how it works in our world. Anyone who does not publicly affirm that Jenner has indeed become a woman, and that this is a marvelous thing, risks being castigated as a “hater” by the cultural elites, and suffering the same treatment as, for instance, the various business executives, bakers, photographers, etc., who have had the temerity to support marriage as it has been traditionally understood. Such are the times in which we live.

Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss

    And those are curious times indeed, an era that only someone with a keen sense of irony can truly appreciate.  The two chief ironies that dominate our age both spring from the widespread rejection of God.  The first is that, taking our Lord to be a tyrant, we sought freedom from His laws, and as result find ourselves instead enmeshed in an endlessly growing tangle of man-made rules that are no less oppressive than the old laws, and in fact much more so, because they lack the clarity and consistency of the old ways. More importantly, they are not founded, as are God’s laws, on a perfect understanding of what our human nature requires. On our college campuses, for instance, the simple and straightforward (not to mention commonsensical) mandate that young men and women are not to fornicate has been abolished; in its place has sprung up an excruciatingly byzantine welter of regulations governing what constitutes consent for said fornication, when and how often such consent must be given, and so on.  It is near impossible to keep up with each new embellishment, but woe to the unhappy individual (invariably a young man) who runs afoul of the newest dictate.  By the same logic, our freedom to express our opinions on the matter of human sexuality must defer to the freedom of Bruce Jenner (or whoever) to declare themselves whatever gender they claim to be, even if it’s a “gender” we’ve never heard of before.

“What About Women Who Are Male?”

    The second irony, closely connected to the first, is best summed up in the remark often attributed to G.K. Chesterton (although the actual source is unknown) that when people cease to believe in God they don’t believe in nothing . . . they believe in anything.  And so we see that the secular world, having dismissed God as an “unscientific” fantasy, has itself lost any grounding in reality.  For example, we somehow don't see the immense damage to both individuals and society as a whole that continues to be wrought by the so-called "sexual revolution", and pretend that the manifest differences between men and women are really just a "social construct", in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary.  Many of us are familiar with the quote from Fr. Henri de Lubac, that "It is not true, as it is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God.  What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man."  Now we can see that the Godless organize the world not only against man, but against plain common sense, and against reality itself.  In a recent piece columnist Jonah Goldberg explores the sort of mental ju-jitsu that necessarily results from trying to process something like the Jenner phenomenon through the current cultural assumptions:

But the most fascinating argument comes from those who have no problem with Jenner changing genders, but have serious misgivings about the word “woman.”

On a recent MSNBC panel celebrating the “Jenner Effect,” The Nation’s Michelle Goldberg (no relation), noted that many young feminists “no longer want to use the word ‘woman’ in relation to abortion because it excludes trans men.” There’s a lot of “conceptual murk to clear away,” she added with admirable understatement, “but among younger people that I’ve talked to, it almost seems amazing to them that anybody would question the need to have gender-neutral language.”

In a fascinating piece for The New Yorker, Goldberg wrote about this growing schism. Rachel Ivey, a young feminist told Goldberg, “If I were to say in a typical women’s-studies class today, ‘Female people are oppressed on the basis of reproduction,’ I would get called out.”

Some students, she explained, would ask, “What about women who are male?”

Limits? What Limits?

    Such extravagant absurdity seems like the stuff of parody, but the stakes are too high to laugh.  They are certainly high for individual transsexuals themselves, whose lives are no happier after their bodies have been mutilated.  A long-term study in Sweden of all the individuals who underwent sex reassignment surgery in that country from 1973 to 2003 concluded:

Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behavior, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.

A recent study in the United States found that 41% of transsexuals reported attempting suicide, many time the rate of the rest of the population. In spite of that, it is now illegal in some states (California, Massachusetts, New Jersey) for therapists to try to help transgendered young people to resolve their feelings in favor of their actual sex . . . you can lose your license to practice if you criticize the emperor’s new clothes..

     There are broader implications for society beyond the issues of transgenderism and transsexualism. Their public celebration is a sign of a culture that has already lost a sense of the sacredness of the human person.  In his 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, Bl. Paul VI said

. . . we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions . . . (Humanae Vitae 17)

    But why accept limits, when we think that there is no God above us to whom we are answerable?  And so we have abortion, lab experiments on human embryos and even the creation of human/animal chimeras at the beginning of life, Euthanasia and socially sanctioned suicide at the end, and in between more and more ways in which human beings and their bodies are reduced to playthings. And now, apparently, there are advocates for the “trans-abled” who say that we should applaud and assist those who feel a desperate need to sever perfectly good limbs, and that to do otherwise would be judgmental and discriminatory.

The Truth In Love

    The prognosis is not good for a society that so eagerly embraces such self-destructive insanity, and is at the same time so desperately determined to shut down anyone who dares to point out the obvious truth.  The logical end of it all is total disintegration unless there is a collective return to reason, of which there seems to be little chance any time soon unless people start turning back to God. We who profess to be Christians must continue to pray for the conversion of society (as well as for unhappy victims of its craziness, such as Bruce Jenner), and we should take very seriously our need to model a different, more Godly way.  But we should also not be afraid to speak the truth about the human person, lovingly but forthrightly, remembering that true compassion means trying to prevent people from harming themselves and others, not in encouraging them to do so or congratulating them after the fact.  After all, if those of us who claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ can’t or won’t be witnesses to His Gospel, who will?

Does It Need To Be 'As Bad As Iran' To Be Bad Enough?

An earlier version of this Throwback was first published in September 2014.

Submit or be derecognized

      For a long time now elite opinion on college campuses has been trying to shut down speech that doesn’t stick to their script, especially religious speech.  Specifically, Christian speech.  The clampdown has now become a little more overt: the California State University system has “derecognized” the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), an Evangelical group, on all 23 of its campuses, as explained in this article [here] by Ed Stetzer in Christianity Today.  The reason for the derecognition (if such a word exists) is that the ICVF refuses to change its rules requiring leaders in the group to be believing Christians.  The state of California has said, in other words, that Christian groups will not be recognized as official groups on campus unless they open up their leadership to people who don’t share, and may even be hostile to, their very reason for existing in the first place.

InterVarsity Students spreading . . . bigotry and intolerance?

Consequences of derecognition

     You may be wondering what the consequences of derecognition are.  According to Greg Jao, National Field Director & Campus Access Coordinator, there are three main things that IVCF chapters will lose:

1)      Free access to rooms (they will now have to pay, and will be shut out if a “recognized" group wants the room).

2)      Access to student activities programs “including”, he says, “new student fairs where we meet most students.”

3)      “We also lose standing when we engage faculty, students and admimnistrators.”

He doesn’t explain in detail what that last point entails. Tish Warren led a similar IVCF group at the private Vanderbilt University a few years ago that experienced a similar fate.  In a separate Christianity Today article that Stetzer quotes at length she explains:

Because we were no longer allowed to use Vanderbilt's name, we struggled to convey that we were a community of Vanderbilt students who met near campus.

In other words, as close to invisible as they can be short of being banned altogether.

Is Christianity "Hate Speech"?

     What’s behind it all?  Stetzer says that “The university system has decided that speech with beliefs that undergird it—and shape how it is organized—has to be derecognized.”  I suppose you could put it that way, but not all “speech with beliefs” is really being targeted.  He allows Warren to be somewhat more specific.  She explains that the banned groups had “crossed a line”, one that

was drawn by two issues: creedal belief and sexual expression. If religious groups required set truths or limited sexual autonomy, they were bad—not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus.

This states the case more plainly.  Notice that it is the same in the wider world: support (not simply tolerance) of what used to be considered sexual heterodoxy is the standard by which elite opinion decides who enjoys basic rights and who does not.  Warren and Jao are both being rather too generous when they posit a desire for “democracy” as one of the motives for the anti-Christian people.  No, democracy is not a priority; these same people have no problem with federal judges overturning state laws and constitutional amendments voted in by 60-70% of the electorate, and at the university level you will not see them applying to the vegetarians, Muslims, and certainly not the LGBTQ groups the same unreasonable demands they have imposed upon the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Don't read that, kids - it might be hate speech

    And that connection to the wider world is what most concerns me. Stetzer starts out his article saying “Now, it’s not persecution”, an admonition he repeats at the end, adding: “I hope they won’t call themselves persecuted, since that lessens the persecution in, for example, Iran.”  If only we could lessen the persecution in Iran so easily!  What he means, of course, is that equating the inconveniences experienced by college students in California to the very real suffering, up to and including torture and death, suffered by Christians in the Middle East tends to diminish our proper sense of horror and outrage at the latter. Fair enough, but on the other hand injustices don’t need to rise to ISIS level, or anywhere near it, to merit condemnation.  And I don’t think he should be in such a hurry to downplay the significance of what has happened in California.

We don't need no stinkin' constitution

     First of all, what the State of California is doing is a direct assault on the constitutional rights of  Christian students.  The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution starts out as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .

Telling members of a religious group whom they must choose as their leaders is an exceptionally unsubtle trespass on the free exercise of religion – and I know that courts have found all sorts of ingenious ways to make laws and constitutional provisions mean the exact opposite of their clear meaning, but if we’re not willing to fight something this blatant, we might as well run the white flag up the pole and get it over with.  Since the courts have also found that the restrictions the Bill of Rights places upon Congress also apply to all other government organs, including state run schools, this is clearly a constitutional issue (as it is not at a private school like Vanderbilt).

     This potential damage here also extends beyond the walls of the university.  The half-spoken message that California State is sending its students is that Christian belief is bad: “not just wrong but evil, narrow-minded, and too dangerous to be tolerated on campus”, as Tish Warren said of the attitude of the authorities at Vanderbilt.  If such a thing is simply a given in the environment where they are formed for four years, how many students are going to be prepared to be open to and tolerant of Christian belief when they get out . . . especially if the outside environment agrees with what they experienced at the university?

Bad is bad

     And, as I have noted in these pages many times, there is a conscious and coordinated campaign underway in the United States and the rest of the Western world to “derecognize” Christianity as a whole.  The mainstreaming of anti-Christian bigotry lays the foundation; simply holding traditional beliefs about morality and marriage makes a person fair game for the foulest and most hateful verbal abuse (see here and here).  Somehow the targets of this vileness, and not the spewers of it, are scorned by elite opinion-makers as “haters” and “bigots”.  And who is going to argue when haters and bigots are defamed, or even threatened with loss of their livelihood (here, here, here) if they oppose the dismantling of traditional morality -  or simply decline to participate actively in its destruction?  This harassment, I submit, is in fact persecution, if not on the level of Iran or Iraq, and sets the stage for worse: once Christians have been completely driven beyond the pale, what's to prevent harsher forms of persecution?  And in fact serious persecutions almost always start with little thing, and with the delegitimizing, the "derecognition", if you will, of the targeted group, 

     Finally, I haven’t discussed the fact that our colleges and universities have, in a very short time (and practically unremarked), undergone a radical change: where formerly they acted in loco parentis, a role in which they protected their students and enforced moral standards, now they actively promote promiscuity and licentiousness . . . and actually punish students for upholding morality.  How can this possibly turn out well?  

     So, to all you Ed Stetzers out there, hold your head up – we have nothing to apologize for. Nobody is confusing California State University with the Islamic Republic of Iran, but what’s happening there is bad enough, and if we allow harassment and injustice to continue, more serious persecution is sure to follow.