Great, so now I belong down under

Which country should you REALLY be living in? Australia G'day Mate! You're a yokker. A true Aussie. You love the beach and barbies, as well as sport and sex. Life couldn't get any simpler, and thats the way it should be. C'mon Aussie, C'mon!

Click Here to Take This Quiz Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

On centers and medians

Mark Sargent of Mirror of Justice blog asks where the political extremes fall in the Catholic Church, and in turn, where the center falls. To him, determining the center seems to be an exercise in perspectivalism:

Rick raises a good question about my post over at dotCommonweal re the dominance of the "extreme right" in Catholic discourse and in the general media, wondering whether I consider Father Neuhaus, George Weigel and others (Robbie George, for example) extreme. Whether one considers another "extreme," depends upon where one stands. More important, it depends upon where the "center" or the "core" is. Those of us who self-dentify as Commonweal Catholics tend to see ourselves as occupying a center position between more radical groups on the "left" (again, the term does not track entirely the political meaning of "left) such as Call to Action and writers such as Wills and Carroll, and the aforementioned writers on the right (same reservation re the political meaning of "right"), with whom we differ to varying degrees on a whole host of issues. Of course, as the recent exchange between Robbie and Mike P and Eduardo suggests, those writers regard themselves as speaking for the core of Catholicism, an assumption with which many of us would argue. Nevertheless, the secular press increasingly looks to that group as the voice of American Catholicism, which at least I regard as a problem.

Problem: Sargent seems to be relying on the ol' straight line metaphor of political affiliation where there are two opposing end points and not so much a center but, to be more geometrically precise, a median. The American way is to identify everything and everybody along a linear axis - a very dualistic way of looking at the world, which of couse, stems from a typically Protestant worldview. "Center" is indeed an apt metaphor for the Catholicism's "belief map," but within a sphere or circle metaphor. What Sargent calls "extremes" are more accurately "peripheries," for in Catholicism, there is a true center: the apostolic teaching of the ages, including past ecumenical councils and ongoing Magisterial guidance. Just so there's no confusion, the center I am referring to here is not an ontological or liturgical center, which could only be occupied by Christ, but rather an ideological or doctrinal center which must be occupied by apostolic teaching and authority.

So in my view, Commonweal is consistently "medianist" (rather than "centrist"), which allows them to be too easily pushed and pulled by the ideological winds of the day. All one has to do to move the median is move the end point. The GOP of the post-Gingrich era has used this strategy to great effect. And that's just too shaky a foundation for one's politics or doctrine. With no objective anchoring point of reference, Commonweal's "centrism" is another's liberalism and yet another's conservatism, which is why "moderate" and "centrism" are highly misleading terms for Catholics. Pope Benedict and JPII have demonstrated themselves to be the true "centrists" of our Church. Medianism may at times be in line with true centrism, but more often than not, it is simply screaming at the umpire from the upper bleachers.

Pope no longer Patriarch of the West

I really don't know what to make of the Pope's decision to drop "Patriarch of the West" from his resume. If, as the Holy Whappers believe, this move signifies a first step in distinguishing his jurisdictional role over the Western Church from the Petrine role over all of Christendom, then it seems perfectly legitimate and reasonable given the our mission to restore unity with the Eastern Church. Pragmatically, however, if this is just the first step in dismantling Papal jurisdiction over the entire Latin Rite the world over, I fear we're in for chaos.

Many have noted that the ideal scenario is that we'd have multiple patriarchs around the world, eg. one for Latin America, one for Africa, one for Asia, or what have you, just like they do in the East. The problem I have is that this sentiment seems to ignore history. The churches currently under the jurisdictional authority of Rome are not like the Eastern autocephs which are to their credit, for the most part, guided by Christ from within, ie. from a profound reverence for the "unchanging" nature of the Divine Liturgy. Inculturation for the East is judicious and organic, not ideological or manufactured. They haven't really needed an extrinsic authority figure to tell them what to do with the Liturgy. Sure, there have been a few messy bumps and flareups with the Old Calendrists, etc. But they have what the West lacks: a Patristic and Apostolic passion for Christ in the Liturgy.

The Latin Rite churches all over the world, by contrast, have grown so used to receiving guidance and discipline from Rome, I think the Liturgy will run amok for decades if Rome abandons jurisdictional control of the Mass, creating more schisms, before any apostolic normalcy is restored. Just look at how the Western churches have mutilated the Mass post-V2, even with all the formal directives from the Vatican.

The best counterargument is exactly what I've mentioned - that top-down management of the Liturgy obviously invites an extrinsicist view of what constitutes the local church, and hence dissent and resistance against the dictates of Rome. The East has done remarkably well for 2000 years without a unitary centralizing power. But that begs the chicken and the egg question: Can the dispersal of jurisdictional power actually cause greater respect for and adherence to the Apostolic Tradition? Or is it only an effect of some other preexisting cause?

Elken Liturgy

Philip Yancey writes about his attempts to meet God in prayer while on a rustic prayer retreat and my goodness, how these people so need good liturgy!

To my great fortune, a herd of 147 elk (I had plenty of time to count them) wandered into the very field where I was sitting. To see one elk is exciting; to watch 147 elk in their natural habitat is enthralling. But I soon learned that to watch 147 elk for two hours is, to put it mildly, boring. They lowered their heads and chewed grass. They raised their heads in unison and looked at a raspy crow. They lowered their heads again and chewed grass. For two hours, nothing else happened. No mountain lions attacked; no bulls charged each other. All the elk bent over and chewed grass.

After a while, the very placidity of the scene began to affect me. The elk had not noticed my presence, and I simply melded into their environment, taking on their rhythms. I no longer thought about the work I had left at home, the deadlines facing me, the reading that Brennan had assigned. My body relaxed. In the leaden silence, my mind fell quiet.

All the reactions Yancey describes in his Natural Geographic moment with the elk are represented in the Sacred Liturgy. It's just sad he had to learn it from hoofed beasts rather than from Mother Church.

Uppity evie chaplains

This is what you get for rejecting the sacraments and for basing the bulk of your religion on trying to convince those "liturgical Christians" that they aren't really Christians. They've been sitting around in their tents on days like today twiddling their thumbs while all those liturgical people were going to Mass and getting ashes on their foreheads.

How unfair! they thought. We feel so left out! No, wait, they're filling themselves with all these external, pious, self-righteous religious acts, the kind Paul condemned loud and clear in Scripture - they really need Jesus! Telling them how wrong they are is an essential part of our constitutional right to free exercise, darnit!

Navy fires them for forgetting that the Navy is not a church or a religious marketplace (duh). Evie chaplains sue for a temporary restraining order (TRO) to keep the Navy from giving them the boot. DC Circuit tells these plaintiffs: sit down! Subtext of Navy's actions - sacramental religions work much better with military culture, because they know who their flock is and keep it simple. They also have an intrinsic appreciation for authority and order (where's the authority and order when your entire religion is founded on a preference for personal revelations over the authority of the Body of Christ across time and space?). Subtext of DC Circuit action - the military has enough to worry about and evies need a reality check. Subtext of my post - alright, alright! so I still got an axe to grind, but these guys are giving the U.S. Armed Forces every reason to simply close down the entire Chaplain Corps.

How to write about Africa

...or, how to spot degenerate Western liberals when they bloviate over the Church's murder of Africans by teaching abstinence.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can't live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Liberals aren't too different when it comes to Asia, or for that matter, anyone different from them. Be sure to read the whole article. Delicious satire.

Redeemer's redemption

I gotta hand it to Tim Keller. He's doing a helluva job...for a Protestant. Harharhar. Seriously, Keller has proven himself to be no charlatan preacher so he's got my hat tip. NY Times has a relatively sophisticated portrayal of "Manhattan's leading evangelist."

But I too question with the Times whether a church can or should be built on a singular personality, other than Christ himself alive and ever-present (which is and can only be the Eucharist):

A looming question for Redeemer, though, is how much of what Dr. Keller and his team have built can be maintained when he ultimately exits the stage. When he was out for several months in the summer of 2002 while undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer, attendance dipped noticeably.

The conventional Protestant reply is that it doesn't really matter. Churches come and go. So long as Christ uses Keller to transform lives and save the lost, then he's doing more than good, even if it all dies away in the long run. All our works are rags to God anyway. The problem with this answer is that besides being trite, it reinforces the "next big thing" mentality where Christians are trained to always look either to be or to consume the next hot Christian fad. Then believers are no longer seeking Christ, but chasing after their own desires and aspirations. This is the essence of a hyper-capitalist, not Christian, culture. Redeemer-type churches do nothing to liberate believers from the iron cage of American solipsism.

In essence, Keller is a good pastor in need of a even better Church.

Renaissance & Haugenmusik

NY Times article on the L'Homme Arme family of Renaissance masses. It frolicks through the winding turns of Renaissance musical arcana before finally arriving at its ideological destination:

Faced with such examples, Mr. Blachly says, "The best I can offer is that sacred and secular were not such separate categories as they have come to be for us."

That may be true, but as much as the sacred and secular have been polarized, so has our typically dualistic culture been guilty of the other extreme, of anointing everything secular as sacred. The defenders of Marty Haugen, et al, tend to argue that throughout church history, liturgical music has always drawn from popular genres, therefore Marty's music is sacred. But the issue for traditionalist contrarians has never been over identifying a purely sacred genre. Pop music is not per se an evil...but most of it IS and Haugenmusik IS. The test is in the Tradition which does impose theological standards, which Von Balthasar's theological aesthetics has helped us to discern. A single melody without any lyrics has a "form" that must be tested for its seaworthiness and longevity on the waters of divine worship. A Josquin Mass though five hundred years old remains remarkably fresh, capacious, and ergonomically well-designed in terms of its musical structure to contain the unfathomable doctrines and prayers of the Credo or Agnus Dei. As today's Mass reading instructs:

No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak; if he does, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse. And nobody puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and the skins too. No! New wine, fresh skins!’ Mark 2:18 - 22

Pop music tends to keep us caged within the prevailing secular Zeitgeist. Haugenmusik is all about naked "spirituality," an individualistic emotionalism incapable of representing any Christological substance. And that's why it and most pop is evil, not because it's pop. May Haugenmusik be an Augenblick on the stage of liturgical history.

Wieseltier on Scientism

Huhoo. This is just too delicious. Opening salvo:

THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. "Breaking the Spell" is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions.

...feast on the rest here. And I thought only Christians found Dennett to be full of crap.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

Thoughtful, heart-warming words from the Ignatius Press Blog's fan mail bag:

I have to say that the Catholic Church and the DaVinci Code Hoax book are full of s***!! The Catholic Church is one the the biggest liars and responsible for the biggest cover-ups in the History of the planet. Christianity has killed more people than any other group in History. This is History!!!! Throughout History, the Catholic Church has alienated, imprisoned, and killed individuals who who were/are free thinkers (scientists, philosophers, scholars, etc...) and came up with ideas and knowledge that went against what the church stated and/or preached, and than later the church accepted these ideas and knowledge as "truth". What about these innocent people who were alienated, imprisoned, and killed for no reason?!!! The church has killed far more people deamed "witches" and/or heretics than you claim in you bulls*** books!!! Why are you so scared?!!! Why are you so stupid and ignorant?!!!!

The Catholic Church is the richest entity on the planet. If the Catholic Church is supposedly into helping people, how can you live with yourselves making and having so much money when people are struggling to live day to day. You make me sick!!!

Hoasca tea & Judicial Activism

Very nicely put by the amici to the hoasca tea-religion case that SCOTUS just ruled on yesterday:

The Government's suggestion that carving out a RFRA exemption from the drug laws would represent judicial activism is entirely backward. This case does not involve courts ordering an exception to an Act of Congress based on general language in the Constitution. It involves an exception to the Controlled Substances Act based on another Act of Congress that expressly calls for exceptions to federal statutes. The case involves two federal statutes, and each must be taken seriously. It is not judicial activism to read the two together and rely on one to create an exception to theother. Judicial activism would be refusing to enforce RFRA.

Chief Justice Roberts and all 8 of his merry justices bought it. And of course, Mirror of Justice has it covered.

You can't handle Religious Freedom

Steve Shiffrin has these conventional thoughts at Mirror of Justice on the Vagina Monologues at Catholic U's.

Freedom is freedom for truth. Error has no rights. This was the perspective of the Church for many centuries. It was used to support censorship and persecution in many countries. The same perspective was employed by Protestant countries for the same purposes and by non-religious dictatorships. The freedom was the same; the truth was different.

At least with respect to the actions of government, Vatican II changed the perspective of the Church. Vatican II respects the dignity of the individual and his or her freedom to make religious choices. It respects the right of individuals to choose error, but hopes to lead them toward truth. As I understand it, liberal Catholics believe that individuals should enjoy the same freedom with respect to Church teaching. They should, for example, have been free publicly to maintain that religious freedom was demanded by appropriate conceptions of human dignity when Church teaching was to the contrary.

First of all, Church teaching cannot be contrary to human dignity, and if you think it does, then you don't get Catholic teaching. The doctrine that "error has no rights" has not been overturned and is still correct, even after Dignitatis Humanae. Persons, however, do have inalienable rights. But I would hold on to the principle that there is no unconditional "right" to spread error, especially harmful error. This does not grant a right to religious institutions to actively suppress error outside its borders. The Vagina Monologues is not a person; it's a play. A university can ban a play from campus. A university can limit what a speaker may or may not speak on if she's invited on the university's dime. To assume that the principle inexorably leads to bloody persecution and repression borders on paranoia. So let's get off the pre-Vatican II Church's back -- it's getting old.

What is almost always overlooked is that the erroneous viewpoints being pushed onto Catholic campuses are not just at variance or at odds with Catholic teaching; they're utter nonsense that do not deserve the respect of university-level discourse. Just because a lot of university-educated people love it doesn't magically transubstantiate bad milk into good meat. VM is not about expanding the debate; it's about pure mockery of any other viewpoint but its own. If it affirms anyone, it does so by way of incitement to hate everything that differs from it. That kind of material belongs on Jerry Springer, not a university campus.

Martyrs of the other drug war

Rob Vischer, law prof at the Univ. of St. Thomas, at AEI Online, makes a fine point in the war over pharmacists' conscience rights:

Hopefully, our elected officials will step back from the rhetoric that has dominated both sides of the debate. They can do so by keeping in mind three fundamental—but frequently overlooked—truths about our society. First, if pressed by pro-life advocacy groups for a conscience clause, legislators should remember that supporting freedom of conscience does not mean that individuals must be legally empowered to act on the dictates of conscience without any possible negative consequence. An individual’s conscience should not be snuffed out by state edict, but neither should it be elevated as an absolute trump over the similarly conscience-driven convictions of employers and customers.

True Christian martyrs have never demanded that the law of the State give them free pass when they stood up for their faith. Christian discipleship entailed saying to oneself, "This is what I believe, and let the chips fall where they may, even to the death if necessary." None of this whining about violation of our conscience rights. When Christians lobby the state to respect human rights, it's on behalf of others who are oppressed and of the State which also needs redemption. But when conservatives expect the state to protect their faith and morality from all the slings and arrows of the world, they fall into the same victimization mentality canonized by the Left and begotten by all our rights-obsessed identity politics. The Cross was never meant be greased and made comfy by the law.

What about the Rights of the Born?

I keep confusing Anne Lamott and Annie Dillard. Both are of this breed of literary "soul sisters" and count Kathleen Norris among their numbers. The former is Protestant and the latter Catholic. Lamott, not surprisingly, had this to say recently in a LA Times op-ed with the silly title, "The Rights of the Born."

I am so confused about why we are still having to argue with patriarchal sentimentality about teeny weenie so-called babies — some microscopic, some no bigger than the sea monkeys we used to send away for — when real, live, already born women, many of them desperately poor, get such short shrift from the current administration.

Most women like me would much rather use our time and energy fighting to make the world safe and just and fair for the children we do have, and do love — and for the children of New Orleans and the children of Darfur. I am old and tired and menopausal and would mostly like to be left alone: I have had my abortions, and I have had a child.

But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women is a crucial part of that: It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society.

The self-contradictions are dizzying.