2017 - Opus Publicum

June 20, 2017 Politics, Uncategorized

It’s Raining in Grand Rapids

The New York Review of Books has a new essay up by Sue Halpern reviewing a recent documentary on Julian Assange. Proactively titled “The Nihilism of Julian Assange,” Halpern—through frequent references to the film—isn’t a big fan of Mr. Assange. In fact, she appears to downright despise him, which only makes sense since Assange, much to the chagrin of the Left, helped cost Hillary Clinton the American Presidency through a series of calibrated leaks. When Assange was releasing documents that embarrassed conservatives and exposed American misdeeds at home and abroad, he was a hero, a man of principles that risked all for the greater good. Now Assange is an unprincipled monster, an opportunist who keeps company with toxic nationalists like Nigel Farage, neo-Nazis in Australia, and allies of Russian president Vladimir Putin. As her praise of Edward Snowden reveals, Halpern is all for leaking classified material, just as long as it helps the “right causes.”

This is not surprising. Over the years, (in)famous leakers like Assange and Snowden have been praised or demonized across the political spectrum. When their work shows how liberal democracy is being compromised, then praise be; but if their work—specifically the work of Assange—apparently undermines the democratic process, then there are not enough condemnatory phrases in the English language available. While sideline legalists have various opinions on what, if any, laws a leaker like Assange has violated, it’s doubtful that his work will stop anytime soon. What’s unclear at this point is if that work will continue to assist the political Right or provide some new cover for the Left. Maybe it will be a bit of both. Either way, democratic legitimacy will continue to be bruised as those holding the reins of power are shown to be the hypocrites, opportunists, and unscrupulous careerists many already suspect.

And why is this a bad thing? Only those still wedded to a belief that liberal democracy has been anything other than a manifest failure should want to see it stand; those with eyes to see are starting to anticipate its long overdue demise. The worry in the air is, “What comes next?” And this is something leakers like Assange cannot assist in answering. The gulf between providing shocking intelligence and proposing a way ahead is radically wide. Assange and other leakers can unsettle the foundations; it is up to those exhausted by the Enlightenment’s lies to start writing the next chapter of the West. And to do that in a manner which is detached from the tenets of liberalism will be an impossible task so long as people insist on keeping some vestiges of the liberal order. Such reformist impulses are understandable, but betrays an absence of nerve and a lack of vision.

This a point missed by secular anti-liberals who believe the imminent plane can be transformed without reference to the transcendent. Talentless to the core, they advocate for steady-to-progressive reform that will meet their personal needs rather than accord with any higher conception of right. Whether motivated by fear or some base desire, those committed to a secular worldview have nothing to propose but ideas that will fail under all circumstances. No commitment to change, no longing for what must come after liberalism, can be actualized if it is motivated by little more than what makes us anxious in this life. Indeed, that is a pathway back to liberalism, as Leo Strauss demonstrated in his review of Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political. Fear, specifically fear of a violent death, becomes the basis for liberalism—an order that makes no demands while providing living space for frivolity, distraction, and discussion. Death is the foreclosure of existence-as-entertainment, not the pathway to eternity.

June 20, 2017 Catholic Social Thought, Economics, Political Economy, Politics, Uncategorized

#ActonU is Upon Us Again

It’s that time of year again, when the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops promotes the anemic Fortnight for Freedom (FFF) and the Acton Institute, headquartered in my hometown of Grand Rapids, MI, holds its annual Acton University gathering. Acton University, as I have discussed before, is less of an academic experience and more of an indoctrination program where (primarily young) Christians can drink deep from the wells of liberalism. Although Acton University is ecumenical in nature, the Acton Institute itself is mostly run by Catholics and targets a Catholic audience. In recent years, has begun pulling in more Eastern Orthodox propagandists, likely because Orthodoxy, unlike Catholicism, lacks a strong social magisterium. That is not to say the Orthodox Church hasn’t spoken on matters such as democracy, the relation between church and state, and economic liberalism; it’s just that Orthodox Christians, particularly in America, are fond of ignoring teachings which does not fit snugly within their personalized worldviews.

The FFF, as most know by now, has been a failure. Since its inception, the United States has, inter alia, legalized same-sex marriage, compelled religious institutions to violate the moral law, and further marginalized Christianity from public life. Some, of course, rejoiced at the election of Donald Trump on the questionable belief that he would serve as a protector for Christians, both at home and abroad. That hasn’t happened, at least not to the extent expected. Instead, Trump has opted to aggravate the sorrowful conflict in Syria while targeting Chaldean Catholics for deportation and death on highly questionable grounds. The position of the Catholic Church in the U.S. has not improved since Trump’s election, and pandering to the empty promises of liberalism, such as “religious freedom,” won’t do a damn bit of good.

Don’t tell that to the Acton Institute, which leans heavily on largescale donations from economic liberals to advocate for an unholy union between Christianity and capitalism. The strategy of Acton University is rather simple. First, without regard for the deep-rooted methodological and philosophical disagreements at the heart of the economics discipline, Acton sells the heterodox “Austrian School” of economics as a “science” in a highly disingenuous manner. Second, with this misinformation in place, Acton’s next step is to selectively latch onto Church teachings or the private opinions of select theologians to convince those in attendance that rather than condemning core elements of capitalism, such as usury and unjust wages, the Christian tradition affirms the free-market system without regard to core questions of justice. For Acton, the only injustices worth focusing on are those allegedly perpetrated by the government when it imposes environmental, social, and labor regulations.

Orthodox and Protestants are likely more susceptible to this raw nonsense than Catholics, though that’s not saying much given the large number of Catholics ready, willing, and able to flush away magisterial documents such as Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Pope Pius XII recently translated address on the 50th anniversary of Rerum. If they pay any mind to the social magisterium, it is usually focuses on more recent iterations such as John Paul II’s Centesimus Annos, and even then they must apply a strict hermeneutic of selectivity in order to avoid the hard truth that the document does not baptize the global capitalist order. As for the stern (albeit sometimes confusing and imprecise) statements of Pope Francis against capitalism, well, they are reduced to little more than the “private views” of a man yet to be enlightened by the tenets of “economic science.”

It is probably too much to hope for the Church to step in, investigate Acton’s errors, and demand that those Catholics who participate in or promote those errors cease immediately. We are long past the point when the Church can be bothered to redirect the faithful so that they do not lose their souls. However, dare we hope that small, but noticeable, shifts in the international order in recent years might inspire Catholics both old and young to rethink any attempt to fuse liberalism—specifically economic liberalism with its indifference toward moral and justice—with the Gospel? Might not the recent “rediscovery” of integralism, with its emphasis on the authentic and proper relationship been the spiritual and temporal orders, spur Catholics to call out liberal projects like Acton University and submit them to withering criticism? Much has already been written against Acton’s diabolical enterprise; a great deal more remains to be done.

June 13, 2017 Catholic Social Thought, Law, Politics, Uncategorized

Excommunicating Carl Schmitt

A recent article appears in Telos, “Carl Schmitt and the Nineteenth-Century Catholic Reaction on Original Sin,” by Brian J. Fox seeks to upend the narrative that Schmitt, despite his decades-long estrangement from the Church, was hewn to an orthodox Catholic worldview during his Weimar-era writings. Fox, who combs through Schmitt’s private journals and other writings, believes that Schmitt, contrary to the Catholic reactionaries he leans upon (Maistre, Bonald, and Cortes), had little regard for Catholic orthodoxy as it pertains to human nature and original sin. Rather, Schmitt drank from the well of Gnosticism, leading the controversial jurist to adopt a radically dualistic worldview which, according to Fox, is at the heart of Schmitt’s secular authoritarianism. While Schmitt superficially shares the pessimistic view of human nature espoused by someone like Donoso Cortes, when it comes to the state, Schmitt fails to appreciate its imperfect constitution, contrary to Catholic teaching.

What this means for the ongoing use (and abuse) of Schmitt’s oeuvre by the Left and the Right isn’t clear from Fox’s piece. Even if he is correct in his assessment of Schmitt’s anthropology and its connection to his apparent authoritarianism, it’s unlikely that the Left—who have never had much time for any religious element in Schmitt’s writings—will pay it much mind. As for the Right, many of whom would also prefer not to think of Schmitt in expressly religious terms either, a “de-Catholicized” Schmitt is probably an attractive figure. The impulse toward authoritarianism still remains strong, especially in pluralistic socio-political states which are unlikely to unify around any transcendent conception of the state and man’s final end. That human beings are an unhinged, murderous, and self-destructive lot is apparent from history; there’s no need to bring revelation into the discussion.

Catholics, by and large, have little use for Schmitt at this juncture in history. To some, Schmitt is an embarrassment: a (temporarily) excommunicated opportunist forever sullied by his association with the Nazi Party. To the extent that Schmitt’s works reflect an authentic Catholic outlook, it is an outlook now deemed to be “outmoded” by virtue of the Second Vatican Council’s teachings on religious liberty and the Church’s relationship to the modern (liberal) world. Schmitt’s preferred political thinkers, despite being faithful Catholics, are connected to the same shopworn anti-liberal sentiments that produced Pius XI’s Syllabus Errorum. Even more conservative Catholic writers are unlikely to repair to Schmitt due to his perceived aversion toward natural law, not to mention his secularized decisionism. Now that Fox has arrived to posthumously excommunicate Schmitt from the Catholic intellectual fold, the chances of Schmitt ever being assumed back into the Catholic socio-political tradition are growing slimmer.

Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. After all, given the confusing mess of secular-born ideologies that have been passed around as true expressions of the Catholic social tradition in recent decades, there’s no need to muddy the waters further—even if the dirt is coming from the Right. That doesn’t mean, however, that Schmitt can’t still be useful in a general sense. His instinctive anti-liberalism (which also manifested itself as anti-socialism) and penetrating critiques of liberal legal theory can still be useful tools for those of a certain bent to put to bed the lie that human beings are naturally good, and so too is any political system predicated upon that erroneous belief. And regardless of the origins of his pessimistic anthropology, Schmitt knew better than many today the dangers of liberalism, of the eternal “discussion,” and the promotion of life-as-entertainment, devoid of risk, commitment, and an ever-ready belief that there is more to existence in this world than what Leo Strauss called the joyless pursuit of joy.

June 10, 2017 Church, Roman Catholic Church

Looking for Antiques Near Sedevacantists

I am not a professional antique hunter; in fact, I haven’t the foggiest idea of what it entails other than walking into stores, looking around, and waiting for something to catch my eye. More often than not, this results in a series of failed endeavors where some anxious owner of a small town shop puts his hopes of making a sale on me and I inevitably disappoint. If more of these enterprises sold bottled water or cigarettes, I would at least provide them a courtesy purchase. Instead, I typically find myself hoping another customer enters the premises so I can bolt for the door, walk briskly down the sidewalk to the car, and never look back. Similar scenarios involving yours truly have been played out at used booksellers, record stores, and comic book shops across the land.

Today’s tale, which went down with nothing in the way of either a successful purchase or the need to make a hasty exit (the shop owner paid me no mind), took place in the two-star town of Middleville, Michigan, a 30-minute drive south of Grand Rapids surrounded by farms, bars, and gas stations. The downtown area has benefitted from a bit of investment in recent years, though it’s nothing to write home about. Approximately 500 feet from the business district, on good old Main St., sits an old Protestant church building with a weatherworn sign out front reading: “Most Holy Rosary Church – Catholic Latin Mass – Sunday 6pm.”

Knowing immediately that this was no diocesan church, I repaired to my phone and after a bit of searching confirmed my suspicions that it was a sedevacantist chapel—one that happens to be run by the CMRI (Religious Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen). Other than the American flag flying distastefully over the structure, there was nothing especially remarkable about it. I couldn’t see in the windows; but at least lightning didn’t strike me down as I walked around the property wondering if its ever visited outside the normal operating hours. Truth be told, I had hoped the front doors would fly open, with either a cleric or—more likely—sacristan there to inquire about my business. In the few minutes I was nosing about, I had even come up with a few form answers, my hope being to engage a real-life sedevacantist in everyday chitchat. Realizing that was not coming to pass, I hitched my horses to the wagon and moved down the road.

West Michigan, as most should know, is a deeply conservative region of the Midwest. Both the Christian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church of America have their headquarters here, and for decades Grand Rapids and Holland were dominated by a Dutch Calvinist ethos. While that ethos has retracted in recent years, particularly in Grand Rapids, the area remains a conservative hub with neoconservatives, Tea Partiers, and old-guard movement conservatives uneasily occupying the political landscape together, self-assured that the political Left will never amount to anything more than a blip on the radar. Grand Rapids’s Easttown neighborhood may fly rainbow flags and boast lawns littered with anti-Trump and “Black Lives Matter” signs, but the ideologies they represent will never be politically relevant.

Catholicism in the region is, at best, a mixed bag. The “spirit of Vatican II” hit the diocese of Grand Rapids like a hurricane, leveling orthodoxy, liturgy, and good taste without compunction. The surrounding dioceses didn’t fare much better. Today, only a couple of “official” safe havens remain for those with a conservative-to-traditional sensibility. And so it came as little surprise that sedevacantists have set-up shop on the distant outskirts of the distant outskirts of town, though without much self-promotion or fanfare. Apparently to be with the sedevacantists requires special election, not advertising; a certain form of degraded Calvinism, as usual, gets the last say around these parts.

Had I come across one of the sede faithful who attend Most Holy Rosary, what might have happened? What would have offended them more? That I recognize Francis as the Pope of Rome or that I am a Greco-Catholic? Maybe they would have gone on to me about the horrors of married priests, the failure of “Uniates” to become “full Catholics” by adopting the Roman Rite, or the use of the vernacular in a large swathe of Eastern Catholic worship. Perhaps they would have thought of me as an “Eastern Orthodox schismatic.” On the other hand, maybe they would have been courteous, hospitable, and inviting. Could it be that they would have looked into the eyes of this poor sinner and felt a genuinely (albeit misplaced) longing to save my soul, to bring me closer to Christ, not for their own glory but the greater glory of God? I have met a Calvinist or two with similar hopes for my soul; it’s still possible I’ll come across a sedevacantist who wants the best for me, too.

June 7, 2017 Eastern Catholicism

Pray for the Russian Church

Much to my surprise (and delight), the Wall Street Journal ran a story today covering the plight of the Russian Greek Catholic Church (RGCC) and their ongoing synod in Italy which, among other things, is seeking greater recognition of their rights from Pope Francis. Here are some excerpts.

A group of Russian Catholics is demanding greater recognition from Pope Francis, saying the Vatican’s appeasement of Moscow threatens its very existence.

. . .

On the agenda is a longstanding request for their own bishop and resources for training their own clergy. Church leaders say the pope has ignored their appeals as he pursues closer ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, which is dominant in the country.

. . .

The complaints of the Russian Byzantine Catholic Church echo those of other groups who feel Pope Francis is willing to sacrifice their well-being for the sake of other priorities.

Catholics in Ukraine accuse the pope of playing down Russian aggression toward their country in order to placate the Russian Orthodox Church, which has criticized Ukrainian Catholics’ opposition to Russian-backed separatists. Russian President Vladimir Putin has cultivated a close relationship with the Orthodox Church as part of a nationalist campaign.

Lamentably, Francis and Vatican hyper-ecumenists are not the only Catholics willing to overlook the plight of Greco-Catholics. As I have discussed elsewhere several times, far too many traditional Latin Catholics romanticize the Russian Orthodox Church and the secular Russian state on the belief that both represent twin pillars of Christian virtue. While the Russian Orthodox Church should be commended at times for its public witness against numerous liberal pathologies, no one should ignore the hard truth that many Russians remain nominally Orthodox and the Russian nation itself is steadily depopulating. Although the RGCC is small, it will never have any chance for ground-level growth unless it is given proper recognition and support from the Roman authorities. Now more than ever the RGCC needs the prayers of all of the faithful. With more and more Russians realizing that Orthodox Church has been compromised by secular politics, there is a moment of opportunity for the RGCC to bring souls into the Catholic fold. But will the Vatican let them?

June 5, 2017 Economics

A Remark on Economics/Political Economy

The Josias recently offered up a fresh translation of Pope Pius XII’s 1941 Pentecost radio address which, inter alia, commemorates the 50th anniversary of Leo XIII’s landmark social encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Patrick Smith, who had a hand in its publication, offers up some thoughts on the address over at his web-log while highlighting Pius XII’s reaffirmation of the Catholic Church’s competence to teach when the social and moral order intersect. That is distinct from teaching on purely practical matters, such as how a society ought to calibrate its competition (antitrust) penalties or design social safety nets. While popes—and indeed the episcopate as a whole—can weigh-in with suggestions, the faithful are not necessarily bound to follow them.

With this noted, it is important to highlight the fact that a great deal of confusion surrounds statements such as, “The Church does/does not have the competence to speak on economics.” Why? Because “economics,” in the widespread understanding, refers to a particular academic discipline which is often regarded as part of the “social sciences.” Economics, in this sense, refers to both a theoretical and practical discipline which, like so many academic disciplines, remains fractured into a series of “schools,” many of which disagree with each other on questions ranging from methodology to normativity. Those wishing to set aside the Church’s social magisterium when it conflicts with the tenets of libertarian or neoliberal ideology are, in a certain sense, correct when they say that the Church has no competence to speak on economics when “economics” is understood as “economic science.” (More on that below.) This is an easy parry, and one that needs to be addressed.

One way to do that is for Catholics who wish to defend the Church’s authentic social magisterium to move away from using the expression “economics” as commonly understood in favor of an older—and more defensible—expression, “political economy,” which does a better job of capturing the policy aspect of economics. Economics is not, as many economists would have it, a “value neutral” science; behind every economic theory or research question lies pre-scientific value judgments over what is to be studied, why, and how. Anthropological assumptions, which have nothing to do with economics per se, animate most branches of the economics discipline, and too often those assumptions are directly at odds with what revelation and natural reason tell us about the human person. Today, however, the economics discipline has cloaked itself in the garb of the physical sciences in order to give itself a prestige which it may not deserve. As the old joke goes, economists love to say that what they do is similar to what physicists and biologists do; but physicists and biologists would never dare say that what they do is similar to what an economist does.

June 3, 2017 Philosophy, World

Least Amount of Terror, Greatest Amount of Security

In the provocative Preface to the English translation of his Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, Leo Strauss opines that “[t]he controversy between [reason and revelation/philosophy and theology] can easily degenerate into a race in which he wins who offers the smallest amount of security and the greatest terror.” “But,” Strauss continues, “just as an assertion does not become true because it is shown to be comforting, so it does not become true because it is shown to be terrifying.”

Sitting in the background of these remarks, penned three decades after the original German publication of the Spinoza book, is the problem of Heidegger, or more generally, the problem of existentialism—both religious and atheistic. An insecure world, gripped by terror, is what existentialism wishes to both expose and relieve. That relief, however, can only come about “if the highest of which a man knows is absolutely secure,” or so says Strauss. Revelation offers the security of truth, but the terrifying prospect that not even all men who come to knowledge of the truth will be secure in the end. For a philosopher like Heidegger—to turn to Strauss again—“there is no security, no happy ending, no divine shepherd, hope is replaced by thinking, the longing for eternity or belief in anything eternal is understood as stemming from ‘the spirit of revenge,’ from the desire to escape from all passing-away into something that never passes away.”

In considering the state of religion today (particularly Christianity), somewhat removed from the more poignant existential concerns of early 20th century Teutonic philosophers and theologians, it is possible to say that it has come around to the idea that best way to touch men’s souls is to offer the least amount of terror and the greatest degree of security (at least as concerns his final end). This shift, which among “magisterial” Christian confessions, is in noticeable tension with their respective traditions of promoting insecurity and terror as a sure (though perhaps not the surest) path to virtue (and onward to salvation), is often castigated as “liberal,” with “liberal” too often meaning little more than “not conservative” or, rather, “not traditional.” From a certain point of view, this trend does appear to start from the reality of insecurity in this world to a hope for security in the next; terror today does not mean terror for eternity; and the God who made all things good will not tolerate His creation to be lost to sin.

There is something paralyzing about this view, at least as it concerns the time that remains before the end of all things. Granted, under conditions of radically reduced terror and unprecedentedly amplified security, the temporal plane becomes a blank canvass onto which man can lightly sketch or intricately detail his greatest hopes and fears; his basest desires and noblest instincts; and so on, and so forth. There is, broadly speaking, a “background” or “source” to which he can repair to for guidance, namely a holy book with an ostensibly inspired but contested canon that fails to provide its own proper hermeneutic, though except for those who are typically castigated as “fundamentalist,” this need not be the only source. Convention rather than nature becomes the measuring stick, with too little scrutiny being given as to where and when those conventions emerged or why. If “why” is explored at all, it is explored in a “scientific” manner, that is the manner which sociology and psychology and anthropology deem appropriate; man’s movement from cannibalism and rape to agriculture and marriage has a survival component and nothing to do with the illumination of his faculties, either from within or above.

Whether or not this all seems personally quite horrific is secondary to the truth that there are those who do indeed see it as quite horrific. Against the narrative of greatest security and least terror comes a flurry of reminders in the opposite direction, rooted—again—not in existentialist concerns per se, but a nagging sense that physical and psychic hardships of an earlier age pointed toward the truth that without the transcendent, man’s position in this world amounted to nothing. It would have been better to have never been born into a world riddled with war, famine, and pestilence if death could not bring anything except a cessation of the misery without the promise of redemption. But since not all men have an equal participation in these miseries, and by a sheer act of the will, choose to bring new miseries down upon others for their own gain, death alone cannot be the answer—it should not be the answer. This belief, rooted in what seems to be a certain “natural” instinct for justice, should be a relic of bygone ages; it seems look an entirely inappropriate basis for conversion, repentance, and (possible) salvation.

May 30, 2017 Catholic Social Thought, Law

A Modest (Catholic) Objection to Richard Epstein’s Legal Vision

If I reflect back on my time in law school (I graduated 10 years ago) and my period working in a law school (which lasted roughly 5 years), there is a good chance I read more books and articles by Richard Epstein than any other soul. Epstein, an emeritus professor of the University of Chicago Law School and current professor at New York University School of Law, is easily the most influential libertarian legal academic in history. Though he has made some intellectual shifts over the decades, such as foregoing his youthful commitment to deontological libertarianism in favor of the consequentialist libertarianism often touted by those associated with the Law & Economics (L&E) movement, Epstein has remained surprisingly consistent in his belief that a good system of private law (torts, contracts, and property) can do a better job than public regulation in producing positive social-welfare gains. And though it seems like Epstein has written on every legal field under the sun (including Roman law), his primary focus remains private law and classical doctrinal analysis.

In a recent issue of the University of Chicago Law Review, Epstein comes to the defense of his preferred realm of legal concepts with an illuminating essay, “Concepts before Percepts: The Central Place of Doctrine in Legal Scholarship.” Epstein is disappointed that “the legal academy is awash in novel approaches to law, driven by a deep distaste for doctrinal analysis” for “[t]here is a strong push for empirical research, economic modeling and philosophical speculation, all at the expense of traditional doctrinal analysis based on close reading of decided cases.” As an empirical matter, Epstein is right. Ever since L&E took off in the 1970s, law review editors have found themselves drowning in submissions promising to revolutionize some area of the law by blending it with another academic discipline (philosophy, literature, basket weaving, etc.). Moreover, a premium is now placed on empirical analysis and fancy formulas, probably because they help make legal academia “look like” other, arguably more respected, fields. Without wishing to say there is no place in legal academia for such scholarship, there comes a point when it is necessary to look at the legal system itself and see if it is accomplishing what it ought to.

But herein lies the problem with Epstein’s article and, indeed, much of Epstein’s scholarship. Only by accepting Epstein’s conviction that the social end of the legal system ought to be “maximiz[ing] the welfare of all individuals under inevitable conditions of scarcity.” For Epstein, this means leaning on the “Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks measures of social welfare” because “they respect the subjectivity of individual preferences while using a compensation formula to measure collective social welfare.” Nowhere in Epstein’s writings is a clear defense of this position over-and-against thicker understandings of the common good, particularly the sort promoted by the Catholic intellectual tradition. Ultimately, what Epstein wants is a legal system that respects freedom of contract and property rights above all else, with the tort law serving as a private regulator of material harms. It is the market, not a clear conception of the common good, which orders society; any encroachment on free competition is anathema except in rare instances where there is a restraint on trade, such as cartelization.

This is a position no Catholic can accept, as Pope Pius XI made perfectly clear in his 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno.

Just as the unity of human society cannot be founded on an opposition of classes, so also the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. Destroying through forgetfulness or ignorance the social and moral character of economic life, it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect. But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life – a truth which the outcome of the application in practice of the tenets of this evil individualistic spirit has more than sufficiently demonstrated. Therefore, it is most necessary that economic life be again subjected to and governed by a true and effective directing principle. This function is one that the economic dictatorship which has recently displaced free competition can still less perform, since it is a headstrong power and a violent energy that, to benefit people, needs to be strongly curbed and wisely ruled. But it cannot curb and rule itself. Loftier and nobler principles – social justice and social charity – must, therefore, be sought whereby this dictatorship may be governed firmly and fully. Hence, the institutions themselves of peoples and, particularly those of all social life, ought to be penetrated with this justice, and it is most necessary that it be truly effective, that is, establish a juridical and social order which will, as it were, give form and shape to all economic life. Social charity, moreover, ought to be as the soul of this order, an order which public authority ought to be ever ready effectively to protect and defend.

Of course, I don’t expect that Epstein, a man who has kept his religious leanings to himself, to accept the magisterial teachings of the Church. However, those Catholics inclined to agree with Epstein’s approach to law and the economy ought to think twice about how far they are willing to follow Epstein down his libertarian path. Even though Epstein has provided some of the best and most spirited defenses of a strong system of private law available, it is his unquestioned ideological attachment to certain libertarian premises behind his view of what the private law ought to look like which renders that view unacceptable by Catholic lights. Further, while Epstein’s instincts do appear to be in the right place with regard to private law holding a higher position in the social order over public regulation, the latter cannot be set aside or reduced to the level Epstein and other libertarians wish to see. Even freedom of contract—one of Epstein’s preferred legal doctrines—must be scrutinized in the light of what is being contracted for. For while there is no sensible reason Farmer Bob can’t contract to trade 10 chickens for Farmer Joe’s prized sow, it’s a different story altogether when Farmer Bob is contracting to pimp out his wife for that pig.

May 25, 2017 Church, Eastern Orthodox Church

Unfair to Dreher?

Recently, over at that great forum of learned and calm disputation known as Facebook, my friend Conor Dugan posted a link to his recent review of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option for Catholic World Report. Although I disagree with some of Dugan’s comments on the book, I am not interested in critiquing it. In response to Dugan’s post, Dreher himself wrote the following: “I do not mind at all constructive criticism, or any kind of criticism, as long as it challenges what I actually wrote in the book. But so many of these reviews don’t even do that. It’s bizarre. I wonder why that is?” This prompted me to write the following reply (to which I expect no answer to):

Because, in all fairness, much of what you wrote is derivative and seems divorced from the intellectual moorings you wanted it to have. Also keep in mind that no matter how much time goes on, people won’t forget the manner in which you left the Catholic Church; besmirched the Catholic Church for years in your writings; and yet repair to Catholicism whenever you need to add some heft to your positions (heft which you apparently cannot find from the Orthodox).

As I have noted elsewhere, people have been doing what you are now marketing for years—decades even. It’s not new. It doesn’t require a catchy title. And unlike what you are proposing, these folks—particularly traditional Catholic communities such as the one found in St. Mary’s, Kansas — aren’t backing down or retreating from the world. They are working — to quote St. Pius X’s motto—”to restore all things in Christ.” There is very little of that restorationist spirit in your book.

Please understand that I am saying this in all honesty and charity. While I would agree that some criticisms of your book have been uncharitable, I think in your understandable desire to defend yourself, you are overlooking some of the “meta” issues surrounding your work.

Although an argument could be made that Dreher’s confessional leanings should not affect the reception of his work, the truth of the matter is that he does strike a lot of people, particularly Catholics, as an opportunist who leans heavily on the Catholic tradition (or, at least, his own interpretation of it) while simultaneously rejecting the Church which gave birth to it. Moreover, Dreher appears to be insensitive to the fact that there are those in the West—including Catholics—who oppose Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church not out of some naïve love for secular liberalism but because of Russia’s longstanding and ongoing history of aggression toward the Catholic Church.

For instance, Dreher is quick to defend Russia from its Western critics, but fails to take note of Russia’s illegal actions in Crimea and east Ukraine, including backing the persecution of Greek Catholics in the region. While Dreher recently opined that he “bristle[s]… at restrictions on religious liberty in Russia, in particular on the freedom of minority forms of Christianity,” he quickly writes this off as little more than an expression of his “Westernized view of how religion relates to society.” Now that Dreher is apparently cognizant of this, does that mean he now realizes that his “Westernized view” is wrong and that, as an Orthodox Christian, he should adopt the “Russian view”? That’s all fine and well if he does, but he should realize that by aligning with the ideology of the Russian state and its vassal church, Dreher places himself directly at odds with Catholicism—the very thing he needs above all else to advance his idea (or career).

There is more. As already noted above and elsewhere on this web-log, Dreher’s “Benedict Option” brand has been chided as derivative, incomplete, and retreatist. There are Catholic communities all over the world which have been living out what Dreher calls the “Benedict Option” for decades, and none of them saw fit to promote themselves through blogs, TV appearances, and book deals. They are simply working and living as they are supposed to be—in accordance with the timeless principles of the Catholic Church. And even those who find it impossible to relocate to an intentional Catholic community still find it possible to practice their faith without succumbing to the machinations of secular liberalism. And so it shouldn’t be difficult to see why Catholics might be put off that Dreher—an unapologetic rejecter of Catholicism—is hijacking their way of life in order to fill his bank account.

While some lines of criticism against The Benedict Option book do miss the mark (particularly those lines of criticism coming from liberal Christians), I do believe that in Dreher’s race to defend himself from all charges, he overlooks why so many Catholics are unsympathetic to his various projects. What can he do to correct that situation? One might hope, at the very least, that he publicly repents of the ways in which he has uncharitably attacked the Catholic Church since his departure more than a decade ago. I don’t see that happening, however, but with God all things are possible.

May 23, 2017 Church, Movies, Roman Catholic Church

Some Thoughts on The Keepers

Less is being made of the new Netflix murder-drama spectacle The Keepers than I had anticipated. After the rousing success of Making a Murderer and, prior to that, the podcast Serial, I had assumed that The Keepers would become the talk around the water cooler at thousands of offices across the country. Apparently not. That is not to say that there hasn’t been some discussion of the miniseries’ contents. The graphic depictions of sexual abuse on teenage girls at a Baltimore Catholic school in the 1960s are as difficult to overlook as they are to stomach. Personally, following the grotesque revelations made in episodes 2 and 3, I had to hit pause on the show lest I find myself overtaken by irrational anticlericalism. Yes, I am well aware that the abuse accounts contained in the series are a gross exception, not the general rule, but acknowledging that fact does not relieve the burning sense of betrayal all Catholics should feel when presented with evidence of priests who violate all standards of decency and care in pursuit of their vile desires.

Like any expose of the Catholic Church, there are points where The Keepers tries to exaggerate the extent of secrecy, malfeasance, and general vice within the Church. There are, naturally, stories of people losing (or, rather, abandoning) their faith because of the abuse that went on, and the “hero” of the story—Sister Catherine Cesnik, who was murdered because she was apparently prepared to expose the abuse scandal in 1969—was a “hip” nun who had been granted permission to live outside of the cloister sans habit prior to her death. (It is hard to not shake the feeling that if she had remained living with her order rather than a mid-grade apartment complex, she might still be alive.)

Beyond the tales of abuse, corruption, and cover-ups galore, The Keepers provides an indirect, but interesting, snapshot of Catholic life during the reforms following the Second Vatican Council. While the image of Catholicism as it appeared in decades prior is still present, there is a noticeable shift in attitude among some of those interviewed about what it meant to be Catholic. For instance, one interviewee, an ex-Jesuit priest, had at one point proposed marriage to Sister Catherine just prior to his ordination and before she was to take her final vows. He was unashamed in his recollection that he had grown to love her; and though she apparently talked him into fulfilling his vocation, it didn’t “take” as they say. Like so many priests and religious after Vatican II and the laicization of the Church, he opted to abandon his calling, perhaps no longer seeing any “value” to it.

As the series proceeds, it’s hard not to notice the shift in aesthetics and tone that are presented over the decades. Well-adorned temples that had been standing for more than a century give way to barns decked out with modernist statuary surrounding priests vested in horse blankets presiding over an emaciated rite. One of the abuse victims, up until her grueling trial of attempting to get the Diocese of Baltimore to take action against the priest who repeatedly raped her, boasted of her involvement in the Church, complete with serving as an “Extraordinary Minister” of the Eucharist. Now, however, the unconsecrated fingers that once held the Body of Christ have been washed of all dealings with the Catholic Church. There was, in her mind, nothing left for the Church to give in exchange for everything some of its priests had taken from her decades ago.

In addition to the abuse accounts themselves, nothing is more chilling in the series than the descriptions of how these perverted clerics used the confessional to their advantage. Without compunction, these priests excommunicated themselves by violating the sacred seal of Confession in order to manipulate their victims into submitting to their carnal desires. While the abuses detailed in The Keepers are undoubtedly excessive, they do call to mind the more general problem of how clerics can use confession to inflict psychic and emotional harm on others, all in the name of being their “spiritual fathers.” Rather than dispensing God’s infinite mercy, they seek to aggrandize themselves by micro-managing the souls entrusted to their care, often leading them not to virtue but to emotional confusion and spiritual despair.

It is difficult for me to recommend The Keepers to everyone. Those who have suffered some form of abuse, regardless of the source, will find the graphic depictions contained in the miniseries difficult to stomach. Those already inclined to blame the Catholic Church for so many of the evils in this world will probably find the series to be little more than a confirmation of all of their prejudices. Even faithful Catholics might be so put off by what unfolds during the documentary that they may begin to question their place in the Church generally. Heaven forbid. However, despite its flaws and occasional biases, The Keepers should remind us that the Church is both a divine and very human institution. It is not, by virtue of its divine establishment, immune from satanic machinations and the corroding power of sin. Its history is one riddled with crises, both moral and doctrinal. While it may be difficult to acknowledge that, particularly in a day and age when “religion” is believed to be either outdated or representative of little more than easygoing sentimentality for the “spiritual,” there’s no good reason to look away from that reality, either.