Obama and Catholics

Colleen Carroll Campbell:

'Among Catholics, the most egregious example of Obama's broken promise of religious tolerance is the one dominating diocesan headlines now: His administration's push for a mandate that would require Catholic institutions to violate the teachings of their church by covering contraceptives in their health care plans — including sterilization and drugs that induce abortions.

'The mandate would be controversial even if accompanied by the standard religious exemption that allows faith-based organizations to opt out of government regulations that violate their religious beliefs. But the Obama administration has gone a step further, by crafting a religious exemption for the mandate so narrow that it excludes nearly all Catholic hospitals, elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities and charitable organizations — virtually everyone, it seems, except Catholic parishes and religious orders. The upshot: Catholic colleges that teach abortion is evil must pay for abortifacient drugs for their students and Catholic hospitals that refuse to sterilize patients must subsidize sterilization for their employees.'

This is a militantly secular administration that uses federal regulatory agencies to legislate policies that simply would have no traction in Congress.
Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/colleen-carroll-campbell/article_364e32fb-45fc-536f-bfc6-f7a703a3b77a.html#ixzz1arP1ngmS

"The Exasperation of a Democratic Billionaire"

Mortimer Zuckerman is interviewed about our current crisis and the president. He compares Obama to Reagan:

'I was not a Republican and I was not an admirer of his before I knew him," continues Mr. Zuckerman. "And you know, Harry Truman had a wonderful definition for the presidency. He said the president has to be someone who can persuade the American people to do what they don't want to do and to like it. And that's what you have to do. Somebody like Reagan had that authority. He was liked so much and he had a kind of moral authority. That's what this president has lost."

What is "ideology" and what is wrong with it?

A thoughtful post by Fr. Dwight Longenecker. An excerpt:

'Ideologies are most often false religions. Ideologies are for people with too much pride or too few brains, or too little courage to actually take a religion (any religion) seriously and follow it to it's proper conclusion. Instead they jump on the bandwagon of some shallow ideology (and all ideologies are shallow) and seek some sort of economic or social or political solution.'

"Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet"

Nice piece about technology as a source of hope.

An excerpt:

'Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.

'That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world.'

Dark energy, accelerating expansion of the universe, etc.

My knowledge of physics is quite limited, though I am fortunate that my very gifted high school teacher gave me a lifelong interest and appreciation of it. Yesterday's interview with Nobel Prize winner Adam Reiss on NPR was fascinating.

What Dr. Reiss and his fellow recipients discovered in studying a supernova was that its vast matter continues to accelerate. That does not make sense, at least under the assumptions we live with. An explosion on Earth will accelerate particles initially, but gravity gradually slows down those particles. Dr. Reiss and his group have evidence that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate; therefore, gravity does not seem to have the expected effects. Thus, the Big Bang seems to be continuously banging after all these years.

Isaac Newton has been dead for almost three hundred years, and physics continues to thrill and mystify. In fact, the mysteries of physics are similar to Christian sacraments: they are truths partially revealed. Newton was a genius who dabbled in all kinds of subjects, including the occult, while pioneering the Enlightenment. Other greats have followed. Most were far more religious than they would admit because the physicist wants to understand the secrets of the universe: space, motion, stars, origins, life, death, and the future. Such inquiry requires a fusion of reason and faith that the theologian more gladly and willingly accepts and admits. Some geniuses such as Stephen Hawking fool themselves through an intense faith in no faith; they are more sophisticated versions of Flannery O'Connor's Hazel Motes in Wise Blood.

My purpose is not to criticize physicists or to bring them back down to the little planet of my small mind, but rather, to say that they are on a noble humanistic endeavor more closely akin to the work of St. Thomas Aquinas than they realize. They know they are on a mission bigger than themselves. They asks questions which are ultimately religious, even if those questions are postulated in scientic terms.

UPDATE: In another development in physics, scientists claim to have clocked a particle called a neutrino at a speed faster than the speed of light. If so, there will be an exception that swallows the rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.

Struggling with religious faith...

A discussion of David Horowitz's book, A Point in Time. Horowitz says:

"I wish I could place my trust in the hands of a Creator," he writes forlornly at one point. "I wish I could look on my life and the lives of my children and all I have loved and see them as preludes to a better world. But, try as I might, I cannot."
Jeff Jacoby responds:

'Judaism regards human mortality not as a reflection of the world's meaninglessness, but as G0d's greatest gift to the men and women He creates in His image. A lifetime — that brief window between dust and dust — is the opportunity He grants each of us to become His partners in creation by making the world a better, kinder, more hopeful place. Our job is not to accept the world as it is, nor to make our peace with the idea that eventually we "will be no one and nowhere." Judaism believes in life after death, but it is only in life before death that human achievement is possible.'

What if the classics were more valuable than for reaffirming our own thoughts?

It is possible to miss the boat.

"Imagination rules the world."

Napoleon said it, not Steve Jobs, but Jobs had plenty of interesting things to say.

An excerpt:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

Does a religious group have the right to determine who is out of the fold and may be fired?

We are Americans, a nation of religious dissenters and land speculators, not Frenchmen used to centralized control of almost everything and a militantly secular political order. More at Get Religion on a Supreme Court case involving a firing at a Lutheran school.

Ultimately, the question is whether an employee of a religious group can claim a property right in the job even if she dissents or diverges from the teachings of a religious group. I say no. The alternative is to require federal regulation of the hiring, adminstration, and employee discipline of religious institutions. That would make us like old Europe at best and N. Korea at worst.

Are we living in a time similar to the 16th century?

Relativism is a lot older than modern times. The Anchoress has a nice piece in Our Sunday Visitor.

From homeschooling to Saint Rose Academy and the Dominican way

Two years ago we started homeschooling our daughter. We found a good on-line curriculum and went to work. After one year, we could report some pretty solid results.

Our second year was not as good, and I can tell you why: learning, as I know from going to school and teaching, is done best within a community sharing common faith and understanding of the development of the soul. Our learning community was not much bigger than our nuclear family of three. No other homeschoolers in our area used our curriculum. My daughter's play group was great, but none of them was doing what we were doing. Last winter, my work had slowed down, and I had applied for admission to the Alabama State Bar. Each week I would drive to Alabama to shake hands and plan the next stage of my career. I was tired and distracted, so our little learning community got weaker. By the time my mother died in March, we had concluded that we could only homeschool if there were other local children using our curriculum.

Going back about twenty years, before I was Catholic, I bought a cassette tape of Benedictine monks in Belgium singing Gregorian chants. One tune in particular grabbed me: Adore te Devote. I did not know the lyrics, and there was no YouTube or internet in those days. Nonetheless, the piety of the song reaches out and pulls me by the ears and heart.

A few years later I was assistant to Russell Kirk at Piety Hill in Mecosta, Michigan. I discovered G.K. Chesterton and read his biography of perhaps the most famous and brilliant Dominican, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. There I learned the origins of Adoro te Devote. A year later a teaching colleague told me about the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., and I saw his translation of Saint Thomas' Adoro. I cry whenever it is sung during Mass, and sometimes, when I am kneeling at Adoration, I want to sing it aloud.

A few years later my wife and I attended the liturgy of perpetual vows for a Dominican Sister of Saint Cecilia in Nashville. Her best friend from high school is my cousin. At the reception following, my wife and I asked one of the sisters to pray for us because we wanted a child and were considering adoption. She replied that such prayers were her charism. We believed her and thanked her.

Yes, it was her charism: eight months later, my wife was expecting our child!

After law school, I was asked to prepare a will for a woman who had gone through RCIA and been received in the Church but was dying of cancer at the Dominican hospice next to Turner Field in Atlanta. (It is run by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne and is the only hospice to be featured on ESPN.) There I found "the peace that passes understanding" and knew the Dominicans could bring God's peace to the end of the earth... or to the end of life.

In August of 2010 I was driving around the Southside of Birmingham with my mother on a pretty but warm day. We saw a sister in a white habit and black veil. We pulled over to greet her. She told us she was new in town, on the faculty at Saint Rose Academy, and somewhat lost. Despite being Birmingham natives, my mother and I did not know where Saint Rose Academy was, but we drove around until we found it. By the time we finished conversing with this sister and another sister, I had determined that if I ever got back to Birmingham, I was going to place my daughter in the care of the Dominicans for her education.


My daughter is now a student at Saint Rose Academy, and we are more than pleased, not just at the quality of the faculty and learning community, but at the commitment to the Eucharist and personal conversion. My wife and I recently went to a meeting of the local chapter of Dominican Laity, and we are going to explore what God might call us to do through the Order of Preachers. We have both been catechists for years and believe God is calling us further up and further in.

As the Dominicans would say, Veritas et caritas!