May 2010 – Page 2 – Jimmy Akin

Okay, Let’s Talk Galactica Finale (Part 2)

Yesterday I said I'd continue this series by talking first about the things I liked and then the things I didn't, but after further thought I decided to go hour-by-hour and talk about both. So here are my thoughts on the first hour of Daybreak.

The episode started with flashbacks to the main characters lives before the fall of the Twelve Colonies.

Fine. Good move. Nice to tie back to the beginning now that we're arriving at the end. Nice to have a little extra insight on where these characters came from.

In principle.

Of course, it's the execution that counts.

I like the flashback with Baltar's dad the most. Roslin's family members' deaths was also interesting. The Starbuck/Lee/Zak thread that starts in this hour is much less interesting (and finishes poorly in later), and the William Adama "I don't want to do some unspecified thing" eventually pays off okay kinda but isn't that interesting here.

Meanwhile, back in the future, Roslin is dying and Lee is stripping Galactica of spare parts, and everyone is getting ready to ship things over to the rebel base star to serve as the new capitol ship after Galactica (which I think is a really cool idea).

Back at the Colony, though, Cavil is preparing to do horrible medical experiments on Hera to find out how she was created so that the cylons can replicate the process now that the resurrection system is shot. Nice creepy stuff, here.

And after a chance encounter with Hotdog, Adama decides to conduct a rescue mission to get Hera back.

This is a point where I think the writing stumbles. I don't mind them rescuing Hera. They need to do that to make the overall arc of the series pay off (the Opera House scenes, the commercials from season 2 indicating that Hera would "change everything"). That's fine. But I don't think they set it up right.

As the balance of the episode reveals, this is a high-risk mission. Adama bluntly says that it is likely one-way, and that it's volunteer-only, with even the former conspirators from the recent mutiny/coup getting a pardon for their participation (nice touch! and a good way to get Racetrack and Skulls back in the action). All this is fine, too.

But there's a mismatch: They didn't do enough to establish Adama's motive for undertaking such a risky mission (that could wipe out a significant chunk of surviving humanity) to save Hera.

Perhaps Roslin should have made an impassioned plea based on her visions of the Opera House. Or perhaps someone should have pointed out that if the cylons kept Hera then they might find out how to reproduce and overrun humanity.

Or something.

But it should have been something.

A moment of sentiment looking at a picture of Hera is not enough to risk a large portion of humanity on a likely one-way rescue mission.

Let's do the math: How many lives are they trying to save? One. How many lives are likely to be lost in an assault on the cylon stronghold? Waaaay more than one. This mission is a Guaranteed Net Loss to the human race in terms of number of lives, and at a point where there are fewer humans alive now than at any point in the series. Therefore, there needs to be something powerfully important about Hera to justify the mission.

But eventually we get the dramatic "Will you go on the mission?" scene on the hangar deck. The build up to this was quite nice, and Admiral Eddie was definitely emoting the heck out of his part, but I think he failed to adequately sell the case for going on the rescue.

It's interesting that less than half the people agree to go. On the podcast, Ron Moore says that's deliberate: That everyone would want to think they'd sign up for this kind of mission, but in reality many people will think, in essence, "I've got a wife, a kid, my own life to think about, so I'm staying."

I think that's true, and I like having many people stay. That's a realistic dramatic choice. Too often we see unanimous "Lock and load; we're all with you, Captain!" scenes, and having more realism to people's choices is good. But I think that in this case Admiral Adama completely fails to make the case why anybody should go on this mission.

I don't have a problem with the idea of likely one-way missions, but a sacrifice of that nature requires a clear and compelling motive, and the most Adama gives us is "This is a decision I have made for myself."

To my mind, "It's a personal choice" + "This is likely a one-way mission" = "Good luck to you, buddy!"

But then we're not dealing with reality here but the final act of an opera–a space opera–and there can be some operatic license here.

So even though I thought the big dramatic volunteering scene needed a more clear and compelling motive, we finally get to the mission itself, which we the viewers know is important.

So. Racetrack and Skulls jump to the Colony to scout things over, we've got battle plans drawn up and explained to us, and everybody cowboys up for what's about to happen in . . . Hour 2.

Okay, Let’s Talk Galactica Finale (Part 1)

So. I am finally getting around to re-writing the Galactica finale review that got eaten by the mist monsters of cyberspace.

Thanks to those who have waited patiently . . . and to the reader who keeps sending emails that just say “bsg finale analysis?” Polite. Succinct. I like that.

So here goes . . .

The reimagined series of Battlestar Galactica ended with a 3-hour finale called Daybreak. In case you’ve forgotten what happened in it,

HERE’S A SUMMARY OF PART ONE.

AND ONE OF PART TWO.

For those who (still) haven’t seen it, I’ll put the spoilers below the fold. But let’s answer the first, more general question here: Love it or hate it?

Mmmmmmmm . . . neither.

I certainly didn’t hate it, but I didn’t find myself thinking it was the best possible ending, either. I put it in the “Basically liked it but had some stupid parts” category.

So I wasn’t disappointed. I wanted to come out basically liking the ending, and I did. I don’t expect shows to wow me in the final episode with a “Best. Episode. Evah!” experience. That’s too much to ask. The Best Episode Evah is statistically far more likely to come before the series finale, so I don’t go into the ending with my hopes set too high.

I just want them to tell an engaging story that answers the series’ major questions, ties up the major loose ends, and gives me a sense of closure and satisfaction.

I thought the BGS finale did that, with a few blemishes that I’ll talk about.

To give you a sense of how I think this finale compared to other sci-fi finales, I guess I’d rank them this way (series that got cancelled and didn’t have a proper finale, I won’t cover):

Star Trek: Deep Space 9: * * * * of 5 stars (fire cave sequence needed to be better and Sisko should have become a prophet, per the plan)

Babylon 5: * * * 1/2 (nice closure, but not the series’ best/most exciting, which wasn’t what I was looking for; get to see the main characters 20 years later in their lives; Sheridan’s final goodbye to Delenn, etc.)

Battlestar Galactica: * * * 1/2 (better than B5 in some ways, but also marred by stupid stuff, making them about equal)

Star Trek: Next Generation: * * * (okay; didn’t wow me; didn’t deserve the Hugo it got; felt like an ordinaryish 2-hour episode; drama hampered by the fact that there was no overarching series goal to be resolved, so they had to come up with the fakey “you’re still on trial” thing in an attempt to provide one; it’s such a pity that–although there was still a lot of good Next Gen to come–the series technically jumped the shark with “the best of both worlds” (~~2nd~~3rd season cliffhanger (thanks for the correction!); Picard becomes a borg); that really should have been one of the feature films)

Star Trek: Voyager: * * (no post-climax cooling off period; very important for this kind of story; we need to see the returnees starting their new lives and enjoying (or not) the home they’ve struggled so long to get to, not just sighting the planet in the distance; also BTW, this is where the bottom of the barrel starts; if your series finale scored lower than this, you really have something to be ashamed of, no matter how good it was in its heyday–or even one episode before)

Stargate SG-1: * 1/2 (ihh. that was an ending? sit around for a long time and hit the reset button? it wasn’t unending, it was uninteresting as a finale)

Star Trek: Enterprise: * (horrible! abominable! never do this! the holodeck thing was bad enough, but the worthless death of a major character was insane! this episode was so bad that the producers deserve to be doomed to a sisyphean ordeal of constantly struggling to get new sci-fi shows on the air only to have them swiftly cancelled and . . . oh, wait.)

The X-Files: * (gaaahhh! unbelievably bad writing in the final episode! the whole mulder-on-trial thing was a disaster! and that franchise-killing movie you followed it up with was horrible, too! LISTEN, CHRIS CARTER!: BEG, BORROW, OR STEAL WHAT YOU NEED TO DO A THIRD MOVIE IN 2012, TELL US THE STORY OF THE ALIEN INVASION THE SERIES WAS LEADING UP TO, AND THEN PUT THE FRANCHISE DOWN AND BACK AWAY SLOWLY, KEEPING YOUR HANDS IN SIGHT AT ALL TIMES!)

Hrm.

Okay, I have more on this to say than will make a comfortably sized post, so up next will be things I liked about the finale, then things I didn’t like.

In the mean time, why don’t y’all argue about the relative merits of series finales like the ones above? (That’s the whole point of rankings–to quantify an opinion for purposes of discussion, after all.)

MESSAGE TO CARDINAL: Shut Up, They Explained

From Canada’s National Post comes this urgent message:

Stop the presses! Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, has created shock waves across Canada by … reiterating conventional Church doctrine on the subject of abortion.

Now, it must be admitted that the good Cardinal was reiterating Church teaching on a point that is difficult for many to accept—that abortion is wrong even in cases of rape, that a child should not be killed for the crime of its father. Even many pro-life American politicians allow for rape and incest exceptions.

Mistakenly.

But the climate toward unborn babies is so . . . er . . . cold in Canada that the Cardinal’s comments have occasioned what the National Post refers to as a “freaked out reaction by many pro-choice politicians and pundits.”

How freaked out?

Parti Quebecois leader Pauline Marois said she was “completely outraged” by the Cardinal’s remarks. A columnist with Montreal’s La Presse newspaper, Patrick Lagace, said he wished that the Cardinal “dies from a long and painful illness.” Even Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Josee Verner—whose international maternal-health policies the Cardinal supports—declared that the man’s remarks were “unacceptable.”

The National Post thus asks a reasonable question:

When, exactly, did it become “unacceptable” for a man of faith to articulate his Church’s position on a controversial bioethical issue? Are there any other issues that Ms. Marois, Mr. Lagace and Ms. Verner would like Christians to shut up about? Gay marriage? Stem cells? Pre-marital sex? Perhaps they should make a list, just so everyone can keep track.

For years now, this newspaper and other conservative outlets have been warning Canadians that the trend toward liberal dogmatism among much of Canada’s political class—buttressed by an out-of-control human-rights constabulary—is serving to muzzle religious Christians who are doing nothing else than giving voice to their cherished beliefs. The appalling reaction to Cardinal Ouellet’s speech demonstrates how serious the problem has become.

Indeed.

While I hate to see our neighbor to the north playing the lead role for a cautionary tale, Americans also need to recognize that our country could go in the same hard anti-family, anti-faith direction that Canada has—if Americans don’t resist the same trends in our own culture that have seized the reins in Canada.

In fact, there has been a good bit of reins-seizing here in America of late.

Fortunately, there is an opportunity to correct some of this coming up in . . . oh . . . November.

What do you think?

Grant Official Threatens Catholic Schools over Lesbian Case

Since Lord Alfred Douglas’s 1894 poem “Two Loves,”which was used at Oscar Wilde’s trial, homosexuality has been referred to as “the love that dare not speak its name.”

But that’s so 19th century.

We’re living in the 21st century now, so that was . . . like . . . 200 years ago, right?

Why, then, can’t Michael Reardon—executive director of the Catholic Schools Foundation—just come out and state the facts about a recent incident in the Archdiocese of Boston’s Catholic schools?

In a statement on the Catholic Schools Foundation website (.pdf), Reardon writes:

Dear School Administrators:

You may be aware from recent publicity about an exclusionary admissions practice at St. Paul School in Hingham, which does not receive support from the Catholic Schools Foundation. In light of those media reports, we thought it important to clarify the position of the Catholic Schools Foundation – – namely, that no school that promotes an exclusionary admissions policy or practice will be considered for support.

We believe a policy or practice that denies admission to students in such a manner as occurred at St. Paul’s is at odds with our values as a Foundation, the intentions of our donors, and ultimately with Gospel teaching. Our concern is the education of young people. We will not fund any school that that treats students and families in such a manner. This policy has been unchanged since our founding in 1983.

We are proud that Catholic schools are known for being welcoming communities for all students. So although this incident is disturbing, we know that it is isolated, not a policy of the Archdiocese, or indicative generally of the Catholic schools of the Archdiocese. Know that we appreciate all you do to make your schools places where all feel welcome.

Please contact me at 617-778-5981 if you have any questions or if I can be of any assistance to you.

With hope for the students we serve and the future of Catholic education, I am

Sincerely yours,

Michael B. Reardon
Executive Director

From Reardon’s letter, you’d have no idea whatsoever was at issue in the St. Paul School case. He vaguely refers to “an exclusionary admissions practice” and ominously warns that “no school that promotes an exclusionary admissions policy or practice will be considered for support.” He speaks opaquely of “a policy or practice that denies admission to students in such a manner as occurred at St. Paul’s.” He uses lofty rhetoric about the values of the foundation, its donors, and “Gospel teaching.” He warns that they will not fund “any school that treats students and families in such a manner.” He uses touchie-feelie language about Catholic schools being “welcoming communities,” “where all feel welcome.” And he says that the St. Paul School incident “disturbing.”

So disturbing, apparently, that he can’t even speak forthrightly about the subject. The whole thing has to be shrouded with indirectness, shielded from frank discussion, and wrapped in comforting PC rhetoric.

It certainly isn’t the case that Reardon would want Catholic schools to accept any student whatsoever. If Catholic schools set no limits whatsoever on enrollment, the sheer volume of potential students would overtax the schools’ resources to the point that they couldn’t fulfill their mission. Schools must for economic reasons alone have “exclusionary admissions practices.” Similarly, some students are so disruptive that they cannot function in a normal classroom environment. Some students, frankly, belong in the juvenile justice system. So it isn’t a question of whether Catholic schools should have “exclusionary admissions practices.” The question is which exclusionary admissions practices they should have, and Reardon knows that full well. He just isn’t being forthright about the kind of exclusionary policy he has in mind.

Mr. Reardon may not understand the importance of being earnest, but let’s look at what he might have said had he chosen to be frank.

Dear School Administrators:

You may be aware from recent publicity that St. Paul School in Hingham has declined to enroll an eight-year old boy who has two lesbian “mothers.” St. Paul’s School does not receive support from the Catholic Schools Foundation, so we have no leverage over them, the way we do you. In light of the media reports, we thought it important to clarify the position of the Catholic Schools Foundation so that none of you get the idea of copying St. Paul’s example. Consider this letter a shot across your bow. Our policy is that no school will be considered for support if it either by policy or in practice declines enrollment for students with same-sex “parents.”

It does not matter how disruptive a situation such enrollments would create. It does not matter how difficult a position it would put the thus-enrolled children in. It does not matter how it would put pressure on teachers not to fully and vigorously proclaim Church’s teaching about marriage. It does not matter what other parents in the school might say about the way their children should be educated. None of these things count. What matters is that these children be admitted. This is the sine qua non.

We believe a policy or practice that denies admission to students with openly homosexual parents is at odds with our values as a Foundation, the intentions of our donors, and ultimately with Gospel teaching. Gospel teaching requires that we turn a blind eye to all the concerns named in the previous paragraph. The necessity of admitting children with openly homosexual parents trumps them all. There can be no rational disagreement on this point, and if you do disagree, you are opposing Gospel teaching.

Our concern is the education of young people. We will not fund any school that that treats students and families (note that I am classifying two homosexuals and a child as a family without qualification) in such a manner. You heard me right. We are so concerned with the education of young people that we will deny funding to all the other students in your school if even one child is not enrolled because he has openly homosexual parents. The need of the one outweighs the needs of the many. We care more about providing a Catholic education for this one student more than providing Catholic education for all the other students we would otherwise provide assistance to. This tells you what our values are. We will use financial scorched-earth tactics against any school that disagrees with us, even at the urging of the parents whose children attend the school. This policy has been unchanged since our founding in 1983. [Really? They would have yanked funds in 1983 over this issue?—ja]

We are proud that Catholic schools are known for being welcoming communities for all students except the ones who must be denied enrollment for various rational reasons that I am ignoring here. So although this incident is disturbing to politically correct sensibilities, we are thankful that it is isolated, not a policy of the Archdiocese, or indicative generally of the Catholic schools of the Archdiocese. Know that we appreciate all you do to make your schools places where all, including open and active homosexual partners but not including parents who would disagree with us, will feel welcome. And remember that if you fail in such efforts, we will withdraw all financial support from your school and the other students it has. Consider them financial hostages to this issue.

Please contact me at 617-778-5981 if you have any questions or if I can be of any assistance to you.

With hope for the students we serve and the future of Catholic education, I am

Sincerely yours,

Michael B. Reardon
Executive Director

Ahhhhhhhh.

Isn’t a little forthrightness refreshing?

What do you think?

Most Recent Favorite Walter Moment

I’ve been meaning to blog about the TV show Fringe in a little over a week, after the season finale, so that if anyone is interested in trying out the show they’d have the summer to catch up (rather than being exposed to all the season-finale spoilers that are about to be broadcast), but I just discovered this nifty share thingie on hulu, and since the episodes are available there for a limited time, I thought I’d share this one particular moment with you.

The moment features Dr. Walter Bishop, one of the lead characters, and the who often gets the best, or at least the funniest, character moments on the show.

Here’s what you need to know for the clip, and below the fold I’ll tell you what I like about it.

Walter is a brilliant scientist.

Years ago he arrogantly conducted nature-defying experiments that led to tragedy and resulted in him being put in a mental hospital.

Back then, when he was playing God, he didn’t believe in God. Now he does.

He is a humbled man trying to make amends for his past, despite the fact that he often can’t remember the details of what he has done.

Most of the time he is sweet, childlike, humorous, and caring. He also is in need of constant adult supervision.

In this clip we find him trying to cope with the real world–on his own–for the first time in twenty years.

NOTE: This doesn’t seem to work for people outside the U.S. due to copyright issues.

Continue reading “Most Recent Favorite Walter Moment”

Fr. Fessio’s Update on Cardinal Schonborn

A few days ago I pointed out a striking Media Failregarding what Cardinal Schonborn said in a meeting with members of the Austrian press.

Fr. Joseph Fessio of Ignatius Press offers some helpful perspective on the story, which only illustrates the 285th Rule of Acquisition (CHT to those who sent links).

First, Fr. Fessio provides some clarity regarding the nature of the event (which the press had given conflicting accounts of):

Cardinal Schönborn, who like his mentor Pope Benedict is a model of openness and transparency, invited the editors of Austria’s dozen or so major newspapers to a meeting at his residence in Vienna. How many bishops can you name who have extended such an invitation to the press?

The journalists agreed that this would be an “off the record” meeting so that everyone could take part freely and frankly. Was this to impose silence on the press? To cover up once again the misdeeds of clerics? No, it was an attempt by Cardinal Schönborn to be as open as possible and to make himself available to answer any question that was asked. It was an attempt to help educate the press on matters that the press often finds difficult to grasp—such as the essential foundations of the hierarchical and sacramental structure of the Church, and the intricacies of moral theology.

That’s certainly a noble effort. As is so often lamented, the press just doesn’t “get” religion and their stories suffer as a result. It would be nice if editors had enough background to catch some of their reporters’ mistakes.

But unfortunately it seems that someone in the private meeting betrayed the Cardinal’s trust and published a garbled account of what happened. So what perspective does Fr. Fessio add regarding the specific claims concerning what Cardinal Schonborn said?

Let’s take them one by one.

1) What about the claim that we should move away from a morality based on duty and toward one based on happiness?

In my own prior piece, I took up this claim first—though it is not first in the article—because the solution to this one is easy to discern. Fr. Fessio offers the same basic interpretation, adding the technical terms for the philosophical positions in question:

First, he [the Cardinal] explained that it is important to avoid the errors of a Kantian moral philosophy, that is, one based on the categorical imperative of duty alone. Thomas Aquinas, inspired by Aristotle, elaborated what scholars would call a eudaimonistic rather than a deontological moral philosophy. That is, a moral philosophy not based on mere duty, but based on the natural desire of all men for happiness.

The Tablet, apparently drawing on other published sources, wrote: “Instead of a morality based on duty, we should work towards a morality based on happiness, [the cardinal] continued.” This is in itself accurate. But in the context of the Tablet article, it implied that the Church should change her teaching on homosexual relationships and divorced and re-married Catholics. (Both were mentioned immediately preceding the above quote.)

But what did Cardinal Schönborn mean by the reference to eudaimonism? He tried to explain it to the journalists. The Church attempts to lead men to their ultimate happiness, which is the vision of God in his essence. Moral norms are meant to do that; they have that as their end or purpose.

2) What about the claim that the Church ought to view long-term homosexual relationships as less bad than promiscuous ones?

Here Fr. Fessio introduces another concept from Catholic moral and pastoral theology, the difference between the law of gradualism and gradualism of law:

The [moral] norms themselves are unchanging. However, our approach to obeying them is gradual and our efforts are a mixture of success and failure. This means that while certain moral norms are absolute, that is, they hold in all circumstances without exception, our approach to obeying them may be halting and imperfect.

This is commonly referred to as “the law of gradualism” and is opposed to “the gradualism of the law,” as if the law itself were somehow variable.

This is the context for the cardinal’s saying: “We should give more consideration to the quality of homosexual relationships,” adding: “A stable relationship is certainly better than if someone chooses to be promiscuous.” This does not at all mean that the cardinal was advocating or even suggesting that the Church might change her teaching that homosexuality is a disorder and homosexual activity is always a grave evil. It is always grave, but there can be gradations of gravity—or, to call it by its true name, objective depravity.

Fr. Fessio may well be right that this is the context in which Cardinal Schonborn was speaking. He may have talked to the Cardinal and found that out first hand. From The Tablet’s piece, it’s not as easy as with the first point to discern that, but this may be due simply to the poor quality of The Tablet’s reporting of the incident.

If the Cardinal were thinking of the law of gradualism in this connection, I still don’t know that I’d think a stable homosexual relationship is better than homosexual promiscuity. As I mentioned in my previous post, few stable homosexual relationships seem to be exclusive—“fidelity” to one’s partner is given a different meaning in homosexual subculture—and even if such a relationship is both stable and exclusive, I don’t see why serial homosexual acts with one person are less objectively disordered than serial homosexual acts with multiple partners. Indeed, I can see an argument for it being worse in that the parties may be reinforced in the idea that what they are doing is okay because it more closely imitates marriage, while intrinsically failing to possess the reality of marriage.

However that may be, it seems to be a point that is arguable.

3) What about the claim that the Church should rethink the situation of divorced and remarried couples?

Here Fr. Fessio also invokes the law of gradualism, saying:

This is also the context of the Tablet’s statement: “The cardinal also said the Church needed to reconsider its view of re-married divorcees ‘as many people don’t even marry at all any longer’.” This “reconsideration” does not mean a change in the Church’s teaching that a valid marriage is indissoluble, and that someone who is validly married cannot remarry validly. It means that perhaps—but only perhaps, because this is an opinion that does not have the authority of a magisterial pronouncement—the Church should find new ways of leading the weak and confused to the difficult but liberating challenge of Christ’s demands.

Fr. Fessio again may well be right that this is the context in which Cardinal Schonborn was speaking, though it is hard from the lousy reporting of The Tablet to tell.

If all the Cardinal was suggesting is that the Church should try to find ways to help couples more perfectly conform their lives to Christ’s teachings regarding marriage then that would be entirely uncontroversial. Such a claim would make sense of The Tablet’s assertion that he referenced the fact many people don’t even marry any more. In that kind of world, the Church definitely needs to think about how better to help people understand and embrace the truth about marriage.

It still would be unclear how that explains the claim that the Church “need[s] to reconsider its view of re-married divorcees,” but this again may simply be shoddy reporting by The Tablet. It’s hard to tell.

4) What about the claim that the Roman Curia needs to be reformed?

Here Fr. Fessio says:

In the course of this “off the record” meeting, the cardinal also frankly expressed his belief that a “reform of the Roman Curia” was needed. It’s not as if nothing had been done. In fact, the cardinal recognizes that the transfer of all sexual abuse allegations against priests to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (then headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) in 2001 was already a major reform. He was referring to an attitude of secrecy and defensiveness, as well as an inability to comprehend the gravity of the scandal.

And that’s certainly a reasonable view to take!

Indeed, any organization composed of fallen human beings is prone to need reform, just as the fallen human beings themselves are prone to need ongoing conversion. The trick is making sure that efforts at reform and conversion achieve the intended goods. But the claim that the Roman Curia—or any other institution—could be improved is scarcely the stuff of scandal.

5) What about Cardinal Schonborn’s “attack” on Cardinal Sodano?

I just love what Fr. Fessio says regarding this:

Cardinal Schönborn did not “launch an attack,” as the Tablet states; he made a criticism. And to characterize the substance of the meeting with such a false and misleading headline is typical of the treatment the pope, Cardinal Schönborn and the Church have been receiving at the hands of a sensationalist press.

This is so true.

Criticisms and disagreements are not the same thing as attacks. Attacks may take the form of criticisms, and disagreements may lead to attacks, but they are not the same things. One can make criticisms and have disagreements without the metaphorical violence implied by “attack.”

Yet the mainstream media invariably phrases things in terms of Drama Verbs: launched, attacked, assailed, blasted, etc.

In fact, just today the Drudge Report carried the headline, “Pope blasts gay marriage as ‘insidious and dangerous’…”.

Here is the full text of the pontiff’s “blast”:

Initiatives aimed at protecting the essential and primary values of life, beginning at conception, and of the family based on the indissoluble marriage between a man and a woman, help to respond to some of today’s most insidious and dangerous threats to the common good. Such initiatives represent, alongside numerous other forms of commitment, essential elements in the building of the civilization of love.

Wow. Harsh, man! “Civilization of love.” Lots of blasting going on here!

Fr. Fessio concludes:

In sum, Cardinal Schönborn is not calling for any change in the Church’s teaching or discipline. He is calling for a deeper understanding of the struggle to live the high demands of the moral law. He is critical of an attitude of defensiveness and dismissiveness still present in the Roman Curia (not to mention many episcopal curias—but the meeting was not about that). And he is trying to be transparent and responsive to the press.

Here again, though, the adage is confirmed: No good deed goes unpunished.

Indeed.

What are your thoughts on this mainstream media mess?

Filed under angelo sodano, benedict xvi, christoph schonborn, divorce, homosexual “marriage”, homosexuality, joseph fessio, media fail, remarriage

Cardinal Schonborn Said WHAAAT???

The Internet has been abuzz with reports that Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, Austria has made some rather unusualstatements.

The one that has been getting the biggest headlines is that he criticized (explicitly or implicitly, accounts seem to differ) Cardinal Angelo Sodano, accusing him of blocking an investigation of Viennese Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer in the 1990s, when then-Cardinal Ratzinger wanted to initiate an investigation regarding allegations that Groer had committed sexual abuse.

The investigation wasn’t held, but Groer was soon replaced as the cardinal archbishop of Vienna by Schonborn himself. (Read about Groer here.)

He’s also allegedly said that the Roman Curia is in urgent need of reform and that Pope Benedict is gently working toward that goal.

While it’s certainly noteworthy for one cardinal to publicly criticize another—whether explicitly or implicitly—any remarks Schonborn may have made regarding Sodano or the need for curial reform pale in comparison to other remarks he is reported to have made.

According to The Tablet:

Questioned on the Church’s attitude to homosexuals, the cardinal said: “We should give more consideration to the quality of homosexual relationships,” adding: “A stable relationship is certainly better than if someone chooses to be promiscuous.”

The cardinal also said the Church needed to reconsider its view of re-married divorcees [receiving Communion without an annulment and convalidation] “as many people don’t even marry at all any longer”.

The primary thing to consider should not be the sin, but people’s striving to live according to the commandments, he said. Instead of a morality based on duty, we should work towards a morality based on happiness, he continued.

YIKES!!!

If the good Cardinal is being accurately represented by The Tablet then something is very definitely wrong. But before betting the farm on The Tablet’s accuracy, we should note a few things.

First, we’re dealing with story in translation, because the Cardinal’s remarks were presumably delivered in German, as we was apparently speaking to members of the Austrian press. We therefore have to watch out for possible translation issues.

Second, the facts of the whole situation are unclear. I haven’t been able yet to even determine the nature of the event in which Cardinal Schonborn made his remarks. Precisely what day did it happen? Accounts vary. Was it a press conference, an interview, or some kind of informal get-together? Accounts vary. Was it to Austrian press editors or reporters? Accounts vary. LifeSiteNews is even reporting that he made his remarks to The Tablet. (As The Tablet’s story makes clear, he was speaking to members of the Austrian media; The Tablet is a British publication that was merely doing an English-language story on the Austrian session.)

Third, and more importantly, we don’t have a transcript of the event—in German or English. I’ve done a bunch of searching online, including Austrian news services, and I haven’t been able to come up with a fuller account of his remarks. Without a transcript, we can’t tell what precisely he said and in what context. All we have to go on are press summaries and partial quotations, and we all know how reliable those can be.

Context and exact quotations are important. Consider, for example, the final claim attributed to the Cardinal, that “Instead of a morality based on duty, we should work towards a morality based on happiness, he continued.”

Sounds like situation ethics or utilitarianism, with the denial that any acts are intrinsically wrong, so that you can do whatever makes you happy, or whatever promotes the most happiness—a position firmly rejected in the Catechism and John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor—right?

Well, that may be the way it sounds based on how The Tablet reported it, but The Tablet didn’t actually quote him, so suppose Cardinal Schonborn actually said something like this: “Many of us were raised with the idea that God’s laws are imposed on us arbitrarily, from without, and that we need to focus on obeying them as a matter of duty alone, totally unconnected from the good that God’s laws are meant to bring us. In reality, God’s laws are not arbitrary or capricious. They are not imposed from without. Rather, they are based on human nature and are designed—as John Paul II said in Veritatis Splendor—to bring us happiness and human fulfillment. It is precisely by obeying God’s laws that we find true fulfillment and eternal happiness, and we need to work toward a situation where people realize this rather than just viewing God’s laws as a matter of sheer duty towards arbitrary commandments.”

Doesn’t sound nearly as bad, does it?

In fact, it sounds a lot like things John Paul II and Benedict XVI have said—and like what a cardinal in Austria might say given the disastrous pastoral situation in that country, which was the one that gave us the Wir Sind Kirche or “We Are Church” movement back in the 1990s. The country is so secularized and the situation so pastorally fragile that one could cut the cardinal archbishop of Vienna some slack for expressing himself in ways that sound different than how he might express himself in areas where adherence to the faith is more robust (just as Paul complimented the religiosity of the pagan Athenians at the Aeropagus as a prelude to preaching the gospel of Christ; Acts 17).

But how far does this kind of explanation go?

I don’t know. I can see how the “morality based on happiness” thing could be redeemed (potentially), but I can’t make heads or tails of his alleged comments concerning the divorce and remarried and whether they should be able to receive Communion. What does many people not marrying any more have to do with that? The sheer inexplicability of this makes me wonder if there is important stuff being deleted.

What about the statements that, “We should give more consideration to the quality of homosexual relationships,” and, “A stable relationship is certainly better than if someone chooses to be promiscuous.”

I don’t know what the first of these means. Certainly there are differences in the “quality” of “homosexual relationships.” A once-in-a-lifetime”, one-night-stand “relationship” is certainly different in quality than an ongoing many-thousands-of-illicit-sexual-acts-with-the-same-person relationship, but why does more consideration need to be given to this—and is this even what the Cardinal has in mind?

It would seem not, if the second assertion is an accurate, in-context quotation. I don’t know at all that a “stable [homosexual] relationship” is better than if someone “chooses to be [homosexually] promiscuous.”

I suppose that viewed exclusively in terms of HIV/AIDs transmission, a “stable” and exclusive homosexual relationship has less chance of spreading AIDs than a promiscuous one and is better in that limited, narrow sense. However, it seems that “stable” homosexual relationships are rarely exclusive.

And if HIV/AIDs is factored out of the picture, I don’t know if the statement is true from any perspective. It seems to me that a person who is promiscuous has a greater chance of burning out and realizing the emptiness and the intrinsic disorder of the homosexual lifestyle than a person who stably and peacefully cohabits with the same homosexual partner for many decades, creating the illusion of a loving—as opposed to an obviously exploitative—relationship.

Still, in the absence of a transcript—or an A/V recording of the remarks—who knows?

Thus far we’ve looked at how Cardinal Schonborn’s reported comments might be more reasonably explained. But it should by no means go without notice that Cardinal Schonborn has said and done things in the past that are, at a minimum, quite eye-opening (here is his Wikipedia page, with the understood limitations of such pages).

So I don’t want to give anybody a free pass regarding this story. There could be press misreporting, there could be misstatements or problematic statements by Cardinal Schonborn, or both.

The problem is: We can’t tell what the situation is.

Thus, for the moment, the whole things goes under the heading of “Media Fail.”

The media has not done its basic job of reporting the facts in a clear and reliable way.

It may have been true, back in the days of the dead-tree/broadcast-only press, that because of economic considerations the media was constrained by word count and air time and that it could only present us with summaries of what newsmakers said, forcing us to rely on their reporters’ fairness and accuracy in composing summaries—but those days are GONE.

There is no longer a rational constraint on the ability of news agencies to provide us with transcripts, or at least audio or visual recordings, of what newsmakers say—complete and thus in context.

And if the press isn’t doing its job in this respect, newsmakers should bring their own recording equipment.

It’s not like it’s hard. A bunch of iPhone apps exist for this purpose.

But with this story we have a Media Fail, with The Tablet and other news sources not linking to the original transcript/recording that we need.

What are your thoughts?

“Grave Sin” = Mortal Sin

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

1857 For a sin to be mortal, three conditions must together be met: "Mortal sin is sin whose object is grave matter and which is also committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent."

What if a sin has been committed that has grave matter but lacks the knowledge and consent needed to make it mortal? How might one refer to such a sin?

Since it has grave matter, one might refer to it–logically–as a grave sin. That would seem pretty straightforward: Sin with grave matter is grave sin. Add the needed knowledge and consent and it becomes mortal. Right?

Well, you'd think that. Only you wouldn't be right.

For some years it's been clear (to me, anyway) that ecclesiastical documents like the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church regularly use the phrase "grave sin" to mean "mortal sin."

But until recently I haven't had an explicit statement documenting this fact. Now I do (CHT to the reader who provided it!)

The statement is found in a post-synodal apostolic exhortation by John Paul II from 1984. The synod of bishops had been held the previous year on the theme of reconciliation and penance, and in the resulting exhortation,

During the synod, some apparently proposed a spectrum of sins consisting of venial, grave, and mortal sins–apparently using the middle category not the way proposed above but as a sin that is worse than venial but less than mortal. This is perhaps related to the mistranslation of "grave" as "serious" in English that was common for a long time.

In any event, that kind of division would be wrong, and so John Paul II wrote:

During the synod assembly some fathers proposed a threefold distinction of sins, classifying them as venial, grave and mortal. This threefold distinction might illustrate the fact that there is a scale of seriousness among grave sins. But it still remains true that the essential and decisive distinction is between sin which destroys charity and sin which does not kill the supernatural life: There is no middle way between life and death.

And so (here comes the money quote) . . .

Considering sin from the point of view of its matter, the ideas of death, of radical rupture with God, the supreme good, of deviation from the path that leads to God or interruption of the journey toward him (which are all ways of defining mortal sin) are linked with the idea of the gravity of sin's objective content. Hence, in the church's doctrine and pastoral action, grave sin is in practice identified with mortal sin.

So. Glad we've got that cleared up.