Month: March 2005

Food & Water

A reader writes:

In our current archdiocesan paper is an article from Rome about the Terry Schiavo case.  They talk about how a court decision to remove the feeding tube would lead us down the slippery slope to euthanasia.

Later in the article, it quotes the Florida Catholic Conference (representing the state’s Catholic bishops, saying: "The said Catholic teaching has a `presumption in favor` of providing nutrition and hydration, but `when the burdens exceed he benefits of providing them, they may be withdrawn or withheld.  …`".  A bit late the article quotes the bishops again, "`While withdrawal of Terri Schiavo’s nutrition and hydration will lead to her death, if this is being done because its provision would be too burdensome for her, it could be acceptable".  This sounds to me like nothing more than a quality of life argument that leads directly to euthanasia and doesn’t seem to square with the Church’s teaching. 

Can you clarify this?

I’ll try.

First, I should note that I am not up on all the recent episcopal pronouncements regarding Terry Schiavo. MORE INFO HERE.

Second, what you quote above is not out of line with Catholic moral teaching. There are conditions in which it is morally licit to remove nutrition and hydration because continuing to provide them itself may be doing damage to the patient.

For example: When my wife was dying, at some point her body stopped manufacturing albumin, which is essential for regulating the distribution of fluids in the body’s tissues. (INFO HERE.) At this point she had completely lost her appetite and was being fed intravenously. The fluid from the IVs were going out into her tissues and collecting there. Without albumin production, her body couldn’t process the fluids out of her system and so she got severe edema all over her body. Not to be too graphic, her arm swelled to elephantine proportions and her hand looked like a balloon with short little fingers sticking out of it.

At this point, the doctors told me that they were going to have to discontinue feeding because the feeding itself was harming her. The doctors explained that if feeding were not stopped, at some point (soon) her skin would rupture and she would have weeping sores, which would be bad for all manner of reasons (infection potential among them). Fortunately, Renee passed before it became necessary to discontinue feeding, but she was rapidly approaching the point where the feeding itself was more destructive than the benefit she was deriving from it. It was getting to the point that it would only be making her suffering worse and hastening her death through other means.

Thus there are situations in which it is morally licit to stop nutrition and hydration, but only when the nutrition and hydration are themselves more destructive to the patient than otherwise.

None of this applies to Terri Schiavo, of course. She is not dying, is not being harmed by her feeding (indeed, she Can Take Food Orally Her Husband Just Doesn’t Want It Given To Her That Way), and it would be murder to starve her to death.

The King In Yellow

One of the books I’m currently reading is titled The King In Yellow. It was first published in 1895, which makes it young in comparison to some of the books I read.

What’s interesting about it (among other things) is that it’s a kind of sci-fi/horror anthology of stories that are all loosely connected by a play they all mention. The title of the play is "The King In Yellow," and it is a most remarkable play. We only get a few snatches of dialogue from it and only the vaguest hints of what it is about, but the characters who read it in the stories have the unfortunate tendency to either go completely insane or suffer a horrible doom of some sort.

The author of The King In Yellow was Robert W. Chambers. It is his best-remembered book and is highly thought of by horror authors, some of whom included references to it and things it mentions in their own works. Unfortunately, they have somewhat less regard for some of Chambers’ later works. Apparently he decided that it was better to be a well-fed best-selling author rather than a starving artist, and he ended up turning his literary output in a more commercial direction.

I don’t know what Chambers’ religion was, but there is a surprising amount of positive material in it about the Catholic Church (so far), and Catholic themes are prominent in several stories (including, obviously, "The Street of Our Lady of the Fields").

It’s interesting reading sci-fi from 1895. The first story in the collection ("The Rapairer of Reputations") is set in 1920, and it’s interesting to see a turn-of-the-century perception of what the futuristic year 1920 would be like. (Among other things, they have euthanasia chambers on public streets in major cities.)

It’s kind of interesting, though, that everybody in 1920 is still riding horses. Chambers didn’t anticipate Henry Ford’s unleashing of the automobile on America. Which brings to mind some

REMARKS MICHAEL CRICHTON MADE.

Chambers also probably didn’t envision (a) that someone in 2005 would be reading his book and (b) that they would be reading it in the way I am: I downloaded the text from the Internet and ran it through my speech-synthesizer to output it as .mp3 files that I can now listen to on my computer or via my iPod or in my . . . pickup. (Sorry; horses don’t typically have .mp3 players installed on them.)

READ THE KING IN YELLOW–IF YOU DARE! (WARNING: There is some material in it that can offend modern sensibilities.)

Podcasting

Ipod A reader writes:

Jimmy, would you please comment on Podcasting and its implications for the New Evangelization.

I would.

First, some helpful definitions:

  • Mobile blogging or moblogging is blogging when you are away from a computer. It is often done by a cell phone, camera phone, or PDA.
  • Audioblogging is what it sounds like (literally! ;-P). It is the use of audio files on a blog. People stop by the blog and listen to or download the files. Audioblogging may be regular blogging (sitting in front of a computer) or moblogging. Often the latter is done by someone calling from a cell phone and recording an audio file that is automatically posted on their blog.
  • A feed is an internet tool that allows people to be notified when you have put something new on your blog so they don’t have to keep coming back to check. When you put something new on your blog, a notice of some kind (typically part or all of the post) goes into the feed. A reader who has subscribed to the feed then gets notified that there is a new post for him to read. The references you see online to RSS and XML are references to feeds that people may subscribe to.
  • The person who subscribes to the feed either uses an aggregator (a service or a piece of software) that aggregates the different feeds he has subscribed to.
  • An iPod is a portable listening device used to play audio files.
  • Last year somebody got the bright idea of combining these things and slapping a label on them (even though they were already coming together informally). That label was podcasting. Podcasting involves the creation of audio files which are then pushed via feeds to aggregator-like services and programs so they can then be listened to online or downloaded to devices like iPods. Since it’s "broadcasting for iPods," it got called "podcasting," though really you don’t need an iPod to listen t a podcast.

Some savants differentiate podcasting from audioblogging, noting that many podcasters produces more sophisticated audio files that are modelled after radio shows (with music and all). Some radio shows are now getting into the podcasting market as technology is forcing changes on the radio industry. By contrast, audiobloggers often just use their cell phones. Other savants do not divide podcasting and audioblogging by their content, though, and consider any audio files pushed via a feed to be podcasting.

Now, as to new evangelization potential: There are already some religious (and Catholic) podcasts,

LIKE THIS ONE BY A DUTCH PRIEST.

I think that podcasting has new evangelization potential comparable to web sites and similar doo-dads. It will make it easier for people to get religious content than in the prior age (the third age of human communications, to anticipate  post I’ll put up soon). Now that we are in the fourth age, people can get info much more easily than they could before. But there’s a catch.

You have to want the info.

In the old days, the Old Media basically had a captive audience. You got exposed to the info that your local newspaper or radio station or TV station wanted you exposed to. That’s why the MSM is lamenting their loss of control over the distribution of information in our society. They don’t like it that people now have the ability to choose what information they want. The MSM liked its information monopoly. It let it push its agenda on us and manipulate the public.

But in the fourth age, people pick their own info, and so if someone is to be evangelized via a website or a blog or a podcast or an as-yet-undreamed-of-thing-that-will-come-out-next-year, he has to request it.

So I’d say that podcasting adds more bandwidth to the new evangelization (and the new anti-evangelization) in a way comparable to what web sites and blogs did.

For right now, there are also some limitations in getting into podcasting that still need to be worked out. One of the biggest is that the folks running podcasting services are geeks and, as such, they don’t know how to explain things to ordinary people and they don’t know how to sell themselves and their services.

I’ve been thinking about doing some podcasting (to anticipate another soon-to-be post–and no, this is not one of the Secret Projects), but the services I have checked have really poor explanations and don’t do basic salesmanship-type things, like giving you links to sample audioblogs so you can see how the end product would look. Others advertise that they work with TypePad (my bloghost) but then don’t tell you how to use the two together.

This kind of info is crucial for getting new customers. I recently e-mailed one such service to try to get some of this kind of info, but a customer shouldn’t have to ask for that info. It should be present on the service’s web site as part of its sales pitch.

Eventually, though, people who understand marketing will start working for these services and the geek factor will recede into the background, allowing more people to get on the podcasting bandwagon.

Ambrose Bierce: The Man Whose Name Wasn't Quite Right

The dapper gentleman on the left is Abrose Bierce (1842-19??).

As you can tell, something’s not quite right with his name.

My theory is that his parents didn’t understand English phonology.

Having stuck their kid with the name Ambrose, which was crime enough to begin with, they didn’t understand that if you say his two names together you get an /s/ sound right up against a /b/ sound  (ambrosbierce). That’s a sound combination that doesn’t occur in English, so it makes it hard for people to say or understand his name. I’m sure people were always trying to turn his name into "Ambrose Pierce," and as a life-long victim of name confusion, I know how scarring that can be.

You’ve also got some echo going on between the /b/ in Ambrose and the /b/ in Beirce.

And we won’t even go into his middle name, which was probably the horror that drove him to become a satirist and horror author. (SPOILER SWIPE FOR THE BRAVE OF HEART: His middle name was Gwinnet).

PierceBeirce was an interesting guy. You may notice that his death date has a couple of question marks in it. That’s because we don’t really know when he died.

He vanished.

In his seventies he went on a tour of Civil War battlefields and after touring Lousiana and Texas he went into Mexico which was undergoing a revolution at the time and Bierce hitched up with Pancho Villa’s army as an observer.

The day after Christmas, 1913, he wrote a friend:

Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!

Nobody ever heard from him again! No news of his getting stod up against a wall or anything! Searchers failed to turn up hide or hair of him (literally!). So we don’t really know when he died. Probably late 1913 or early 1914.

A fitting end for a horror author.

Expecially one with such a horrifying name.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MAN WHOSE NAME WASN’T QUITE RIGHT.

READ HIS WORKS.

OBTW, the reason I mention Beirce is that I’m going to be excerpting one of his works, The Devil’s Dictionary, which is a dictionary with humorously subversive and often revealing definitions.

F’rinstance:

DICTIONARY, n.  A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.  This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Amen, Brother Bierce! Amen!

Ambrose Bierce: The Man Whose Name Wasn’t Quite Right

AbrosebierceThe dapper gentleman on the left is Abrose Bierce (1842-19??).

As you can tell, something’s not quite right with his name.

My theory is that his parents didn’t understand English phonology.

Having stuck their kid with the name Ambrose, which was crime enough to begin with, they didn’t understand that if you say his two names together you get an /s/ sound right up against a /b/ sound  (ambrosbierce). That’s a sound combination that doesn’t occur in English, so it makes it hard for people to say or understand his name. I’m sure people were always trying to turn his name into "Ambrose Pierce," and as a life-long victim of name confusion, I know how scarring that can be.

You’ve also got some echo going on between the /b/ in Ambrose and the /b/ in Beirce.

And we won’t even go into his middle name, which was probably the horror that drove him to become a satirist and horror author. (SPOILER SWIPE FOR THE BRAVE OF HEART: His middle name was Gwinnet).

PierceBeirce was an interesting guy. You may notice that his death date has a couple of question marks in it. That’s because we don’t really know when he died.

He vanished.

In his seventies he went on a tour of Civil War battlefields and after touring Lousiana and Texas he went into Mexico which was undergoing a revolution at the time and Bierce hitched up with Pancho Villa’s army as an observer.

The day after Christmas, 1913, he wrote a friend:

Good-by — if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico — ah, that is euthanasia!

Nobody ever heard from him again! No news of his getting stod up against a wall or anything! Searchers failed to turn up hide or hair of him (literally!). So we don’t really know when he died. Probably late 1913 or early 1914.

A fitting end for a horror author.

Expecially one with such a horrifying name.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MAN WHOSE NAME WASN’T QUITE RIGHT.

READ HIS WORKS.

OBTW, the reason I mention Beirce is that I’m going to be excerpting one of his works, The Devil’s Dictionary, which is a dictionary with humorously subversive and often revealing definitions.

F’rinstance:

DICTIONARY, n.  A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.  This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Amen, Brother Bierce! Amen!

Remember The Alamo!

Alamo March 6, 1836: The final massacre at the Battle of the Alamo happened.

Those who died in or shortly after the massacre included:

  • Lt. Col. William Travis (commander of Texas regular army forces)
  • Jim Bowie (leader of the militia forces)
  • Davy Crockett (former congressman)

The massacre of the Alamo inspired Texican forces as they continued to fight for their independence. The battle was memorialized at the Battle of San Jacinto (the last battle of the revolution) with Gen. Sam Houston’s cry "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!"

REMEMBER THE ALAMO.

REMEMBER GOLIAD.

Marriage Involvement 3

A reader writes:

Ok, so to combine a couple of questions you answered recently on your blog:

I’ve got a Catholic friend who is cohabitating in Germany. In Germany, you have to have a civil ceremony before you have a church ceremony. Usually (he tells me) this is done a few hours before the church ceremony, so it’s no big deal. In his instance, they had a civil ceremony several months ahead. They do, however, still intend to have a Catholic wedding.

Assuming, fairly safely, that the German Catholic Church is going to go through with this although they are living together, is the marriage licit? Am I required to forego attending?

Assuming that they have been having conjugal relations in the interim between the civil and ecclesiastical weddings, they have been sinning.

If they repent and go to confession before their ecclesiastical wedding then they will not be in a state of sin at the time that occurs and the wedding will be licit (in conformity with the law).

If they do not repent and go to confession before their ecclesiastical wedding then they will (presumably) be in a state of sin at the time it occurs and the wedding will be illicit (not in conformity with the law) but it will be nevertheless valid (real).

I cannot recommend that folks attend weddings that are invalid as their witness would testify to something that is false (i.e., that this is a valid marriage). However, attendance at a wedding that is merely illicit (not celebrated fully in conformity with the law) is an entirely different matter.

If God honors the wedding such that he brings about a valid marriage as a result of it then, whatever other problems there may be with its celebration, it seems to me that the basic threshold has been crossed in terms of attendance. By showing up, your presence testifies to what God is doing (bringing about a real marriage), and so I can recommend that people show up in such situations (assuming they would otherwise attend).

The parties may be in a state of sin at the time of their wedding, but that’s the way it is wit tons of people–and always has been. God still honors the wedding by "showing up" and bringing about the union of the couple ("What God has joined together . . . "), therefore it’s okay for you to show up, too.

125?

125 The human lifespan seems to cap out at about 120.

Though there have been improvements in the human lifespan made in the last century or so due to the advent of modern medicine, these have tended to shift only the average lifespan upwards–not the maximum lifespan.

Much of the shift is due to improving the chance that infants will not die soon after birth. Even two hundred years ago, people who made it out of infancy tended to live almost as long as the average person does today, so the average lifespan of post-infants hasn’t shifted that much.

The maximum lifespan hasn’t really changed: Humans just don’t tend to live past 120.

That fact has caused many to speculate that there is a "death gene" that prevents us from living longer. If our deaths were simply caused by minor problems building up over time ("wear & tear") then we’d expect to see modern medicine extending not only the average lifespan but also the maximum lifespan.

It hasn’t.

This raises the possibility that we may one day find and be able to switch off the "death gene"–if there is one–in which case we may be able to break the 120 barrier.

But one woman may have already done so.

Reports are that Maria Olivia da Silva, a native of Brazil, is 125 years old.

I don’t know if this is accurate or not, but if so, maybe she has a defective death gene.

GET THE STORY.

(Cowboy hat tip to the reader who e-mailed.)

Changing The Law Of Abstinence

A reader writes:

Jimmy, what is the best way to explain to a fallen away Catholic who is troubled about why it is O.K. to now eat meat on Fridays when years ago you would go to hell for eating meat on Fridays.

I would point out several things:

  1. Human law often interacts with divine law in a particular way whereby human law specifies particular actions that will help accomplish the goals laid out in divine law.
  2. For example, divine law would require that, under normal circumstances, we behave in a way that we are not a danger to ourselves or others. This requirement applies across the situations we encounter in life, including driving an automobile.
  3. To facilitate the goal of driving in a safe manner (as required by divine law), human law creates certain mandates to facilitate this goal, such as having everybody drive on the same side of the road.
  4. Which side of the road it is varies from country to country. It doesn’t matter which side is picked (in America it’s the right side; in the UK, it’s the left side) as long as everybody drives on that side when they are in that country.
  5. If a country wanted, it could change which side of the road people drive on, say from the left to the right. Before the change it would be a sin to drive on the right side of the road because it would be dangerous in the extreme to do so, but after the change it would be a sin not to drive on the right side of the road.
  6. Something similar to this applies to the case of penance. The Church teaches that all of the faithful are obligated–and gravely obligated–to do penance for their sins by divine law.
  7. It therefore has established certain specific requirements to help people fulfill divin law in this regard. These include the practice of fast and abstinence on various days of the year.
  8. That one is fasting or abstaining on any particular day is not of itself important, the same way that driving on a particular side of the road is not of itself important. What is important is that the community is organized in such a way that the larger goals of divine law (behaving in a safe manner, doing penance for sins) are facilitated.
  9. With changes of time and culture, the Church has recognized the need to adapt its penitential practice to varying needs. When everyone in Europe was Catholic and shared similar diets and economic conditions, having a law like mandatory Friday abstinence for everyone made more sense.
  10. But today the Church includes people on every continent, who live in different cultures, with different diets and economic conditions.
  11. As a result, the Church has allowed the bishops’ conferences to make their own best judgment about how the Church’s pentitential practice should be applied in their country. If the bishops’ conference feels that a variance from the universal norm is warranted for their people, they can request a variance from the Vatican.
  12. The universal norm is still that Catholics are to abstain from meat on Fridays (all Fridays of the year), but the American bishops’ conference judged that a more restricted program of abstinence (only Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, the the Fridays of Lent) would work best for Catholics here in America. They requested a variance from the universal norm and the Vatican granted it. Thus here in America there are a smaller number of days on which abstinence is required.
  13. The situation with regard to abstinence is thus similar to the situation with driving laws. It doesn’t matter of itself which days you do penance on or which side of the road you drive on. The important thing is that you obey the laws of the land that you are in.
  14. If the law says to abstain from meat on some days and not others, that’s what you are obliged to do. If the law says to drive on one side of the road and not the other, that’s what you are obliged to do. It is a sin to violate those requirements.
  15. If the law changes then your obligations change. But to knowingly and deliberately violate the law when it is in force is, by definition, a transgression.
  16. A Catholic who knowingly and deliberately ate meat on a normal Friday before the law changed in the U.S. and who didn’t have an excusing cause was knowingly and deliberately spitting on the requirement to do penance in the way the Church required and thus on the authority that Jesus gave the Church (the Church having been given the power to bind and loose by Christ himself). A person who eats meat on a normal Friday after the law changed is not doing this.
  17. In the first case, a person is defying not only the obligation to do penance but also the authority of Jesus Christ himself as exercised through his Church. In the second case, a person is complying with the obligation to do penance (assuming he does penance when he is required to do so) and with the authority of Jesus Christ.
  18. The change of circumstances totally changes the moral character of the act. While it’s physical character (the eating of meat) may be the same, its moral character (defying one’s grave obligations) is totally different.
  19. In the same way, a person in the US who drove on the left side of the road at a time this was illegal would be gravely defying his obligations (to drive safely and to obey the law of the land), but if the law changed then though the physical character of his act (driving on the left) would be the same, the moral character of it would be completely different.

Hope this helps!