Moral Theology – Page 10

Did Obama Lie on Abortion and Healthcare?

Remember how President Obama promised that his health care legislation wouldn’t cover abortion?

Remember all that stuff with the Stupak amendment, which was later abandoned?

Remember how the deal in abandoning the Stupak amendment involved a presidential order that would keep federal dollars from going to abortion?

Remember how pro-life legal experts said the presidential order wasn’t worth the paper it was written on?

Remember all that?

Well, now comes this news:

The Obama administration has officially approved the first instance of taxpayer funded abortions under the new national government-run health care program. This is the kind of abortion funding the pro-life movement warned about when Congress considered the bill.

The Obama Administration will give Pennsylvania $160 million to set up a new “high-risk” insurance program under a provision of the federal health care legislation enacted in March.

It has quietly approved a plan submitted by an appointee of pro-abortion Governor Edward Rendell under which the new program will cover any abortion that is legal in Pennsylvania.

There is still some legal sleight of hand involved:

The section on abortion (see page 14) asserts that “elective abortions are not covered,” though it does not define elective—which [National Right to Life legislative director Douglas] Johnson calls a “red herring.”

The proposal specifies coverage “includes only abortions and contraceptives that satisfy the requirements of” several specific statutes, the most pertinent of which is 18 Pa. C.S. § 3204, which says abortion is legal in Pennsylvania. The statute essentially says all abortions except those to determine the sex of the baby are legal.

“Under the Rendell-Sebelius plan, federal funds will subsidize coverage of abortion performed for any reason, except sex selection,” said NRLC’s Johnson. “The Pennsylvania proposal conspicuously lacks language that would prevent funding of abortions performed as a method of birth control or for any other reason, except sex selection—and the Obama Administration has now approved this.”

So what do you think? Did President Obama lie?

The Right to Keep and Bear Arms

The odds that it is being infringed went down this week when, among other things, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision (.pdf)in which it held that the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms applies not only to the federal government but to state and local governments as well.

Because this isn’t a legal blog, I’m going to pass over the legal intricacies and arguments that the case involved (though they are fascinating) and go to the moral issue in question: Is it a good idea for people to have the right to own guns?

Of course, we are not talking about all people without exception. As the decision in this Supreme Court case as well as the previous one noted, lawmakers can reasonably bar felons and the mentally ill from owning guns. (Personally, I would change “felons” to “violent criminals,” due to the absurd extent to which federal law has started classifying things as felonies; I’d also shore up “mentally ill” to make sure that only those who pose a danger to themselves or others are intended, due to the tendencies to classify everything under the sun as a mental illness, but those are other issues.) The question is: Should ordinary, law-abiding, mentally stable individuals be allowed to own guns?

And by “guns” I mean “firearms that are in functional condition,” not “pieces of disassembled metal that could be taken out of a locked container and/or assembled and/or unlocked and/or loaded and so be turned into functional firearms in a few minutes time.” (Sorry for the verbal gymnastics, but that is the state of affairs to which opponents of gun rights have pushed things.)

So: Should ordinary people be allowed to own guns?

Guns are marvelous tools. That’s why we fight wars with them. On a smaller scale, we also defend ourselves with them, we hunt with them, obtain food with them, control dangerous predators like bears and mountain lions with them, control animal populations like deer that would otherwise suffer unless culled, signal the start of sporting events with them, and use them in marksmanship competitions.

The last two cases are atypical. Starter pistols are loaded with blanks or caps and are or are used in a deliberately non-lethal way. Similarly, marksmanship competitions are not the main use for which guns are intended.

The situations we are concerned with are those in which guns are aimed at their primary targets: animals or humans.

What about animals?

The Church acknowledges that animals do not have rights the way humans do. Consequently, it is never murder to kill an animal and we have the right to eat animals, use their skins, etc. Unnecessary cruelty toward animals is a sin, but this involves an abuse of human nature rather than a violation of an animal’s rights. Activities like hunting, obtaining food, eliminating predators that pose a danger to humans or livestock, and culling animal populations to keep them in balance are morally licit in principle.

Still, these considerations don’t go to the use of firearms that gun control advocates are most concerned about, so let’s look at the issue of using firearms against other humans.

What we are talking about, essentially, is war on the individual scale.

The Church views war as something that is always a tragedy, but it acknowledges that the use of warfare is mortally legitimate when a nation needs to protect its (or others’) interests and there is no less destructive practically way to do this.

In the same way, the Church recognizes an individual right of self defense. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor…. the one is intended, the other is not.”

Love toward oneself remains a fundamental principle of morality. Therefore it is legitimate to insist on respect for one’s own right to life. Someone who defends his life is not guilty of murder even if he is forced to deal his aggressor a lethal blow:

If a man in self-defense uses more than necessary violence, it will be unlawful: whereas if he repels force with moderation, his defense will be lawful…. Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of moderate self-defense to avoid killing the other man, since one is bound to take more care of one’s own life than of another’s.

Legitimate defense can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for another’s life. Preserving the common good requires rendering the unjust aggressor unable to inflict harm [CCC 2263-2265].

So we have a right, and at times a duty, to use lethal force in defending life. Does that translate into a right to own guns?

Well, guns are remarkably good tools for administering lethal force—and by extension they are remarkably good tools for keeping aggressors at bay. They are also tremendous equalizers.

Put on your Father Brown hat for a moment and think like a criminal—a home invader. Whose home do you want to invade? One with a bunch of people in it, including at least one large adult male? Or a home with only one person in it, who happens to be smaller, female, and perhaps elderly? If you are a home invader, you stand a better chance at holding your own in the latter circumstance than the former, making it the logical (if monstrous) choice for you.

But suppose the little old lady has a gun! And goes to the range regularly! And has carefully thought through what she would do in the event of a home invasion!

Suddenly you’re on a much more equal footing with your potential victim—even if you, the home invader, yourself have a gun.

And, of course, criminals often do have guns. If the one attempting to victimize you has one, and if you have a right and/or duty to defend yourself against him (which the Church acknowledges you do) then that right entails the means you will need to perform the act of legitimate defense. In other words, it entails a right and/or duty to use a gun—unless you have some other means of effectively defending yourself against an attacker with a gun (e.g., maybe you’re Wonder Woman and can do bullets and bracelets).

Or suppose that your attacker doesn’t have a gun but that he’s just much more physically powerful, agile, and skilled at violence than you are. To exercise your right to or fulfill your duty to perform legitimate defense in such a situation, you need something to equalize matters, and a gun is a very good option. Perhaps the only one.

It would be wonderful if we lived in a world in which all weapons could be beaten into ploughshares and nobody would make individual war any more, but we’re not in that world, yet, and ordinary people still have that right and/or duty to defend themselves and others, using lethal force if necessary.

So there is a significant case to be made that ordinary, law-abiding, mentally-stable people ought to be able to own guns.

Of course, there are arguments against this—that having more guns around increases gun violence, that there would be gun accidents, etc.

Such claims should not be taken uncritically.

There are two sides to this story, as there are to so many, and people on both sides of the issue need to have their facts and arguments vetted.

Statistical arguments are interesting and need to be given their proper weight. So does the question of what you, personally, would do if you (God forbid) find yourself in such a desperate situation.

Because the saying is true: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

What are your thoughts?

ISRAEL: Whose Land Is it? (Pt. 2)

In our previous post on this subject, we looked at the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory currently occupied by the modern state of Israel because they were promised it in the Bible.

We saw that reasonable people could take different views of this subject, especially concerning how such a promise might apply to the present age.

Now let’s look at the question from an ethical rather than a revelatory perspective. That is to say, apart from the revelation claim that we have already examined, what grounds might be offered for the claim.

Before we do that, though, I’d like to clear something up that I think has resulted in some folks spinning their wheels: the term anti-Semite. This is a misnomer. It is used to refer to hatred of Jews, though the category “Semite” properly includes people who aren’t Jews. Nevertheless, that is how the term is used. I suggest that we not fight about the word and just note that it is a misnomer that is in popular use and move on.

Now: What claims besides revelation might one appeal to in support of the claim that the Jewish people have a claim to the territory of Israel?

1) The legal argument: This would involve asserting that some entity or entities that had legal title to this territory in the 20th century lawfully gave it to the present Israeli governing entity as a Jewish homeland. And, in fact, many people do make this claim.

While it would be an interesting legal debate to thrash this out, we’re not going to do that on this blog. I am not an expert on the law, especially as it pertains to this question, and it would exceed the capacity of a multi-issue blog like this to review all the relevant information and arrive at a firm conclusion. Therefore, aware that there is more than one side to this argument, I would suppose that reasonable people could take different views on the issue.

Further, regardless of whether civil (or international or whatever) law supports does not deal directly with the question of what is ethical. Human law can support all kind of wicked and unjust things, and so even if human law supports something, that isn’t itself decisive for the question of whether the thing is moral (which is the kind of question this blog is more interested in).

So let’s look at other grounds.

2) The ancestral argument: Some in the combox have asserted that the Jewish people have a right to the land of Israel based on the fact that their ancestors lived there a long time ago.

This strikes me as the least convincing argument on this issue. The fact is that human populations move all over the place during history. Often they are forced out of one land, and at some point any claim they have to it lapses. That fact that modern Jews’ ancestors had title to the property 1900 years ago doesn’t mean that they presently do any more than I have title to where my ancestors lived 1900 years ago.

In view of the historical memory of the Land and in view of the biblical promise regarding it, it is understandable—especially after the Holocaust—that there would be a desire to immigrate there and create a Jewish haven state there, but this is a natural desire—not a moral right to do so. Based on our individual and corporate histories, there are all kinds of desires we might naturally have about the way we’d like the world to be, but that doesn’t give us the moral right to go out and try to bring them about. Whether we have a moral right to take action regarding a wish or desire is a separate question than whether is it natural for us to wish it.

Human migration is so extensive in history that all of our ancestors have been kicked out of lots of places at various stages. In fact, if the Out of Africa theory is true, all non-Africans’ ancestors at one point must have gone through the very territory currently occupied by Israel. That doesn’t give all non-Africans title to this plot of land, either.

So . . . where your distant ancestors lived doesn’t mean that you get to reclaim the place today.

(Unless God has said you can, but that’s a different ground. It’s the revelation claim, not a “we used to live here” claim.)

3) Right of conquest: Historically a lot of people have felt that if you conquer a land, it’s yours. The fact you conquered it gives you a right to it.

One problem for using this argument in the case of Israel is that it works contrary to the legal argument that many wish to use. If the land was given to the Israelis legally then it wasn’t obtained by conquest—at least in the traditional sense (we’ll get to an untraditional one, below).

The conquest claim might, however, be used for territory like the West Bank since that was obtained in war.

But the right of conquest isn’t generally acknowledged today. The fact you conquered something may have given you title to it in the middle ages (or even more recently), but it doesn’t today. America conquered Iraq, but that doesn’t mean we own it. In fact, there is a widespread sentiment that America should get out of Iraq as soon as practical.

Today if you want to claim moral title to a land, you need something more than “We militarily defeated the people who were living there.”

4) Right of self-determination: The argument here would be something like: Since the legitimacy of government depends on the consent of the governed, the majority of people who actually live in a land get to determine how it is governed and by whom. Therefore, since the majority of people currently living in the territory of Israel are Israelis and, it would seem, support the existence of Israel, they have title to the land.

You might also call this the right of present possession and, as the old saying goes, “possession is nine tenths of the law.”

This is a more persuasive argument than the ones we have considered thus far in this post. Some version of the right of self-determination in conjunction with the present possession of a territory must underly the moral right that every nation state has to its territory. Whether Israel’s case is justified is a question that has to be answered, but at least this argument presents us with a potentially successful argument.

Note, however, that it only addresses the question of whether the Israelis now have moral title to the land, not whether they did so in the past or whether they will in the future.

If we consider the past, it is quickly recognized that in the 19th and in the first half of the 20th centuries there was a massive migration of Jewish people into the territory of Palestine—with an eye to potentially founding a Jewish state or haven state there, which would mean displacing or making some other arrangement with the people who were already living there.

The desirability of creating a Jewish haven and the understandability of wanting to creating it here doesn’t mean that it was automatically moral to do so. What this amounts to is a non-military invasion of the territory with an eye to claiming it for yourself—the nontraditional form of conquest mentioned earlier.

Certainly one can see how the then-present inhabitants of the territory would object to this project, just as Native Americans could reasonably object to the mass migrations of European colonists with the same designs . . . or the way Mexicans might have viewed with suspicion the immigration of lots of potentially rebellious Anglos into Texas in the early 1800s . . . or the way Americans in the modern Southwest might view with suspicion the Reconquista sentiments expressed by some recent immigrants.

I don’t say that to pass judgment on any of these groups. It’s just a fact of history that immigrants can overwhelm and eventually take control of the lands to which they migrate. Whether they were justified in doing so is a complex moral question to which there is no automatically right or wrong answer. People do need places to live, and sometimes they need to migrate. When they migrate, some places are more rational to migrate to than others. And if enough of them migrate, over time it will have a natural impact on the governance of the region.

Because there is a natural tendency for everyone to identify their own interests with what is morally right, those who are doing the migrating have a natural tendency to think that it is morally right for them to do so, and those whose territory is being migrated to have a natural tendency to view the situation with concern or alarm and to think that it is morally wrong.

So it is reasonable for Jewish immigrants to the territory of modern Israel to view the migration as justified (or even necessary), and it is natural for Palestinians (then and now) to view it as unnecessary and unjustified.

In other words: People can have different views on this subject.

There does come a point, if a migration is big enough, where a new governing situation becomes rational or even obligatory. The situation of a tiny nativist group holding all governing authority in the face of a disenfranchised majority class is going to lead to really bad situations (think: Apartheid, only with the natives being the rulers and the immigrants being the disenfranchised). The immigrant class must have its say in determining the governance of the region, and if it is big enough, it’s going to end up exercising that governance itself.

When that happens, a new civil order has been achieved. Hopefully it will be a just order (often it is not). Hopefully it will be achieved bloodlessly (often it is not). But the immigrant class will be the new rulers, and legitimately so.

One can hold, then, that this is the situation that applies in modern Israel, and that the common good is best secured by allowing the state to continue to exist. This would mean that the Israelis have a moral right to the territory (or at least some of the territory) now, regardless of whether they achieved this by legitimate means.

Or one can deny this and argue that the presence of modern Israel is a destabilizing element that will ultimately harm the common good of the parties involved—or that is presently harming the common good of the parties—and that it would be better to peacefully dismantle it.

I don’t see that as happening any time in the near future. A more likely scenario to my mind is that nuclear proliferation in Muslim states may at some point lead to the destruction of Israel.

That’s not at all something I wish for, but it is an eminently possible occurrence in the imminent future.

One could thus argue that, while Israel for a time held the land legitimately, it could cease to do so in the future, should the situation grow more unstable and the presence of Israel lead to great harm to the common good of the parties involved.

So just as this theory does not mean Israel achieved its title to the land through moral means, it also does not mean that it necessarily will keep its title in the future.

All of these are positions one could entertain legitimately. I’m not going to tell you which you should believe. I’m just trying to point out the scope that exists for diversity of opinion.

What are your thoughts?

ISRAEL: Whose Land Is It Anyway? (Pt. 1)

Recently we were discussing the Helen Thomas broujaja and the question of who “owns” the land of Israel/Palestine inevitably arose.

I’m not going to solve that long-standing and thorny question in this blog post, but I can offer some considerations that need to be taken into account when forming an opinion on the subject.

First let me note that there is room for different opinions, here. The issue is a complex one, and people of good will can take different positions—regarding the founding of the modern state of Israel, regarding its role in God’s plan, and regarding what should happen with it in the future.

In previous comboxes, some readers asserted that support for Zionism is so important that opposition to Zionism ipso facto makes one an anti-Semite. This claim is etymologically ironic in that many of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are, in fact, Semites, but even allowing for this irony, it is simply not true. Zionism has been and remains controversial within the Jewish community itself.

Just to eliminate potential confusion at the outset, let’s define our terms. I will be using the term “Zionism” in two senses: (1) The belief that the modern state of Israel should have been founded and (2) the belief that the modern state of Israel should continue to exist. There are other ways in which the term can be and historically has been used, but these are the two ideas that we will interact with here.

Note that one can be a Zionist in one sense but not the other. One could be a Zionist in sense (2) only and hold that, while the modern state of Israel should not have been created, now that it has been, it has a right to defend itself and to continue to exist. On the other hand, one could be a Zionist in sense (1) only and hold—for example—that, while it was right to create the modern state of Israel, that state has morally forfeited its right to exist due to human rights violations or that while it may have been right to found the state of Israel in the 20th century, if unstable Arab states start getting nukes and a regional nuclear war is about to start then the best thing for the welfare of the Jewish people would be to leave the region.

Many Jewish people today are Zionists in both sense (1) and sense (2), though not all. There are quite a number who are sense (2) only Zionists, and an even-more-nuclear-future could give rise to a significant number of sense (1) only Zionists.

Some Jewish people are Zionists in neither sense (1) nor sense (2). This is the case, for example, with the gentlemen pictured, who are members of Neturei Karta, who hold a view that was quite common among Orthodox Jews prior to the founding of Israel.

This view is that the Jewish people should not try to control the land of Palestine on their own and that they should regain statehood there only through the coming and the actions of the Messiah. Trying to take control of Palestine prior to that point, on this view, constitutes a usurpation of God’s plan and is viewed as a violation of the three oaths held to regulate relations between the Jewish people and the nations during the present age.

Neturei Karta is by no means the only Jewish group holding this view, BTW.

These people are not anti-Semites. They don’t even deny that the Jewish people have a special title to the land of Palestine. They simply see the legitimate control of this land as an eschatological reality that should not be confused with contemporary Zionist aspirations.

I thus hope that the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a little more clear and that we can discuss the issue without people wanting to automatically play the anti-Semitism card.

That said: Who owns the land?

There are two main perspectives from which this question needs to be evaluated: the prophetic and the ethical. In this post we’ll look at the prophetic perspective.

Many here in America have reflexively treated the prophetic aspect of the question as unambiguous and definitive: God promised Israel the land in the Old Testament, and so it’s theirs. Case closed.

But prophesy often is not so straightforward in its interpretation or application. God also made it clear that, if Israel committed certain sins—or sins of a certain character and magnitude—that it would be dispossessed of its land, at least for periods of time. And there are passages warning the Jewish people to submit to their conquerors and that they will not be restored to the land for a set time and things like that.

There is also the question of the way in which many Old Testament prophesies have found fulfillment through Christ in ways that would not have been expected previously. The impact that this phenomenon has on the promises regarding the land is something that cannot be ignored.

For its part, the Catholic Church acknowledges that the Jewish people still have a special role in God’s plan. That’s something I’ve written about before. But the Church does not teach that the Jewish people have a right to possess the land of the modern state of Israel in the present day by divine promise. In fact, the Holy See has studiously avoided saying that.

It has even gone so far, in its 1993 Fundamental Agreement with Israel, to state:

The Holy See, while maintaining in every case the right to exercise its moral and spiritual teaching-office, deems it opportune to recall that, owing to its own character, it is solemnly committed to remaining a stranger to all merely temporal conflicts, which principle applies specifically to disputed territories and unsettled borders [art. 11:2].

In its specific application, this passage is referring to disputed territories like the West Bank and Gaza rather than to the territory of Israel as a whole, but the same principle applies in general. The Holy See treats the question of what people have title to what territory as a temporal affair and thus something that goes beyond the Church’s purview. The Church can certainly raise moral objections to various courses of action, like trying to forcibly kick out the people who currently have title to a territory. But the question of who has title is treated as a temporal rather than theological issue. The Church does not hold that any particular people has an immutable divine right to a particular territory.

This is not to say that a Catholic could not hold that Israel does have a right to the land in the present day due to God’s promise. That is an opinion within the realm of permitted theological speculation. But it is not something the Church has signed off on. The Church has remained conspicuously neutral on that theological question as it applies in our age.

One could thus hold the opinion that the Jewish people have a right to that land in our day, that they have a right to the land but not in our day (perhaps at the Second Coming or near it, if we are not now near it), or that they no longer have a special right to the land. Each view is permitted.

This deals with the subject from the prophetic perspective. What about the ethical one?

That will be the subject of our next post.

In the meantime: What are your thoughts?

See Ya, Helen!

So Helen Thomas has resigned.

Fine with me. I always found her obnoxious, abrasive, partisan, rude, and mean-spirited.

But don’t count her out just yet. She previously resigned from UPI in 2000 but had a new gig at Hearst Newspapers within a few months, so we may see her again.

Though she is gone (at least for now), the question remains: Was what she said in the video clip anti-Semitic or merely anti-Zionist?

In the combox of my previous post, many commenters disagreed with me and said that the clip did provide proof of Thomas’s anti-Semitism.

That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with disagreement.

Other commenters agreed that the video didn’t provide proof of anti-Semitism and said that I was right to distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism.

That’s fine, too. I also don’t have a problem with people agreeing.

Even though Thomas has resigned, the issues involved in the exchange are still with us—and will be in the future—and that makes them still worth talking about. So I’d like to explore them a little further.

Specifically, I’d like to evaluate the following claims by critics:

1) That wishing a group of people would leave a particular land automatically constitutes racism

2) That the Jewish people have legitimate title to the land of Israel

These issues were not created by Helen Thomas. They have been with us for a long time, and they will be with us for a long time in the future. I can’t treat them in a single post, but let’s tackle the racism charge in this one.

Some commenters suggested that “Go home!” is the unmistakable cry of the racist, and at first glance, this seems plausible. But does this claim hold up to careful consideration?

It certainly doesn’t apply to all racists. Some racists don’t want those against whom they are prejudiced to leave at all. The runaway slave laws that used to exist in America are proof of that.

But what about the reverse? If you do want a group of people to leave, does that automatically make you a racist?

As is often the case, a matter of principle like this can be demonstrated by changing the scale of the problem. Suppose that we aren’t talking about a whole nation full of people, like Israel, laying claim to a particular territory. Suppose it’s just one person and a much smaller territory.

Specifically: suppose that you are in your house and one night someone breaks in. Further suppose that you are a member of race X and the home invader is a member of race Y. You naturally want the person to leave. But—and here is the key question—why do you want him to leave?

Is it because of his race? Because you don’t like race Y as a whole and don’t want its members around? If so then you are a racist with regard to race Y. No doubt about it.

But the reason you want the person to leave may have nothing to do with the home invader’s race. You may want him to go because you don’t want people invading your home. In that case, your motive is not racism but anti-home-invasion-ism.

Now let’s scale the issue up to where groups of people large enough to control national territories are in play.

Suppose, that you are a citizen of Vichy France and the Nazis have rolled in on their tanks and taken control.

If you want the Germans to leave, are you a racist?

It depends. If you hate all Germans and want them to leave simply because of that fact, then yes, you are an anti-German racist. (Be sure to remember that the word “race” originally applied not just to skin color but to national/ethnic/cultural origin, as in “the German race,” “the British race,” “the Japanese race,” etc.)

If you want Germans out because they are Germans, then yes, you are a racist.

But if you want them out because you don’t like people occupying your homeland—and if you would object whether they were German or British or Japanese—then you are not a racist. You are an anti-occupationist.

In the same way, if it’s 1800 and you are a Native American and you don’t like people of European descent—British, Spanish, or Portugese—occupying your homeland then you are a racist if you hate all British, all Spanish, or all Portugese—even the ones who aren’t occupying your homeland; but you are not a racist if you just hate foreign occupiers.

Or if it’s A.D. 60 and you are a Jewish person in Jerusalem, you may well hate the Romans occupying Judea and Galilee. If you hate all Romans everywhere, then you are an anti-Roman racist. But if you don’t mind Romans that aren’t supporters of the occupation then you are just an anti-occupationist.

They key is whether you want someone to leave because they are an occupier (of whatever race) or whether you want them to leave because they are of a specific race, apart from the occupation issue.

It should be pointed out that hating occupiers and lead to racism.

* If you are a Jew in second century B.C. Judea and you hate the Greek occupiers, you may be led to hate all Greeks.
* If you are a Jew in first century A.D. Judea and you hate the Roman occupiers, you may be led to hate all Romans.
* If you are a Native American in the nineteenth century A.D. Americas, you hate the European occupiers, you may be led to hate all Europeans.
* If you are a twentieth century Frenchman and you hate the German occupiers, you may be led to hate all Germans.
* If you are a twentieth century Palestinian and you hate the Jewish occupiers, you may be led to hate all Jews.

If so, your hatred of occupiers has led you into racism.

But just because occupation can lead one into racism doesn’t mean that it always does lead one into racism.

Should we assume that Maria von Trapp became an anti-German racist just because the Nazis perpetrated the Anschluss and seized control of Austria?

This seems implausible.

We can’t just assume racism on the part of a person who opposes a particular occupation. We can’t just leap to conclusions. We must strive to be fair and accurate about others, even if we don’t like them.

Specifically, we need to watch out for potential offenses against the Eighth Commandment (“Thou shalt not bear false witness against they neighbor”; Exodus 20:16). One commits calumny who “by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them”; also, if on the basis of an emotional reaction one leaps to an unwarranted conclusion, one commits the sin of rash judgment who “even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2477).

I understand how easy it is to get caught up with emotion when one encounters the kind of venom that Thomas displayed in her recent remarks (even chuckling—or as some have said, cackling—at her own provocation). That’s human. But it is at precisely such times that we have to check ourselves and make sure we are not being misled by our emotions (see above on rash judgment).

That’s why Scripture is full of exhortations like:

* “Reckon others better than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3)—i.e., give them the befit of the doubt

* “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12)—would you want to be given the benefit of the doubt, or to have people stop and check their emotions before lashing out at you?

* “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18, Mark 12:31)

These are part of the Jewish tradition as much as the Christian, as illustrated not just by the quote from Leviticus, but also by Hillel the Elder’s teaching a Gentile, “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man: this is the whole Law; the rest is mere commentary” (Shab. 31a).

The ethical requirements of both Judaism and Christianity thus require us to be careful in this area and make sure that we are not being swept up by our emotions. But that’s not the only consideration here.

In America today, in the wake of the Jewish Holocaust in Nazi Germany, there are few more damning things that one can say against a person than that they are an anti-Semite.

The only things that compare with it are calling someone a racist, a sexist, or a pedophile.

But that’s changing . . . rapidly . . . because the word “racist” is loosing its punch. The word has been so over-used that its force is wearing off, just as “Help! Wolf!” lost its punch in the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

If you use an emotionally-charged term too often, when it isn’t clearly warranted, it will lose the charge it has. People will start rolling their eyes when you use it, and their sympathies will shift from those who make the accusation to those against whom it is made.

If you don’t want that to happen to the word “anti-Semitism” then you don’t want it over used.

So there is one more reason we should be careful when charging someone with anti-Semitism.

This applies especially to Helen Thomas when you look at the things she said in the video, because she specifically suggests that Israelis who immigrated from America should return to America.

America is Helen’s native country. It’s her own neighborhood. Her own back yard.

And by saying that Israelis who came from America should return to America, she’s saying, “Let’s have more Jews here!”

If she hated Jewish people in general and wanted them to “just go away” on that basis then she wouldn’t be inviting them here. She’d want them to all die or something—or move to Antarctica, or the moon. But none of those is what she says. She just wants them out of a particular plot of ground in the Middle East, and she’s happy to have those of American origin come back to America, where she lives.

That shows she’s anti-occupationist, but it does not show that she’s anti-Semitic.

You can argue that what’s going on in Israel isn’t an occupation. That goes to the issue of who has proper title to the land in question (the subject of an upcoming post). But Helen perceives it as an occupation, and that’s what she’s objecting to.

So at least from what we see in the video, Thomas is clearly an anti-Zionist, but if you want to charge her with anti-Semitism, you’ll need to provide additional evidence.

What are your thoughts?

Is Helen Thomas an Anti-Semite

On May 27, long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas made remarks that have caused an uproar.

At the time, she was outside the White House, which was hosting a Jewish heritage event. An interviewer asked her if she had any comments on Israel.

Her reply was, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.”

She went on to say that “they” (meaning the Palestinian people) are an occupied people and that Palestine is “their land.”

When asked where Israelis should go, Thomas said that they should “Go home” and went on to identify “home” as “Poland, Germany . . . and America . . . and everywhere else.”

Thomas’s remarks caused an uproar in which many have called her remarks offensive, disgusting, anti-Semitic, hateful, and so forth. Some have been demanding that the White House strip her of her press credentials. Others have suggested that she should be fired from Hearst Newspapers, for which she currently works.

I’d like to look at one characterization of her remarks—that they were anti-Semitic.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have a long-standing disapproval of Helen Thomas. I don’t like her reporting. She strikes me as excessively partisan, mean, rude, and unpleasant. But if she’s anti-Semitic, I don’t see sufficient evidence of it in this clip.

Watch for yourself and then let’s discuss . . .

There are anti-Semites in the world, but “anti-Semite” is a term that one has to use with caution. After the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, calling someone an anti-Semite is to throw them in league with the Nazis. It has the emotional punch of calling someone a racist. In fact, anti-Semitism can be seen as a form of racism: racism directed toward Jewish people.

Terms like “anti-Semite” and “racist” are such damning terms that they should only be used when the facts justify them. They should not be tossed around willy-nilly, at whomever you happen to dislike. However convenient they may be for torpedoing your opponent’s reputation, indiscriminate use of these words only cheapens them and takes the focus off the horrors of real anti-Semitism and real racism.

So is Thomas an anti-Semite?

I don’t know. I don’t know her heart (or even her track record of publicly expressed opinions about Jewish people), but I don’t see evidence of anti-Semitism in the clip.

Why do I say that?

Well, for a start, she never even mentions the term “Jew.” Her comments are directed at Israel, which is not synonymous with the Jewish people as a whole. Her problem—at least as she articulates it in the clip—is not with Jewish people in general but with those Jewish people who are present in the modern state of Israel and who, in her view, are oppressing the Palestinian people.

That’s not anti-Semitism. It may by anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism, but it is not racism directed toward the Jewish people.

Her complaint in the vid is of a political and historical nature, not a racial or even a religious one.

She does not display hostility to Jews outside of Israel. If they went to other countries—“Poland, Germany, and America, and everywhere else”—then she would not appear to have a problem.

And note that she includes America in the list of where he wishes the people of Israel would go. It seems she would not mind more Jewish neighbors right here in her own country.

So I’m not seeing evidence for anti-Semitism—hatred (or whatever) of Jewish people as Jewish people. She is expressing—cantankerously (and taking delight in her own cantankerousness)—a historical/political opinion that is common among many people with her background.

For those who may not know, Thomas is a Maronite Catholic [UPDATE: I’ve since run across additional claims that say she is Greek Orthodox, so I’m not sure what is accurate here] whose parents were immigrants from Lebanon (so technically she is a Semite, though ironically not as the term is used in “anti-Semitic,” where “Semite” is improperly treated as a synonym for “Jew”). She was born in 1920 and growing up as a girl and a young woman hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were immigrating to Palestine, with increasingly tense relations between them and the Palestinians. She was a grown woman—age 28—when Israel became an independent state, and subsequently has seen—and felt in a personal way—the subsequent history of pain and violence of the region, including in particular the horrors that have befallen Lebanon on account of its proximity to Israel.

There is another side to that story—the Jewish side. (In fact, there are many sides to this story, including multiple ones within each ethnic group.) But it is understandable if someone like Thomas were to think, “Y’know, things would have been better off if all those immigrants and refugees had never come to Palestine. I wish they’d all go back to their previous homelands.”

Actually deconstructing the state of Israel and returning its citizens to other countries is not something that is presently on the table (though who knows what will happen if Middle Eastern states start getting nukes), and I don’t know that Thomas was literally proposing it. She may well have just been giving voice to an angry wish or fantasy scenario.

But that kind of thing is not uncommon or unexpected. In history people have conflicts, some people lose, and those who lose often harbor such wishes—sometimes for generations. It’s human nature.

Beyond that, the opinions one might reasonably attribute to Thomas on the basis of the clip—that it would be better if the Jewish migration to Palestine had never occurred and the state of Israel had never been founded, that the Palestinians have some kind of still-existing claim to the territory of Israel, and that it would be better if the Israelis migrated to other countries—are opinions which one could reasonably hold.

That’s not to say that they’re right, just that one could reasonably hold them. (I.e., they don’t flatly contradict the clear dictates of reason.) One also can reasonably hold diametrically opposite views. These are subjects of a historical and political nature that people can disagree about.

Were Thomas’ remarks inopportune? As they were made outside of a Jewish heritage celebration, oooooh yes.

Were they phrased with unnecessary cantankerousness? Uh-huh.

Was she foolish to make them? Most definitely.

Should she lose her job or White House credentials over them? One may reasonably hold this opinion.

But was she being anti-Semitic in her remarks? Not from what we see in the clip.

You can hold that Helen Thomas is as hateful, offensive, mean, venomous, outrageous, embarrassing a woman as you wish, but if you want to accuse her of anti-Semitism, you’ll need more than this clip. One can be angry about a historical situation without hating an entire people.

She is clearly an anti-Zionist—and an angry one!—but Zionism and the Jewish people are not the same thing. An angry anti-Zionist is not the same thing as an anti-Semite.

Unless evidence emerges that she hates Jewish people as an entire people (not just those Jewish people she views as occupiers of Palestine), let’s not call her an anti-Semite. It cheapens the word and thus makes it easier for real anti-Semitism to occur.

What are your thoughts?

Bishop Olmsted an Evil Monster?

I thought I would take the opportunity to offer a few thoughts on some of the issues raised in the combox of my previous postregarding the situation in the Diocese of Phoenix.

A sizeable number of commenters strongly deplored Bishop Thomas Olmsted’s actions regarding Sr. Margaret McBride.

So far as I can tell based on the known facts, Bishop Olmsted had done three, possibly four, things regarding Sr. McBride:

1) He has contacted Sr. McBride to get her side of the story regarding the abortion she approved.

2) He has informed her that, based on the facts as he understands them, she has triggered the provision of canon law that provides a latae sententiae (automatic) excommunication connected with abortion.

3) After the excommunication was reported in the press, Bishop Olmsted allowed his communications director to confirm the excommunication.

4) Bishop Olmsted *may* (or may not, we don’t know since nobody official is discussing this) have had a role in the reassignment of Sr. McBride to other duties at St. Joseph’s (the Catholic hospital where she works and where the abortion occurred).

I don’t see how anybody can object to Action #1. If a Catholic bishop is informed that an abortion has taken place at a Catholic hospital in his diocese, he is supposed to investigate it and find out what happened. Contacting people for their side of the story is always a good thing, so I don’t see grounds for outrage on this one.

Action #2 is something I think people may misunderstand. I’ve seen reports elsewhere on the Net where people are saying things like “the Bishop automatically excommunicated her when he found out.” This is not what happened. It’s a misunderstanding. He didn’t “automatically excommunicate” her. According to the Bishop, she “automatically excommunicated” herself. He informed her of this fact.

Canon law provides an automatic excommunication for a small number of offenses (e.g., abortion, throwing away the consecrated species of the Eucharist, assaulting the pope). When a person commits one of these actions (all things being equal) the person automatically incurs the censure of excommunication by the commission of the act itself.

If Sr. McBride incurred this penalty, it was by her own action, not the bishop’s.

Based on his reading of the facts, Bishop Olmsted concluded that she had incurred the penalty and made her aware of this.

That is not an act of cruelty.

It is a spiritual work of mercy because it gives her occasion to pause, reflect, and take the steps necessary to be reconciled with the Church (which is the purpose of excommunication to begin with; it is medicinal in nature, intended to facilitate repentance and reconciliation).

One could argue that perhaps Bishop Olmsted was wrong in his assessment of the facts and that Sr. McBride did not excommunicate herself. I’m not a canon lawyer, but depending on the facts of the case I can imagine a number of different potential lines of defense in Sr. McBride’s favor (i.e., that she did not excommunicate herself).

So can others.

Coming from very different places on the Catholic spectrum, Michael Liccione and Thomas Doyle both offer potential lines of defense.

As I am sure they can, I can also think of additional lines of defense they don’t mention in their articles.

But I am not in possession of the full facts of the case because so many of them are confidential.

Bishop Olmsted is in possession of the facts, and, unlike me, he is a canonist.

Based on what is known, I can understand why people would question whether Sr. McBride excommunicated herself, but we’re dealing with something at several removes, and we need to be cautious in making judgments about situations on which we do not have all the facts.

On the other hand, I could imagine one saying, “I defer to Bishop Olmsted on the question of whether Sr. McBride excommunicated herself. Let’s say that she did violate the law in this way. But I think it’s a bad law.”

That’s a position a Catholic (or anyone else) can legitimately hold.

Some canonists have argued that penalties that take effect automatically are a bad idea anyway. At his blog, canonist Edward Peters writes:

I have long held that latae sententiae penalties are unsustainable in a modern legal system, that their use inevitably distracts attention from the underlying offense and redirects it toward the complexities of the canonical legal system (which most folks are not prepared to assess), and that the 150 year trend toward reducing automatic penalties in the Church is good and should be maintained. Still other issues, such as authority to remit sins and sanctions, are unnecessary complicated by automatic sanctions as well.

And, one may note, the Code of Canons for the Eastern Churches (CCEO), which is the equivalent of the Code of Canon Law (CIC) for Eastern Catholics, has no latae sententiae penalties at all and handles the same issues in other ways (cf. CCEO 1402).

So it is perfectly possible for the Church not to even have this kind of law—or to configure it differently so that it would have a broader or narrower scope regarding abortion—or to add new offenses (e.g., sexual abuse of a minor by a cleric)—or to delete existing ones.

All of these are legitimate opinions one can reasonably hold and discuss and advocate.

But in such cases, one’s disagreement is with the law, not with Bishop Olmsted.

He has to deal with the law the way it is, not the way he—or anyone else—might wish it to be, just as every cop and every judge has to deal with the law as it is in his jurisdiction.

So I don’t see grounds for faulting Bishop Olmsted for seeking to apply the law—as it is, not in some other way—to events in his diocese. That’s his job.

Action #3 (confirming the excommunication after the press began reported on it) seems to be a reasonable thing for a bishop to do, lest confusion result. The press has a hard enough time getting religion stories right, and it’s entirely understandable that the bishop would want to head misunderstandings off.

Action #4—which is only speculative, but which involves reasonable speculation—seems to naturally follow from the previous actions.

Sr. McBride’s position was “vice president of mission integration” at the hospital. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I suppose it means helping ensure that the hospital undertakes its medical services in fulfillment of its mission as a Catholic entity, in keeping with the Church’s vision of human rights, including and in a special way the foundation of all rights, the right to life.

If it is true that Sr. McBride had such a grave lapse of judgment as to approve of a direct abortion taking place in the facility then it is easy to see how this would be inconsistent with her job duties regarding mission integration. It is also easy to see how excommunicating oneself is inconsistent with a job involving mission integration.

Again, one could disagree with Bishop Olmsted and argue that Sr. McBride did not approve of a direct abortion (the kind that is intrinsically evil) or that for various reasons she did not automatically excommunicate herself, but those matters pertain to his judgment involved in Action #2. If one grants that he is right about Action #2, then Action #4 follows from it as a logical consequence, so there is no special ill will manifest in having her duties changed given the established assessment of her actions.

I thus don’t understand the outrage being expressed toward Bishop Olmsted.

If you want to disagree with him, okay. But do so with some reserve, because we are not privy to the facts of this case. We only know them partially.

If you want to disagree with the law and suggest what you think would be a better formulation, fine. But recognize that your objection is to the law, not the Bishop.

There is ample room here for Catholics and other people of good will to discuss and even disagree, but let’s do it with caution and respect.

I’ve got more to come on this issue, including the medical situation involved and the ethics of direct vs. indirect abortion, but in the meantime . . .

What do you think?

What Are the True Facts Regarding the Abortion-Approving Nun?

I’ve had several requests to comment on the announcement in the Diocese of Phoenix that Sr. Margaret McBride of the Sisters of Mercy (pictured) has incurred automatic excommunication for approving an abortion at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix.

So here goes.

As you would expect, Bishop Olmsted of Phoenix is being pilloried in connection with this, with the mainstream media and others trying to fit it to the “Cruel Bishop vs. Victim Nun” stock narrative (as opposed, e.g., to the “Conscientious Bishop Trying To Do His Job after Nun Approves Horror” narrative).

So let’s try to take an objective look at the situation, starting with the facts of the case.

Unfortunately, the facts of the case are not entirely clear. The identity of the mother who had the abortion, for example, has not been disclosed due to medical privacy laws, but here is what we know:

1) Last December a 27-year old woman with pulmonary hypertension was 11 weeks pregnant and sought some form of care at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix.

2) According to a statement of St. Joseph’s, a consultation was held “with the patient, her family, her physicians, and in consultation with the Ethics Committee, of which Sr. Margaret McBride is a member.”

3) It was decided that “the treatment necessary to save the mother’s life required the termination of an 11-week pregnancy.”

4) The abortion was performed, though the means by which it was done is not clear. Presumably it was suction aspiration, or possibly dilation and curettage since RU 486 does not seem to be recommended for 11 pregnancies. The Arizona Republic states that it was a “surgery,” which would also point to either suction-aspiration or D & C, but it mentions this only in passing, and so it could be something the reporter assumed, not what actually happened. If it was (as I strongly suspect), suction-aspiration or D & C then the child was directly torn in pieces as part of the procedure.

5) At some point this came to the attention of the Diocese of Phoenix, and Sr. McBride confirmed to Bishop Olmsted that she had approved the abortion.

6) At some point, presumably after this, Sr. McBride was reassigned within St. Joe’s. Neither the diocese nor the hospital has said whether Bishop Olmsted had a role in the reassignment.

7) Also at some point, presumably at about the same time, Sr. McBride was informed that she had incurred a latae sententiae (automatic) excommunication per canon 1398 of the Code of Canon Law, which states: “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication.”

8) At some point the reassignment of Sr. McBride came to the attention of the Arizona Republic, whose staff contacted both Bishop Olmsted and St. Joseph’s for statements.

9) On or about May 14, St. Joseph’s confirmed to the Arizona Republic that an abortion had taken place there in December. On or about this same date it provided a statement to the newspaper.

10) On May 14, Bishop Olmsted provided a statement as well.

11) On May 15, the Arizona Republic published the statements online (kudos to the Arizona Republic for doing so instead of hiding them and merely quoting and summarizing them without showing us the context).

12) The same day, it published this story by Michael Clancy on the matter (for some reason the story now carries a date of May 19, though it originally came out four days earlier; perhaps this is an unacknowledged revision of the original story). It was at this point the story became known to the public in general.

And those are the basic facts as we know them (or seem to know them).

Let’s see if we can answer a few questions:

1) Is the bishop really being mean?

From the way this is being reported, you’d think that Bishop Olmsted was issuing thundering public denunciations of Sr. McBride, that he took the initiative to sent out some kind of press release announcing the excommunication, perhaps to warn members of his flock that Sr. McBride is to be publicly shunned or something.

From what I can tell, this is the exact opposite of what happened. It appears that Bishop Olmsted issued his statement only in response to the hospital confirming the story for the press. Had the hospital kept its mouth shut, Bishop Olmsted would not have made it public.

To minimize public humiliation of Sr. McBride, Bishop Olmsted did not say in his statement that she had been excommunicated. In fact, she was not mentioned in his statement at all. The only mention of excommunication the statement makes is a general one, with no specific individuals in focus. It is just the general caution, “If a Catholic formally cooperates in the procurement of an abortion, they are automatically excommunicated by that action.”

Reporter Michael Clancy also seems to acknowledge that the Bishop did not speak explicitly of Sr. McBride, stating in his story only that he “indicated” (as opposed, e.g., to “said”) that McBride was excommunicated.

My guess is that what happened here is that the Bishop wanted to deal with these matters privately, but someone at the hospital tipped the press, which then asked both the Bishop and the hospital about the matter. When the hospital confirmed, the Bishop felt obliged to respond as well, but of a desire to protect the reputations/privacy of those involved, he responded only in general terms, acknowledging that an abortion had taken place, that he was horrified by this, and explaining the Church’s position on such matters.

Scarcely the “Cruel Bishop vs. Victim Nun” narrative. No thundering public denunciations of Sr. McBride; no attempts to publicly shame her—quite the opposite!

But the press ran with it, making explicit the fact that she had been excommunicated. The bishop hadn’t said so, but presumably she and/or someone else who knew about it told the Arizona Republic, and the Arizona Republic took the reference to the Church’s law in the bishop’s statement as confirmation.

The story then went all over the place, and the diocese felt obliged to provide a Q & A to clear things up.

This Q & A was released on May 18th by Rob DeFrancesco, the diocesan director of communications. It is online here (.pdf), and it seems to have been written by the communications office, because it contains a number of imprecisions regarding canon law that Bishop Olmsted, who is himself a canonist, would not be expected to use in his writing.

The document is notable, though, in that it confirms that Sr. McBride—and ostensibly others (none of who are named)—automatically excommunicated themselves due to their involvement in the abortion.

Again, this does not support the narrative of a bishop being cruel by publicly humiliating someone. Instead, it suggests a bishop trying to preserve the reputations and privacy of all involved but feeling compelled by the press to reluctantly confirm certain facts in order to prevent public misunderstanding.

2) Did Sr. McBride automatically excommunicated herself?

This is an important question, because if she did then one can scarcely fault Bishop Olmsted for informing her of this fact. It would be his duty as a pastor to inform her of the canonical consequences of her action and encourage her repentance and reconciliation with the Church. In other words, he would be doing his job, seeking to encourage reconciliation in the wake of a tragic error.

So . . . did she?

As outsiders, it’s hard for us to say for ourselves because the specific facts of the case aren’t known. Bishop Olmsted has sought to preserve Sr. McBride’s privacy, and according to Catholic News Service, “Sister Margaret . . . has declined to comment on the controversy.”

But let’s look for a moment at the law as it seems to apply to this case.

According to canon 1398, quoted above, a person who “procures a completed abortion” incurs automatic excommunication. Among other things, this must be understood in light of subsequent Magisterial teaching (e.g., Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae) as referring to a “direct abortion, i.e., every act tending directly to destroy human life in the womb ‘whether such destruction is intended as an end or only as a means to an end’” (EV 62).

This excludes procedures that do not directly kill the child but that foresee the child’s death as a non-intended, non-desired side effect (e.g., radiation or chemotherapy treatments for a pregnant mother with cancer). It is also why I dealt above with the fact that the child was almost certainly killed by suction-aspiration or dilation and curettage, both of which tear the child into tiny bits and are thus unambiguously the direct killing of an innocent individual, with no dispute possible, even hypothetically.

So far as we can tell, there is no dispute that a direct abortion occurred in this case, meaning that this part of the question is off the table.

So did Sr. McBride “procure” such an abortion?

Before we answer this question, we must mention another canon that has relevance to this case. Canon 1329 provides that:

§2. Accomplices who are not named in a law or precept incur a latae sententiae [automatic] penalty attached to a delict [offence] if without their assistance the delict would not have been committed, and the penalty is of such a nature that it can affect them . . .

One might hold that only the woman who has an abortion and/or the one who pays for or arranges for it “procures” it, but canon 1329 makes it clear that the penalty of automatic excommunication also applies to accomplices “if without their assistance the delict would not have been committed.”

So one can either argue that by voting to approve the abortion Sr. McBride fell under the provision of “procuring” the abortion or that she functioned as a necessary accomplice under the provision of canon 1329 §2.

In either case, she would have incurred automatic excommunication.

Thus Bishop Olmsted would have been simply doing his pastoral duty of informing her of the fact that she had excommunicated herself and needed to take steps to reconcile with the Church.

3) Is there another option?

Suppose that Sr. McBride did not “procure” an abortion and that she was not a necessary accomplice in procuration one. Is there a theory that would allow her to be seen as automatically excommunicating herself?

Maybe.

Such a theory seems to be suggested by the Q & A that the Communications Office of the Diocese of Phoenix released.

This Q & A states:

Why was Sr. McBride excommunicated?

Sr. McBride held a position of authority at the hospital and was frequently consulted on ethical matters. She gave her consent that the abortion was a morally good and allowable act according to Church teaching. Furthermore, she admitted this directly to Bishop Olmsted. Since she gave her consent and encouraged an abortion she automatically excommunicated herself from the Church. “Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church #2272) This canonical penalty is imposed by virtue of Canon 1398: “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs a latae sententiae excommunication.

The significant part of this is the quotation from CCC 2272, which states that formal cooperation in an abortion is a grave offense to which the Church attaches the penalty of excommunication.

Formal cooperation is a much lesser test than that provided for in Canon 1329. To formally cooperate with an act one need only cooperate with it (as Sr. McBride clearly did by voting to approve the abortion) and approve of it (as she did if she consented to it as “a morally good and allowable act,” per the Q & A). This involves much less than being an accomplice without whom the offense “would not have been committed.”

Still, an unquoted part of the Catechism text notes that this application is “subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law” (presumably including Canon 1329). It then references Canons 1323 and 1324, neither of which seem apropos to this case.

Nevertheless, it seems that the Communications Office of the Diocese of Phoenix may be holding to a theory that, based on CCC 2272, any formal cooperation with a direct abortion will trigger automatic excommunication, and if it is true that Sr. McBride “gave her consent that the [direct] abortion was a morally good and allowable act according to Church” then it seems she formally cooperated in such an abortion and triggered the penalty on this theory.

There would be several defenses against this view (among them: The Catechism is a teaching document that does not establish legal requirements; also, Canon 18 requires that a strict interpretation be given to laws involving the penalty of excommunication).

And the theory just articulated is not the common understanding among canonists, which is one reason why the Q & A seems to contain imprecisions that one would not expect of Bishop Olmsted as a canonist, but it deserves to be mentioned since it’s in the Q & A.

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?

“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.