Category: +Religion

Yes! No longer do pregnant moms have to make do with the services of ordinary doulas—women who assist them during or after the birth of a child and who aren’t midwives.

No! This is the twenty-first century, and now women—in New York City—have a brand new service available to them: the abortion doula.

These service-providers hang out on a web site called DoulaProject.Org, where they blog about their services and experiences. They have an e-mail list and a Facebook fan page, and their suggested reading section includes titles like, “The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden Story of the Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade.”

Imagine that! It’s so much better now that we have Roe v. Wade and mothers can simply terminate their children rather than having to surrender them to adoption.

But let’s meet some of the abortion doulas themselves, shall we?

First, there’s E. Kale Edmiston, who describes herself as “a college-educated, white genderqueer,” who works as “a research scientist” and who is “a reproductive justice organizer.” She’s committed to her work as an abortion doula, as she has to take the train from her home in New Haven, Connecticut to her abortion gig in New York City. She says that she became “pro-choice because I grew up in the rural Midwest and saw how abstinence only education, coupled with limited access to abortion, exacerbated class disparities in my hometown.”

When she first became an abortion doula, she worried that she might not be able to relate to her clients, “who are mostly lower-income women of color and immigrants,” but fortunately . . .

What I found after my first few shifts of work was that I had worried way too much about saying the right thing. With most of my clients, I barely speak at all. In the waiting room, I sit next to her as I hold her hand. During the procedure, I try to be a solid presence- I plant my feet squarely next to the table and I face her; I try to make our dynamic her focus- whether its letting her squeeze my hand or looking her in the eye with absolute confidence that she is going to be ok. Afterward, we mostly sit in silence together, only really speaking if I sense that she wants to talk. This is a huge departure from my normal way of being in the world. I live mostly in my head; I over-think everything; my 9-5 job is working as a research scientist. Being an abortion doula is my one much-needed chance to be embodied emotion with another person.

Another abortion doula is “Lauren Mitchell, a petite redhead from Williamsburg” who is one of the founders of the Doula Project and who, according to the Meet the Doulas page on their site, “firmly believes in the inherent interdisciplinary connections that appear in the context of the body and throughout the spectrum of pregnancy.” She also is evidently a firmly-committed believer in the singular efficacy of bafflegab. Her bio notes, “When she’s not thinking about women’s health (which is rare), she writes. Her work can be found under the pseudonym L.A. Mitchell,” but the bio quickly qualifies this by saying, “(please note, she is not the L.A. Mitchell who writes sci-fi Christian romance novels).”

Whew! I am so relieved to hear that. (Not that I read sci-fi Christian romance novels, mind you.)

Another founder of the project is . . .

Miriam Perez, 25, an editor at Feministing and author of the blog Radical Doula, found that some people like herself felt isolated in their doula communities because they were queer, pro-choice or uninterested in making a full-time career of doula work. For Perez, it was also an issue of reconciling her reproductive rights work with being a doula.

And so the Doula Project was imagined when Perez met the Mitchell and the project’s co-founder, Mary Mahoney, at a meeting of The New York Birth Coalition in 2007. The idea of installing a doula unit at a local hospital or clinic became a passion project that Mitchell and Mahoney eventually carried to fruition (Perez had relocated to Washington, D.C.). And it continues to grow. Besides the partnership with the Manhattan hospital, the project appoints abortion doulas on an individual basis to women undergoing abortions at other hospitals and adoption doulas to Spence Chapin Adoption Agency. It’s also set to open a chapter in Atlanta.

There are 20 active abortion doulas in New York, mostly women under 30, and they work in shifts on a volunteer basis, serving up to 25 patients a week. To become doulas, they must complete 20 hours of clinical training, but the bulk of the job is intuitive — being present with the patient before and after the abortion, responding to her cues and providing necessary support. The intimacy of the experience can be wrenching. “What you get very used to is this weird mix of tragedy and relief and sex and death — this wild variety of emotions,” Mitchell says. “There’s always this interesting mix of remorse and relief.”

Not everybody is cut out to be an abortion doula, of course.

“A lot of people are interested in this politically, but don’t have the warmth,” Mitchell says. “You need more than just your conviction to do this.”

So it’s not enough, you see, to want to assist in homicide out of a sense of sheer ideological driven-ness. You have to have a human touch, too. Got it?

Elsewhere co-founder Mary Mahoney writes:

Three years ago I became a doula. Early in my training, I became part of a conversation that focused on providing doula support for all of a pregnant person’s choices, including abortion. Since that time, I have served more than 100 pregnant people as part of The Doula Project in New York City. The project was founded on the idea that pregnancy is a spectrum and that as female-bodied people we may experience any and all of the possibilities that spectrum contains in a lifetime. Within that, we should also have access to doula care for each of our pregnancies.

Presumably, most of the “pregnant persons” that Mahoney works with are also “female-bodied people” Probably most of them aren’t “genderqueer.” But such is the life of a “reproductive justice organizer.”

It’s interesting in how Sin-As-An-Ideology (as opposed to a weakness) causes language to be warped as a way of masking the hideous distortions it introduces.

File this one under Dr. Frankenstein’s Medicine Show.

Your thoughts on this amazing new service?

That’s the message that British MP Ed Balls recently “reassured” the public Catholic schools would be forced to send to the children who attend them. According to the Guardian:

Ed Balls’s controversial amendment to the bill on sex education, allowing faith schools to opt out of new rules on teaching about issues such as homosexuality and contraception, was passed in the Commons yesterday by 268 votes to 177, giving the government a majority of 91.

The amendment, which was passed without debate due to a lack of time at the report stage, allows faith schools to teach personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) lessons “in a way that reflects the school’s religious character”, and has been condemned by teaching unions and the National Secular Society, which said the government had betrayed children in faith schools.

Balls insisted there was “no watering down”. “There’s no opt-out for any faith school from teaching the full, broad, balanced curriculum on sex education,” he said. “Catholic schools can say to their pupils that, as a religion, we believe contraception is wrong, but what they can’t do is say they are not going to teach about contraception.”

This is just jaw-dropping.

So . . . Catholic schools in England get to say that contraception is wrong, but they have to go ahead and teach kids how to procure and use it?

And that’s supposed to be allowing them to present the matter in a way “that reflects the school’s religious character.”

I wonder if Mr. Balls would view this as a legitimate way of acting if the shoe were on the other foot . . . e.g., “As a state-sponsored, secular school, we believe it is wrong to tell people what religion they should be. Now here are some very detailed instructions about how to become a Catholic.”

Of course, the “compromise” that this measure represents is just hypocritical window dressing.

I suppose that it’s possible that, after the next election in England, this could be reversed . . . but I don’t hold a lot of hope for that.

England seems hell-bent on literally being hell-bent in its social policy these days.

And, as always, anything bad that happens in England is a cautionary tale for what could happen in America if we aren’t active and vigorous in opposing it.

GET THE STORY.

MORE HERE.

The faithful are abandoning the Church in droves!

The number of priests is plummeting!

The number of seminarians is spiraling downward!

The number of nuns has dropped!

Right?

Well, the number of nuns has dropped, but the rest of that is just wrong.

I remember back in my Evangelical days, it was a well-accepted fact that the Catholic Church was on its last legs, with people abandoning it in droves, losing more and more ever year.

Funny how things change when you check the facts.

Certainly, there are problems in the Church (always have been; cf. Epistles of St. Paul). The Church did take a big hit after Vatican II. And we’re a long way from where we should be.

But we’re actually growing. Worldwide.

As is the number of priests and seminarians.

The evidence for this—or rather, a summary of it—is found in a work the Holy See produces each year called the Annuario Pontifico (Pontifical Yearbook). Among other things, it collects Catholic statistics from around the world. The newest edition of it came out last Saturday.

So what did it say?

Globally, an increase in the Catholic population of 19 million, for a total of 1,166,000,000 Catholics, or 17.4 percent of global population.

“Yes,” you say sagely, “but 19 million is just a raw number, and the number of Catholics could be going up and yet the Church could still be shrinking in terms of percent of global population.”

But it’s not. The previous year’s Annuario showed the Church at only 17.33 percent of global population, so the increase was not just an increase in raw numbers but in percentage of overall population as well. In other words: The Catholic population is growing faster than the world population.

“Good!” you say, ‘but surely the Catholic population is shrinking here in the U.S.”

Noooo. Though I don’t have numbers from the new edition of the Annuario, according to the 2009 Official Catholic Directory (the Kenedy directory) for the U.S., the number of Catholics in this country increased by a million over the course of the year, maintaining the overall Catholic percentage of the population here.

“What about priests and seminarians?”

They’re up, too, worldwide. According to the new Annuario there were an additional 4,000 priests worldwide between 2000 and 2008 (the most recent year of the Annuario’s data), for a total of 409,166 priests. And in just one year (2007-2008) the number of seminarians jumped by 1,000 (total: 117,024).

The number of consecrated religious, of both sexes, did drop from 2000 to 2008, hemorrhaging 40,000 and dropping the total to 739,067.

There are still lots of problems the Church has to face, but imminent extinction isn’t one of them.

GET THE STORY.

I was very pleased to see Matt Warner’s poston the fact that the Big Bang theory of cosmology was proposed by the Belgian priest, Fr. Georges Lemaitre (pictured).

This is a really cool thing, and not many people know it. It’s also a terrific way to show people that the Catholic Church isn’t anti-science. “Why, the father of Big Bang cosmology was a Catholic priest!”

Pope Pius XII was also very enthusiastic about the Big Bang (though he didn’t use the term) and its potential to show the coherence of the idea that the universe was created in time, which was widely denied by scientists previously. He gave a speech about this to the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences back in 1951.

Being an astronomy and apologetics buff, I find all of this absolutely jazzy.

But I’d also give a quick word of caution, because Catholics need to be a little careful using the Big Bang in apologetics.

One temptation is to identify the Big Bang not just as the moment of creation but specifically as the creation of light in Genesis 1. That’s problematic because Genesis does not portray the creation of light as the moment the world came into existence. It really doesn’t! Let’s look at the text:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
2 The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.
3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.

The earth already exists in a formless and empty state, with a deep of waters that has a surface, which the Spirit of God hovers over. Then light gets created.

So Genesis depicts the creation of light happening when the heavens and the earth and its waters already existed. At least that is how the text depicts it. You can argue that this isn’t to be taken literally, but that only makes the same point another way: We shouldn’t be too quick to identify the Big Bang with the creation of light in Genesis. We have to be careful about mapping Genesis onto modern cosmology.

But there is another thing we need to be careful about, which is identifying the Big Bang as the moment of creation.

It may well have been! I would love for us to find a way to prove that scientifically.

But we’re not there yet. Scientifically, there is still a lot about the Big Bang that is a mystery. We just don’t understand it. The evidence shows that it happened, but not why it happened. We have very little clue about that scientifically—and there may well be no scientific answer. It may be that God just did it, and did it in a way not susceptible to scientific study.

But that’s not the only option. There are others that cannot presently be ruled out on scientific grounds. For example, the visible universe we see today may have budded off of a larger universe that we cannot see, and the moment it budded off may have been the Big Bang. There are other options, too.

If one of those options is the case, it just means that God created the universe—from nothing—even farther back in time than we can currently see.

But new scientific instruments may allow us to go even further back. In fact, there are plans for a new set of scientific projects that may let us discern something about the state of the universe before the Big Bang (if there was one).

In his 1951 speech, while hailing the Big Bang, Pius XII also cautioned that “the facts established up to the present time are not an absolute proof of creation in time, as are the proofs drawn from metaphysics and revelation.”

So, while the idea of the Big Bang is consistent with the idea that the universe was created a finite time ago, and while the Big Bang may be that moment of creation, we need to be a little careful on that score.

MORE INFO HERE.

Every year a bunch of questions come up concerning Lent and the details of the laws governing it. Sometimes these rules are misstated or not clearly stated in various places on the web, so let’s look at what the Church’s official documents say regarding the practice of fast and abstinence on Ash Wednesday.

Before we do that, though, let me offer a few notes of caution:

1) The Church’s laws regarding fast and abstinence today are very mild. As such, they are minimums. One can go beyond what they require and observe a stricter form of penitence, though one is not legally required to do so.

2) There are ways of technically staying within the letter of the law while violating its spirit—e.g., avoiding meat but having a lavish seafood feast. These should be avoided. We want to keep both the letter and the spirit of the law.

3) The Church does not mean us to hurt ourselves by observing penitential practices, and there are a number of exceptions to the law of fast in particular. Anyone who has a medical condition that would conflict with fasting is not obliged to observe it. For example, someone with diabetes, someone who has been put on a special diet by a doctor, someone with acid reflux disease who needs to keep food in the stomach to avoid acid buildup.

Now let’s look at the law.

Ash Wednesday is a day of abstinence and fast. According to Pope Paul VI’s constitution Paenitemini:

III. 1. The law of abstinence forbids the use of meat, but not of eggs, the products of milk or condiments made of animal fat.

2. The law of fasting allows only one full meal a day, but does not prohibit taking some food in the morning and evening, observing—as far as quantity and quality are concerned—approved local custom.

Something to note about the law of fast is that while it acknowledges one full meal, it does not further specify the quantity of “some food” that can be consumed in the morning and evening. You sometime hear or read about “two smaller meals as long as they don’t add up to another full meal” but this is not what the law says. It just says “some food.” That is certainly something less than a full meal, but the Church does not intend people to scruple about precisely amounts. (Also, the “doesn’t add up to another full meal” rule is very difficult to apply since people eat meals of different sizes during the day and the “size” of a meal can be measured in more than one way; e.g., calories vs. volume.)

The law does provide that approved local custom can regulate the quantity and quality of this food, but the U.S. bishops have not established a complementary norm regulating this. Nor has any U.S. bishop bound his subjects in this respect, to my knowledge. (Your mileage may vary.)

Now: Who is bound to abstain and fast? Here the governing document is the 1983 Code of Canon Law:

Can.  1252 The law of abstinence binds those who have completed their fourteenth year. The law of fasting binds those who have attained their majority, until the beginning of their sixtieth year. Pastors of souls and parents are to ensure that even those who by reason of their age are not bound by the law of fasting and abstinence, are taught the true meaning of penance.

“Those who have completed their fourteenth year” mean those who have had their fourteenth birthday (your first year starts at birth and is completed with your first birthday). The obligation to abstain begins then and continues for the rest of one’s life.

Not so with the law of fasting. “Those who have attained their majority” refers to those who have had their eighteenth birthday, and “the beginning of their sixtieth year” occurs when one turns fifty-nine (the sixtieth year is the one preceding one’s sixtieth birthday, the same way the first year precedes the first birthday). The law of fast thus binds from one’s eighteenth birthday to one’s fifty-ninth—unless a medical condition intervenes.

What about those who are too young to be subject to these requirements? Here Paenitemini states:

As regards those of a lesser age, pastors of souls and parents should see to it with particular care that they are educated to a true sense of penitence.

As noted, these are legal minimums, and one certainly can do more.

Christianity Today has a web article noting (and quoting from) our recent discussion of John Paul II’s practice of self-mortification.

The piece—written by an Evangelical—is noteworthy in that it doesn’t just lash out against the concept. (No pun intended! Honest! Didn’t even notice that until later!) Indeed, it devotes a significant amount of attention to understanding the practice from a Catholic perspective.

Though ultimately the author sees self-flagellation as “misguided,” he acknowledges and recommends the practice of self-denial, including fasting.

(So . . . why is self-flagellation “misguided” whereas fasting is to be recommended? As long as you don’t permanently injure your body with either—and both can be done in ways that do permanent damage—why is one more misguided than the other?)

In any event, I’d like to kudos CT and the author of the piece—Collin Hansen—for seeking to explore the issue in a fair-minded way!

GET THE STORY.

File this one under the heading “defending the indefensible.”

Author and blogger John Allen, of the National Catholic Reporter (not the Register, just to avoid any misunderstanding), is a competent and insightful journalist whose pieces I enjoy reading.

Mostly.

A thing that occasionally mars them is his desire to play waggish phrasemaker, a role in which he can display a tin ear.

For instance, in today’s column he writes:

I may have inadvertently added fuel to the fire by introducing something new to fight over: My phrase “Taliban Catholicism” to capture a certain trajectory within the church. (At least I think I coined the term, though for all I know somebody else got there first.)

In my brief remarks Monday night, I applauded [Bishop Kevin] Farrell’s vision, underscoring it with a bit of rhetoric that’s become part of my standard stump speech. A defining challenge for the church these days, I said, is to craft a synthesis between entirely legitimate hunger for identity on the one hand, and engagement with the great social movements of the time on the other.

That synthesis, I said, has to involve striking a balance between two extremes. Here’s how I described them:

“On the one extreme lies what my friend and colleague George Weigel correctly terms ‘Catholicism Lite,’ meaning a watered-down, sold-out form of secularized religiosity, Catholic in name only. On the other is what I call ‘Taliban Catholicism,’ meaning a distorted, angry form of the faith that knows only how to excoriate, condemn, and smash the TV sets of the modern world.”

Allen then recounts how he was politely taken to task by a member of the audience he was addressing and offers two defenses of his use of the term “Taliban Catholicism.”

First, he says that he uses the terms “Catholic Lite” and “Taliban Catholicism” not to describe specific people but states of mind. Second, he says that he doesn’t use them to refer to the left or right portions of the theological/political/whatever spectrum and that both exist on both sides of the spectrum.

These are pretty weak excuses to my mind.

Unless one has the linguistic bullheadedness of Humpty Dumpty, it should be recognized that words do not just have stipulative definitions where you get to use them the way you want to, with no thought to the real-world consequences.

Words are used by communities, and when you create compound terms like “Catholic Lite” or “Taliban Catholicism,” they’re going to suggest particular things to the community. In this case, no matter what Allen might subjectively mean by these terms, they’re going to be taken by contemporary English-speaking Catholics of the type found in his audience as references to the Catholic “left” and the Catholic “right.”

That’s what the audience is going to automatically assume.

Perhaps, with a lot of explanation and exposition and disclaimers by Allen, he could overcome that initial perception, but that’s what the initial perception is going to be.

But there’s an even more fundamental problem.

There is just no parity whatsoever between Weigel’s term “Catholic Lite” (incorporating a reference to low-calorie food products) and Allen’s own “Taliban Catholicism” (incorporating a reference to murderous thugs with whom we are at war).

It is as if Allen had used the phrase “Al-Qa’eda Catholicism” or “Nazi Catholicism.”

Now matter how many Humpty Dumpty games you play with these terms, they are just going to generate more heat than light.

Allen is smart enough to know that.

I chose the picture that I did for this post to call to mind the kind of murderous thugs that the Taliban are. But this picture doesn’t tell the half of it. In searching for it, I came across far more disturbing and violent pictures of the Taliban. People they had killed. People they were about to behead. People about to be shot in the head. I don’t suggest that anyone go looking for such pictures, but they underscore the force of the word “Taliban” and just the kind of evil with which it is associated.

Allen’s “Taliban Catholicism” is said to “excoriate, condemn, and smash the TV sets of the modern world.” The real Taliban has done far, far worse acts than that, which is precisely why his use of the term to refer to people who—however much they rage against certain things in the modern world—do not actually commit Taliban-like atrocities is disgusting.

Opinionated Catholic asks: In 25 Years Will There Be A Papal Statement on Robots?

Who can say? Always in motion, the future is.

But this one seems a pretty sure bet, in part for the reasons that Opinionated Catholic cites:

What happens when warfare can be conducted just by robots. . . .
It appears this world is fast approaching. That is one reason when I hear of aircraft that have no humans, tanks that have no commander, and ships with no crews I start wondering if we want to go down this road.

What about new Just War theory issues? An inequity between nations that can have robots do the dying for them and those that have to use real live human beings?

However there is no stopping it. Soon we will have to deal with the moral and ethical questions involved here.

It’s a sure bet that the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace will be all over the issue of battlefield robots, with papal comments to follow, and perhaps even a whole papal document devoted to the subject, though that’s more iffy.

I would guess that we won’t be seeing full armies of autonomous droids in twenty-five years, though we already have a variety of battlefield robots, and their presence will increase over time.

And yes, technologically and economically developed countries—like ours—will have more and better robots than other countries, with poor ones not having any.

This disparity will be noted and will be part of the inevitable discussion—which will be prompted by the just as inevitable use of robots.

When I first saw the headline wondering whether there would be a papal statement on robots in twenty-five years, though, it wasn’t battlefield robots that my mind first turned to: It was ordinary robots whose job isn’t to kill people . . . but to kill jobs.

Given the Holy See’s concern for ordinary workers, the impact of robots on the workforce would also be likely to occasion papal remarks.

In fact, I thought, I’d be surprised if there weren’t already papal remarks on job-killing robots.

So I Googled the Vatican web site,

AND LOOKEE HERE.

There are already a number of hits. Mostly they aren’t statements issuing from the pope but from different Vatican dicasteries.

There are, however, a couple of statements from John Paul II that deal with—surprise, surprise—the impact of robots on the workforce.

Unfortunately, the Holy See doesn’t have English translations of these addresses up on its web site, but here are Google’s translations:

Address given during a 1983 papal visit to an Italian glass factory.

Papal audience from 1984 on Labor Day.

NOTE: If you’re good with Italian, you can help improve Google’s translation by mousing over the text.

This is a chart showing the fifty largest countries by population and the religious freedom they offer.

The chart was prepared by the Pew Forum, and it measures religious freedom along two axes. The first—the horizontal axis—is the amount of freedom allowed by law, with the most freedom on the left and the least freedom on the right.

The second—the vertical axis—is the amount of freedom allowed culturally (i.e., how much social hostility you are likely to meet apart from the law), with the most freedom at the bottom and the least freedom at the top.

The size of the circles represents the number of people living in the country.

When I first saw this, several questions occurred to me.

One was: “Where is Saudia Arabia? It ought to be in the extreme top right of the diagram.” The answer is that it’s not one of the top fifty countries by population, so it’s not on the chart. However, in the Pew Forum report that the chart is based on, Saudi Arabia is the only country listed in the “very high” category for both social hostilities (6.8) and government restrictions (8.4) to freedom of religion.

Another question was: “Why is the U.S. ranked the way it is?” It turns out that the government restrictions score the U.S. has (1.6) includes the fact that it requires religious organizations to apply for a special status (c3 non-profit) to obtain tax-exempt status, and there are strings attached to that (e.g., limits on what pastors can say about politics).

Fair enough.

I’m less sure about the social hostility score the U.S. is given (1.9). Certainly there are people in the U.S. who are hostile to different religions, and there are even crimes committed against people because of their religion, but I’m not sure that the Pew researchers have ranked things properly.

If you look in the full report, the U.S. is classed as having “moderate” social hostilities toward freedom of religion, with an overall score of 1.9. The Pew report justifies this by saying: “In the United States, law enforcement officials across the country reported to the FBI at least 1,400 hate crimes involving religion in 2006 and again in 2007.”

Okay . . . but it then immediately says that Belgium is a country with “low social hostilities” (it’s score is 1.3) and justifies that by stating: “In Belgium, for example, 68 anti-Semitic incidents were reported in 2007 and 31 in the first half of 2008, but none involved physical violence.”

But wait. Belgium has a population one thirtieth that of the U.S. if you took Belgium’s anti-Semitic incidents and scaled them up by a factor of 30, you’d get 2,040 for 2007 and 930 for 2008. And that’s just anti-Semitic incidents, not anti-Muslim or anti-Christian.

That’s not looking so different than the U.S. It may be looking even worse.

You could fix on the phrase “but none involved physical violence” to explain the difference in rankings. Presumably some U.S. incidents did include physical violence, but many no doubt did not (e.g., spraying anti-religious graffiti on churches or synagogues). And if you scaled Belgium up by a factor of 30, you might get some physical violence appearing as well.

In any event, I suspect that the ranking here is something of an apples-to-oranges comparison that has more to do with how the two governments classify, report, and track such incidents.

It’s still an intriguing way of measuring global freedom of religion.

MORE

FULL REPORT (.pdf)

Your thoughts on the state of freedom of religion—here or abroad?

So various circles have been atwitter about news reports that Pope John Paul II practiced certain forms of self-mortification or, in the immortal words of the Associated Press, “John Paul II used belt to whip himself.”

It is not surprising that our pleasure-obsessed culture would find this unusual, nor is it surprising that latent anti-Catholic tendencies in the culture would cause people to read it in a negative light—as something shocking or repulsive.

So what can we say to those who have this kind of reaction?

Let’s start with what we can say to fellow Christians (Catholic or not) who find themselves thinking this way: While not every person is called to the kind of self-mortification that John Paul II practiced, self-mortification is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition with roots going all the way back to the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.

We read in the Old Testament, for example, of people fasting, wearing sackcloth (which abrades the skin; the Old Testament equivalent of a hairshirt), putting ashes on their heads, and lying tied-up in uncomfortable positions for long periods of time (Ezekiel 4:4-8).

In the New Testament we also read of such practices, and of particular note are Jesus’ own remarks about (and personal practice of) fasting. If Our Lord himself practiced fasting, then self-mortification could scarcely fail to find a place in Christian spirituality. Note also that in the Sermon on the Mount he doesn’t say “if” you fast but “when” you fast—implying an expectation of his followers.

Once we have recognized this, the issue of self-mortification becomes one of degree and occasion, for the fundamental principle has been established. If a particular Christian’s faith tradition (or personal view) hasn’t made room for self-mortification then he needs to conduct an open-minded re-examination of the issue.

He might be helped in that re-examination by what we can say to a non-believer, which goes beyond establishing that self-mortification is biblical and deals with the underlying principles.

The first thing to point out is that this isn’t masochism. It’s not the case of wanting the pain out of some sick craving. While there are masochists, anything they do along these lines is not a genuine spiritual exercise. The whole point of self-mortification is that you don’t find the pain attractive but are willing to submit to it anyway for a higher goal.

And the non-believer, unless he is a unthinking hedonist, should be able to acknowledge that it can be legitimate to endure pain for a higher goal (i.e., that there can be higher goals in life than just avoiding pain). For example, the pain that soldiers undergo to defend their country, the pain that parents undergo to help their children, and the pain that absolutely all of us must shoulder in order to achieve important goals.

So what goal was John Paul II, and other practitioners of self-mortification, striving for?

Holiness.

Specifically, virtues like humility, compassion, self-control, the ability to say no to your body in the pursuit of a spiritual goal.

A close analogy is the athletic saying, “No pain, no gain.” In order to get your body in shape, you must be willing to endure some hardship, and the same is true of your soul (or your personality if the person doesn’t believe in souls).

Self-mortification teaches humility by making us recognize that there are things more important than our own pleasure. It teaches compassion by giving us a window into the sufferings of others—who don’t have a choice in whether they’re suffering. And it strengthens self-control.

As well as (here’s the big one I’ve saved for last) encouraging us to follow the example of Our Lord, who made the central act of the Christian religion one of self-denial and (in his case) literal mortification to bring salvation to all mankind.

Even if a non-believer doesn’t buy the religious premises involved, he should be able to see the nobility of the principle of shouldering hardship for the sake of others and for the sake of learning virtues like humility and compassion rather than focusing exclusively on one’s own pleasure.

Hopefully he can see why a pope, as the vicar of Christ and as the leader of the Christian world, would be called to personal mortification in a way that goes beyond what most people are.

NOTE: Any form of significant self-mortification must be done under the guidance of a competent spiritual director. Do not try this at home on your own.