Eric Johnson: April 2005 Archives

I want to like Hillary better, I really do. The Democratic Party has pretty much reduced its political agenda to government giveaway programs, unrestricted abortion, and the acceptance of buggery. They need to get serious about being a national party again, and Senator Clinton (D-Standbyourman) is one of the few leaders who can stand up to the shrill, narrow constituencies of her party.

So when I see her get tough on North Korea and their nukes, my heart is gladdened. During her time in the Senate, and especially with her work on the Armed Services Committee, she has tried to be a serious voice, and by all accounts she works hard to understand the issues under their purview. States are primarily about enforcing worldly justice, by enforcing the law internally and by defending against external aggressors, and anyone who wants to be president must take that seriously.

Yet through it all, she is a Clinton, and being a Clinton means that you have to get in a nasty cheap shot while ostensibly doing something for the public good. When Admiral Jacoby, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, delivered the assessment that North Korea has the capability to put nuclear warheads on missiles that can reach the U.S., Clinton called it

...the first confirmation, publicly, by the administration that the North Koreans have the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear device that can reach the United States....Put simply, they couldn't do that when George Bush became president, and now they can.

She apparently forgot that her husband was president when North Korea promised to stop its offensive nuclear program in 1994, in exchange for fuel and other goodies. Well, they took the fuel, continued the program, and that's why we're in this situation today: because her husband accepted the word of an insane tyrant. The problem didn't start with President Bush (and, in fairness, it didn't start under President Clinton, either), it was inherited by him.

Disagreeing about the best way to defend the nation is healthy and good, but using the subject primarily for political ammunition is a grave betrayal of public trust. Someday, there will be a nationally-known Democrat with some degree of intellectual honesty whose name is not Joe Lieberman. Maybe that person will be Senator Clinton. She's got about three years to make it happen.

With all the papal news, we have not recently said much on a subject near and dear to my heart: Marines administering earthly justice so murderous thugs can face the divine version.

To summarize: several dozen thugs commandeered three large suicide vehicles and tried to detonate them inside a base. The attacks were deflected by the quick thinking of three 21-year-old Marines, who repelled the vehicles with machine guns and grenades. The thugs tried to attack on foot, but again they failed. In the end, the Marines killed 21 of the thugs and wounded another 15. No Marines were killed, or even seriously hurt.

The herd of independent minds in the media are parroting the same line, about how the thugs' attacks are "becoming more sophisticated" lately. While it's true the attacks have more people involved, all of them have ended badly for the attackers. Seems to me that "sophisticated" ought to mean something more than using three car bombs instead of one, and 30 guys on foot instead of 8 or 10. Real sophistication would mean better effectiveness on the battlefield, not getting more thugs to show up to the party.

I regret that the thugs aligned themselves with thieves and oppressors, then threw their lives away by attacking a Marine post. I hope they somehow repented before their death. But how can I muster any sympathy for people whose operating principle is to maim and murder as many people as it takes, military or civilian, so they can overthrow the Iraqi government and take charge themselves?

A regular Catholic Light reader e-mailed me for some help picking a catechism:

...I am basically looking for a catechism that explains 'What do Catholics believe, and why do they believe that?,' and it has to be orthodox. I have already purchased and read Surprised by Canon Law."

He seems to be looking for a good apologetics book, not just a good catechism. The difference is that a catechism will tell you what Catholics believe, but apologetics will tell you why.

I could name a dozen good apologetical books, but I really can't think of a single, all-purpose volume — sort of like a "Mere Catholicism" for the general knowledge-seeker. I'm sure they're out there, I just don't know about them. Does anyone want to name any favorites?

I caught the last half of the papal installation Mass today, but missed the Holy Father's homily. Here is the text if you missed it, too. It is truly magnificent and transcendent.

In particular, I am interested to know what non-Catholics think of Benedict's words. Anyone care to comment?

Discussions about the papacy revolve mainly around the duties of the office, and its function within the Catholic faith. That is not the only essential aspect of the pope's role, however. The papacy is not solely an instrument that performs certain actions, it is good and beautiful in its own right.

It is a sign of God's providence that he would entrust the Gospel to an unbroken line of successors, who are God's primary liaisons to mankind until Christ comes again. The charism of infallibility, often misunderstood and derided, is a gift not only to the pope, but to all of us. Jesus went to the trouble of becoming incarnate, teaching his disciples, getting crucified for our sins, and rising from the dead. Having gone to all that effort, the Good Shepherd wants to ensure that his truth will remain intact, pure and entire.

Too often, that gets buried in media coverage that emphasizes the political aspect of the papacy to the exclusion of the central fact: God loved the world so much that he gave his only son, and the protection of his saving message are manifestations of God's perpetual love.

A little more about Pope Benedict's "Nazi past." When membership in an immoral political party is compulsory, and you are not obliged to commit any heinous acts, then I do not think joining it is morally wrong. Since everyone living under the party's regime understands the rules, and that membership is not a personal statement backing the party's crimes, they cannot possibly be scandalized.

A personal anecdote: When I was in Iraq, one of our translators invited us to dinner with his family. His brother was a teenager who loved everything about America, which he had learned about on the Internet. He loved our laws, our music and movies, our guns, and our freedoms. He completely hated the Ba'athist Party, but to go to high school, he had to join it. The brother didn't have to gas Kurds or feed women into industrial shredders, he just had to go through the motions. I don't think he did anything wrong, either.

The Jerusalem Post had an editorial on Monday defending the new pope's reputation against slanderers: "Ratzinger a Nazi? Don't believe it":

London's Sunday Times would have us believe that one of the leading contenders for the papacy is a closet Nazi. In if-only-they-knew tones, the newspaper informs readers that German-born Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and suggests that, because of this, the "panzer cardinal" would be quite a contrast to his predecessor, John Paul II.

The article also classifies Ratzinger as a "theological anti-Semite" for believing in Jesus so strongly that – gasp! – he thinks that everyone, even Jews, should accept him as the messiah.

To all this we should say, "This is news?!"...

As the Sunday Times article admits, Ratzinger's membership in the Hitler Youth was not voluntary but compulsory; also admitted are the facts that the cardinal – only a teenager during the period in question – was the son of an anti-Nazi policeman, that he was given a dispensation from Hitler Youth activities because of his religious studies, and that he deserted the German army....

The only significant complaint that the Times makes against Ratzinger's wartime conduct is that he resisted quietly and passively, rather than having done something drastic enough to earn him a trip to a concentration camp. Of course, whenever it is said that a German failed the exceptional-resistance-to-the-Nazis test, it would behoove us all to recognize that too many Jews failed it, as well.

Read the article here (registration required.)

(This was taken from a comment I made in an earlier thread that deserves its very own post.)

We keep hearing about how the new pope must reach "progressives," but who are these people, and how many of them are there? The world at large is not "progressive." Africa isn't, nor the Middle East. India and China are not, and that's a third of the world's population right there. Nor is Latin America, or most of Asia.

There are pockets of "progessive" people in all those regions, but by and large, they have not signed on to the liberal-secularist project. The "progressives" that need to be pleased are thus white Western elites with college educations — which is, what, maybe one percent of the world's population? That's a rather narrow perspective.

I have another word for "progressive": it's "decadent," a word that means "falling down" in Latin. The people who embrace this agenda are not advocating a more just and prosperous society, which are the measures of true earthly progress. The main objectives are simultaneously to remove any stigma against practically any sexual activity, and to get the state to pay for life's necessities. This has resulted, among the "progressive" societies of Western Europe, in the declining birthrates that are dooming their own existences. It's an unsustainable societal model, and it's collapsing as we speak.

How is that progress, exactly?

Everybody gets to be a papal expert today, so here are my observations, worth precisely what you paid for them.

1. The choice is not a sentimental one. It does not play to the crowd, much less to the zeitgeist's desire for a nice, kind, "flexible" man.

2. The choice is a safe one. The cardinals all know the new pope and they know what to expect (or at least they think they do.)

3. The speed of the choice indicates that if the cardinals did not know who they wanted, they at least knew what they wanted.

3. The problems within the Church stem from a lack of orthodoxy, compounded by insufficient and often flawed leadership. Cardinal Ratzinger is intimately familiar with both shortcomings, has been dealing with them for years, and now has the power to correct them at the higher levels.

4. This does not absolve us, the laity, from correcting the flaws at our lower level. Indeed, that is our job. We should start with the lowest level of all — our own hearts.

5. Orthodox Catholics may be hoping for a Götterdämmerung of the heterodox liberals, when the internal enemies of the True Faith will be cast out into the darkness. We should instead hope for their conversion and repentence for whatever misunderstandings they have created, and for the faiths they have stifled. (I say this as someone who is infuriated every time a priest, religious, or Church employee questions Catholic teaching in public.) The Holy Father will sort things out the way he deems prudent, and we should be careful not to indulge ourselves in revenge fantasies, however psychologically satisfying they may be. "For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you" (Matt. 7:2).

Let the work begun with Pope John Paul II find its consummation in the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI.

CORRECTION: I hope it was clear from the original text, but I was saying we should not indulge in revenge fantasies. I left out the "not" in the original.

Iraqi officials have confirmed that 300,000 people were slaughtered by the former rulers of Iraq. (For you aging hippies out there, that's 75,000 times the number of students who died at Kent State.) Those numbers are sure to increase as other mass graves are found.

Sometime soon, I would like to explore the question of whether it is morally permissible for a state to intervene on behalf of grossly oppressed peoples. The last time we considered that question in December 2003, it was an occasion for a lot of hot-tempered dialogue, much of it my own.

Now, even the news media cannot paint the "insurgency" as a valiant resistance movement like they did with the murderer-thugs of the Viet Cong. The "insurgents" are simply criminals, and they speak for no one, save for a few marginal imams, washed-up Baathists, and several tribes who are used to holding the whip instead of working for the common good.

May their souls of these 300,000 find the peace they did not have in this life. May their murderers, and their successors who continue to kill and oppress the innocent, meet divine justice.

This might seem like a surprising statement to see on a Catholic blog, but I'm glad "Revenge of the Sith" will be rated PG-13. Just because a movie is inapproprate for 12-year-olds doesn't make it morally objectionable, and frankly, I think the "Star Wars" series needs to get a little more edgy.

"Sith" has to show the transformation of Anakin Skywalker from whiny, pouting brat to a dark menace with James Earl Jones' voice. I have very low expectations here. George Lucas lost interest in human beings a long time ago, and in all likelihood, the movie will be a pile of poop.

I'll still see it, though.

Postscript: My older son, Charlie, has wanted to name our new baby Luke, after Luke Skywalker, if it's a boy. Now he wants to name him Michael, after Michael the Archangel — but he wants his full name to be Michael Skywalker Johnson.

Andrew Stuttaford, National Review Online's resident skeptic, is often priggish about other people being priggish. To him, any call to rein in one's personal behavior brings us closer to the Fourth Reich, and any expression of religious belief is dangerous to his ideal world of fuzzy gray agnosticism.

I wrote about Stuttaford last year, and so I won't repeat my criticisms. However, when he says something that is demonstrably false to support his worldview, it's worth refuting. Here is his post on NRO's The Corner, praising an atheist's essay about the Church of England:

The London Spectator does not, incredibly, allow access to its web site these days even to subscribers (like me) of its print edition unless they pay an extra charge, and that’s a shame because it means that Matthew Parris’ brilliant – and curiously moving - article on the Church of England won’t get the readership it deserves.

It’s never easy to explain the traditional English attitude to religion (which used to find many an echo over here too) to those outside Albion, but Parris (an atheist, as it happens) does as well as I’ve ever seen:

”The Established Church…understood in her bones two great truths: the English are wary about religion; but the English do not want to be atheists. To the English mind, atheism itself carries an unpleasant whiff of enthusiasm. To the English mind, the universe is a very mysterious thing and should be allowed to remain so. And so the English church became what up to our own day it has always remained: a God-fearing receptacle for intelligent doubt; the marrying of a quietist belief in order, duty, decency and the evident difference between right and wrong with a shrewd suspicion that anyone who thinks he can be sure of more than that is probably dangerous…That right at the center of [English] national life, should for so long have stood this great and lovely edifice of sort-of religion, adorned (through her buildings, her rituals, her art and her music) with so much beauty, so much grace and so much balm for troubled spirits, and served in her priesthood by so many luminously decent men, has surely for centuries helped confound atheism on the one hand, and serious religious enthusiasm on the other. Not so much religious belief as religious relief, this has calmed everybody down. “You really don’t need to decide,” has been Anglicanism’s refrain, “and besides, who knows?”

Amen

This is ahistorical nonsense, a falsehood wrapped in willfull ignorance and tied up with a bow of anti-religious poppycock. Of course the English people don't want to be atheists; no people on Earth have managed to be thoroughly atheistic, including the Russians, who gave it the old Slavic try for decades, murdering millions of people in the name of state supremacy over God's law. Even the French aren't that foolish.

As for the essayist's first point, I am intrigued to know how he manages to refute the entire history of his nation until the twentieth century. I am no expert on England, but I did take two semesters of British history, and (like most Americans) I know more about English religious history than any other country, as it is so bound up with our own past. There are so many counter-examples that one could write for hours about it.

Chaucer seemed to think that England was a religious nation; indeed, he thought it was so obvious that he never bothered to comment on it. Read the "Canterbury Tales" and see a nation permeated from top to bottom with explicitly religious ideas, where monks, priests, and nuns were a part of the everyday landscape.

Saint Sir Thomas More was not beheaded in 1534 for refusing to knuckle under to a "sort-of religion."

Shakespeare's England was roiling with religious controversies. Queen Elizabeth's government carried out an ongoing campaign to exterminate Catholicism within her realm, which was stoutly resisted by many of her subjects, particularly in the north. The Church of England may have said many things at that time, but "You really don’t need to decide...and besides, who knows?" was not one of them. It was, "Worship in our churches or be suspected of sedition and get fined, possibly get arrested, and if we figure out you are a Papist you could have your innards boiled in front of you as you shriek in pain and your family watches you die. Then we'll confiscate your lands and possessions and your family can wander in the street, penniless and starving."

There was a general decline in religious observance, during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Thanks to the superhuman efforts of the evangelicals, most especially the Wesleys — themselves Anglicans, though their followers became known as the Methodists — the nineteenth century was a time of religious revival. By the time of the Oxford Movement, when John Henry Newman leveled charges of laxity against the Anglican communion, his critics did not say that "the universe is a very mysterious thing and should be allowed to remain so." They said he was wrong, and the Church of England was a bastion of Christendom.

It may well be true that the English people have settled in for a European-style agnostic fatalism (i.e., an embrace of the Culture of Death). I've been to England a few times, but I don't want to generalize from my experiences, and perhaps Stuttaford and Parris are right. If that is true, then that attitude is a very recent vintage, and one way or another it will disappear: either because the English rediscover their roots, or because they will disappear like the other Europeans by aborting and contracepting themselves out of existence. Either way, secularist agnosticism is a dead-end, and cannot last.

He is not our worst ex-president — that would be Jimmy Carter, affectionately known in Springfield as "History's greatest monster — but he's trying his best to claim the title:

[Clinton] said he had met "two great popes" in his lifetime, John Paul II and John XXIII. Clinton said he recognized that John Paul "may have had a mixed legacy," but he called him a man with a great feel for human dignity.

This from the guy who is primarly remembered for messing aroud with the White House help:

Specifically, 53% of Americans named "Monica Lewinsky" or the "affair, adultery, sex scandal" as the most memorable moment of President Clinton's eight years in office, more than four times the number who cited "the economy" (12%).

UPDATE: As I typed this, Drudge has posted the full quote:

“[Pope John Paul II] centralized authority in the papacy again and enforced a very conservative theological doctrine. There will be debates about that. The number of Catholics increased by 250 million on his watch. But the numbers of priests didn't. He's like all of us - he may have a mixed legacy.”

Getting carnal favors in the Oval Office, standing up for 2,000 years of Christian truth...it's all pretty much the same, right?

Father James Poumade, priest of Christ, godfather of my younger son, and a Catholic Light reader, gave this homily today at our church. Read past the continuation — it's worth your while.

I assume that almost everyone by now has heard of the passing of our Holy Father Pope John Paul II. Most likely, among other things, the Holy Father will be remembered for his dedication to the sanctity of life and his insistence upon the beauty of the truth, whether it was popular to do so or not in a world that questions, like Pontius Pilate, if truth even exists.

One of the Holy Father's last appeals to the world was for the life of Terri Schiavo, an appeal that seemed to have been as much shown by the way the Holy Father carried out his last days as by his words. Like her, he was fitted with a feeding tube, although of a less serious type; like her, he asked for no extraordinary medical treatment. It was the Pope himself who declared that although one can legitimately choose not to use ventilators, heart-lung machines, CPR, and so on (although once one begins to use them, they cannot be lightly removed) food and water are not medicine and are not optional, no matter if they are delivered by a fork and cup or by a tube, and it was the Pope, true to form, that showed the world that he could practice what he preached.

The next month, as a new pope is selected, Catholics will have a great opportunity to explain why our faith is not incompatible with high culture, sex, education, personal hygiene, or any other good thing, small or large. There will be a lot of regular people who are curious about this whole Catholic thing — now is a good time to think of an explanation, if you haven't already.

Hugh Hewitt, currently a fallen-away Catholic (the doors are still open, my friend!), links to my conversion story that Catholic Answers published six years ago. Hugh refutes a sneering Tina Brown article implying that religious people have never encountered Mozart. I would love to corner Ms. Brown and ask her what her three favorite Mozart pieces are, and why.

(If you want to read my conversion story, it's here.)

The first time I saw the Pope, it was completely by accident. I was traveling in Europe with four friends after graduating from high school, and we happened to be in Rome on a Sunday. I had little use for Catholicism, but as all four of my friends were Catholic, and I wanted to see the art and architecture of the Vatican, there was no doubt that we would end up at St. Peter's for a while.

The Pope appeared at his apartment window, for a customary blessing of the thousands of people who assembled there that hot July day. I wish I could report that I fell prostrate on the ground and embraced the fullness of truth right then and there, but I didn't. (I would have been trampled by the sweaty pilgrims, for one thing.) But I could say I saw the Pope, though he was but a small white figure waving to us in the distance.

Four years later, my future wife and I were received into the Catholic Church, and four years after that, we were married and took our honeymoon in Rome. One of our parish priests had studied in Rome, and put us in touch with a member of his seminary's faculty, who gave us passes to the Wednesday papal audience along with "a special treat." Having no idea what that might be, we showed up at St. Peter's on Wednesday morning. The Swiss Guards kept waving us past the throngs of people lined up to get into the auditorium; we ended up sitting to the Pope's left with about a dozen other newlyweds.

After the address, the couples were ushered up to the Holy Father, two-by-two, Noah-style. I kissed his ring, and thanked him for all his work on behalf of families. If I close my eyes, I can still feel his firm thumb tracing the sign of the cross on my forehead. He blessed my wife, and held her hand tenderly, putting his hand on her cheek and smiling. A cardinal stepped in to whisk us away so the next couple could receive their blessing.

Many things affect a marriage, but I am convinced that the Pope's prayer for us has enhanced our married life, and continues to do so. He asked God to give us good things, both spiritual and material, and we have indeed been blessed, above all with our several children.

I know the Pope belongs to everyone and no one, but I feel like he was my pope, in a way. I saw him before I was Catholic, and I was impressed by his rock-like refusal to give in to the world, even as he sought those who worship the world's false promises. Someday, I hope to see him again in the New Jerusalem, though I'm sure he will again be off in the distance, near the throne of the Most High, and I will be in the outer suburbs. Perhaps he will wave to me again.

Goodbye, my Holy Father.