The Practice of Lent

Lent has come around again, the period of penitence and reflection that leads up to the fifty days of Easter. No meat on Fridays. Fasting. Almsgiving. The Stations of the Cross. What is it all for?

Then the disciples of John came to Him, saying, "Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?" And Jesus said to them. "Can the wedding guests fast as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast." -- Matt. 9.14-15

Fasting is one of the oldest religious practices of all humanity. It is interesting that, as with sacrifice, the practice is taken into the Abrahamic tradition without question; there is no direct discussion of its purpose -- it is simply part of the assumed nature of religious practice. There are directions on what to do when fasting, or accounts of people being called to a fast, but no reasoned explanation of the practice.

This, American Christians typically find hard to stomach. We do not like the idea that an unexplained, opaque tradition can claim to dictate our behavior. We wish to reserve our consent to those things we understand; we want to know the whys and the wherefores, and to claim the right to dissent from those things that we do not believe in.

Unfortunately, though there is a noble impulse contained in this desire, there is another impulse which is ignoble in the extreme. To try to understand so as to avoid sin is one thing: I am by no means sure that the desire to avoid sin really animates our behavior here, however. Judging from my own examination of conscience, what calls itself independence or principle is very frequently only an ancient voice saying that I have the right to do whatever I please, or nothing if I like that better, that I will not be ordered around, that I will have an explanation so that I may be like God, knowing good and evil.

This illustrates the wisdom of the Church in mandating certain practices as a minimum for the Christian life -- what are called technically the precepts of the Church. This draws criticism occasionally from Protestants, and more frequently from heretical or lazy Catholics; but if we believe seriously that the Church is in any sense from God -- and, whether we accept the theory of Petrine primacy or not, Christ did certainly say that He would found the Church -- then it is not manifestly irrational to suppose that she has the right to discipline her members. This insistence on certain corporate practices, traditions we all observe in common, benefits us in a multitude of ways:

1) It gives us an opportunity to practice obedience. Jesus is recorded in John as saying, "If you love Me, keep My commandments." This theme of obedience as the sacramental manifestation of love is continually harped upon in all of the apostle's writings. And it makes sense. Even on a natural level, is anyone much impressed by a man who claims to love a woman, but consistently puts his own pleasures or his own ego before her desires? Obedience is the natural expression of love. What does this have to do with the Church? Well, the same Gospels that emphasize love record our Lord telling His apostles that anyone who received His word would also receive theirs. It is hypocrisy to claim to love Christ and at the same time pour contempt upon His Mystical Body, which Body, St Paul tells us, is the Church.

Indeed, the unexplained-ness of the traditions of the Catholic Church reminds us, not so much of her authority, as of the factual truth of the Christian religion. When something is a fact, you cannot argue with it; there is no good pleading that you want a simpler solar system or a more accessible geography; you have to take them, as they stand, or shut your eyes to them. G. K. Chesterton wisely drew out one of the most fascinating elements of the image of St Peter being given the keys of the kingdom. A key, he points out, is not a matter of abstraction or of argument. Susceptible to analysis and yet not to dispute, it is indeed complex; the only simple thing about it is that it opens the door.

2) It puts us in touch with the wisdom of the whole Church. Related to this first point is the fact that submitting oneself to these traditions is, literally, following the practice of most Christians (Catholic or otherwise) who have ever lived. These practices were not chosen arbitrarily. In adopting them -- better, in allowing ourselves to be adopted by them -- we are recognizing the wisdom of someone other than ourselves; which, after the first shock, is a refreshing exercise.

3) It sets forth to the World the unity and universality of the Faith. We say, whenever we recite the Creed, that we believe in one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. The oneness and the catholicity of the Church are witnessed to the world every time we abstain from meat on Friday or observe the law of fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We are saying wordlessly, through these actions, that we are part of a people with an identity that is not drawn from this world, but from another world altogether. Though mortifications may be difficult, they are anything but dull, however dully they may be kept by some; they have, could we but see it, all the thrill of rebellion. They particularize our refusal to be ruled by the Flesh at the behest of the World. They do this far more, not less, when we keep them as members of the faith, in union with countless brethren spread throughout space and time, rather than on our own initiative; for anybody can follow his own desires. The elevation of private devotions over public ones as being worthier, because they spring from personal fervor rather than blind submission to authority, is based on a caricature of reality. It has no grounding in the Scriptures (take a look at the ancient Israelite calendar some time), and it smacks of Gnosticism more than Christianity.

But what does fasting do, exactly? Why was it taken into the Jewish tradition in the first place, and thence inherited by Christians? Again, there are several answers.

1) It asserts the spirit's dominance of the body. This, while in some ways one of the less important aspects of a fast, is one of the most obvious. The body -- not to be confused with the Flesh in the Pauline-Johannine sense, that is, our inner selfish nature -- wants things that make it feel good, like a child. Body and soul alike benefit from the reminder that it is the soul that has the right to authority in the person, and both suffer when this authority is never asserted; just as spoiling a child damages the parents, too.

2) It sacramentalizes our repentance and mourning. Passing to Scripture, this is the meaning we see fasting most consistently associated with. As we see in the passage from Matthew above, and frequently in the Old Testament when kings or prophets call for a fast or go into mourning because the whole nation needs to turn back to God, it is assumed that this will be an expression of the heart's movement to the Lord. (Not, note well, an expression of emotion. If anything, it is likelier to order and strengthen the emotions than they are likely to sort fasting out properly.) But when the heart moves, the body should move also, for we are not ghosts in machines but a single whole, a body-and-soul complex. C. S. Lewis says in his novel Perelandra that the sacraments were instituted partly as a reminder that the division we draw between the body and the spirit is neither wholesome nor final. Fasting allows the body to participate in our penitence; and, as Jesus suggests in Matthew, in our remembrance of that great day when the Bridegroom was taken away from us for a time.

3) It brings about a confrontation with the False Self. Why precisely fasting does this, I do not know; though it should be said that it does not do it automatically, but only according to the spirit with which we enter our fast. If we enter it inattentively, and merely on the grounds that the Catholic Church has bound us to fast, we will glean but a little benefit; if we enter it with a desire to show off, whether to others or ourselves, we are already whited sepulchers, empty perhaps of food but full of dead men's bones. But if we enter it humbly, accepting the practice of the Church and trying to allow God to work in us through that medium, we will learn a surprising amount about ourselves, and particularly about the False Self.

Why do I say "the False Self"? To distinguish it from the ordinary confrontation with fleshly desires. Crankiness, for instance, seems to be a catholic experience among Catholics when we fast. This is natural; when the body is refused its habitual pleasures, it goes into hysterics; the Flesh neither knows nor cares what our larger goals are, but simply wants to get what it likes. But all of this lies in the realm of the natural conflict between the Spirit and the Flesh. When we speak of the False Self, we are dealing not with bodily but with spiritual realities. It must always be remembered that our identity in Christ is our real identity, even though it may be less familiar than the identity we lived in before our conversion (whether that conversion was to a newfound faith or to an intentional practice of what we once took for granted). That second identity is the False Self.

This is not necessarily a malicious or vulgar identity; it may, indeed, be very self-disciplined, even very moral -- even, in a sense, very religious. It is, in a way, the Devil: the temptation, not of wicked self-indulgence, the Flesh, nor of a wicked acceptance of the corrupt systems of the World; rather, it is a wicked spirituality. Chesterton's phrase, "things of that extreme evil that they seem innocent to the innocent," is very fitting. Fasting, for whatever reason, seems to awaken the False Self. As for its identifying marks, they are probably unique to each person; provided that we stick like limpets to prayer, I dare say we will know it when we see it.

I wish I could say that there were some dramatic and decisive way of defeating the False Self. Possibly there is, but if there is I do not know anything about it. The only ways I know of dealing with the False Self are the same ways that every sin and tendency to sin is dealt with: Confession, Communion, prayer, spiritual direction, studying Scripture, brotherly fellowship, tithing, Eucharistic Adoration, examination of conscience, the Rosary. Do this and you will live.

The Mystery of Marriage

The question of gay marriage, having already been broached in a number of places, has come to roost in Maryland (not that it is likely to be the last). Thoughtful people are divided about the right conclusion; I have been on both sides of the fence myself, and transitions have been at once painful and tedious; not a little rhetorical shrapnel has exploded, more than once, too close to my head for comfort. (Hoping to keep that shrapnel to a minimum, I repeat here that I am a homosexual myself, one who attempts to live chastely, in accord with Catholic teaching, which may be found in the Catechism, paras. 2357-2359.) What ought a Christian -- or any person of good will -- to think of the matter?

Marriage, says St. Paul in Ephesians 5, is a great mystery -- translated into Latin as sacramentum -- and has reference to Christ and the Church. This much we know from revelation, and this we could not have learned on our own. That marriage, in one form or another, exists in basically every culture and has roughly the same form and implications does tell us that it is a manifestation of the law of human nature, but it would tell us nothing of its mystical significance, as understood by the Catholic Church.

Now, it is an element of Catholic teaching -- one violated by ostensibly Catholic governments many times over the course of history, but never mind -- that anything which is known solely through the medium of revelation, and could not be known through human reason however consistently and persistently exercised, is properly the province of the Church, not the state. Only the Church has the authority to authoritatively teach those truths revealed by God and not known through any other medium. There are some truths which are not revealed at all, like the multiplication table, known through unaided reason; and there are some which one could reach through reason or through revelation, because both are adequate to produce the conclusion. Reason alone is the province of the state. Anything known solely through revelation is outside the state's ken, and it would be wrong -- a usurpation, a gross injustice -- if it attempted to enforce doctrines proper to the revealed sphere. Tendering respectful regrets to St Augustine, this is why the political persecution of heretics, although it has not always been adequately denounced by the authorities of the Church (though sometimes it has), has at any rate always been wrong.

Returning to the subject at hand, we are now in a position to formulate a right approach to the problem. Is the belief that marriage ought exclusively to involve one man and one woman, without any variation in the gender or number of the partners, something known only through Christian revelation, or is it known through human reason as well? If it is known through reason, then it is right and proper for the state to publicly recognize the fact, and enshrine it in law. If, however, this truth falls solely into the province of the Church, the state certainly ought to do nothing about it.

Viewing things through a strictly social lens, I believe it is safe to say that the sociological purpose of marriage has always been the begetting and rearing of legitimate children. (I specify "legitimate," because of course many societies have not only had hordes of illegitimate children, but turned a somewhat indulgent eye toward the manner of their getting -- on the part of the male, anyway.) For this purpose, most societies have deemed it necessary to have one man and one woman put in a permanent bond, a covenant, for the raising of said children.

There have been two major, conspicuous exceptions to this pattern. One is polygamy and the other is divorce. Both were tolerated for Israel under the Old Covenant, though Jesus Himself tolerated neither of them. But their genesis is fairly easy to see: the one, due both to the extreme predominance of men in the cultures where it prevailed, and possibly to a shortage of men on account of wars and so on; the other, because people often get tired of each other and want somebody else, and most societies have seen fit to enshrine the fact in law. (I am not here addressing the question of marriages that are invalid in themselves, and are therefore eligible to be broken up through annulment -- a formal declaration that there was no valid marriage in the first place -- rather than divorce. Msgr. Ronald Knox, a contemporary of C. S. Lewis, has an excellent bit on the subject in his sermonic collection In Soft Garments; but this issue, while interesting, is beside the point.)

Both, however, share premises with the view which our Lord says was "from the beginning" -- that is, an element of the law of human nature, which every sin departs from. Lewis puts it best when, somewhere in Mere Christianity, he says, "Men have disagreed over whether you ought to have one wife or four. But they all agreed that you shouldn't simply have any woman you liked." Both polygamy and divorce are clearly declensions from, not mere alternatives to, the ideal of a permanent covenant between one man and one woman. They rely on monogamous marriage for sense to be made out of them. Polygamy literally consists in multiple marriage covenants made severally -- the man and all his wives were not part of one covenant; he simply had multiple individual marriages. Divorce, even more obviously, depends on marriage for its existence, since it is the destruction of marriage.

A homosexual pair, for reasons I hope I need not elaborate in much detail, cannot produce offspring no matter how theoretically fertile one or both of the parties. It therefore cannot constitute a marriage in the sociological sense we have been dealing with.

But what of the other significances of marriage? After all, even hardline conservative Catholics rarely insist that begetting children is the only reason for marriage. True; and it is, in fact, Christianity itself which set forth those other reasons. "Mutual society, help, and comfort that one ought to have of the other," as the Anglican rite has it (or used to have it -- one can hardly keep pace with the fluctuation of their traditions) is something we can see through reason, but of course that is scarcely specific to marriage; indeed, if marriage were our only source of society, help, and comfort, life would have come to a parlous pass. As for being in love, eros in the strict sense, attitudes to that (Catholic or otherwise) have been consistent through time and space only in being at variance. Everything from ranking eros nearly among the virtues, to making it practically a vice, to devout indifference about the whole question, have prevailed; there's no good seeking a consensus down that road. Nor has there, until very recently -- the last century or two at most, I believe -- been any attempt to regard eros as intrinsically connected to marriage, and many people, from swooning poets in the twelfth century to frivoling cynics in the twentieth, have regarded eros and marriage as positively irreconcilable. It is only Christianity that has elevated marriage from a covenant focused simply on progeny to a sacrament, mystically setting forth the relation between Christ and the Church. So if we trust the Church to tell her that there is something more to marriage than children, what grounds can we offer for not believing her when she tells us what the something is?

Of course, we might argue that we merely happen to agree with the Church for other reasons, but in that case we had better have some solid arguments to hand when asked why we wish to define marriage in a way that -- for better or worse -- has never been done by any human society in history. (This is not to say that there have never been societies which were highly tolerant of homosexual behavior, but that is another matter.) If we happen to feel (or wish?) that marriage is just a symbol of our love, fine; but why should the government be compelled to bestow any legal status on a private romance? If it is a pragmatic question of inheritance and visiting rights in hospitals and the like, naturally people ought to be able to make out their wills as they please and see whomever they like when they are sick, but reinventing marriage is not precisely the obvious solution. If it is a matter of the right to adopt children, I fear I must say, frankly but without relish, that I do not support it; not because I expect lesbians or gay men to be bad parents -- not in the least -- but because, psychologically, a child needs both a father and a mother; to deprive them of either causes quantifiable psychological detriment, as anybody can see from the results of single parent families, rapid successions of partners, and the like.

Perhaps the most troubling dimension of the whole discussion, though, is the determination on the part of some (not all) gay activists to have the question decided without discussion. Not legal discussion, of course that will take place. But one argument that I, at any rate, have frequently heard upon the lips of fellow homosexuals is that lesbians and gay men deserve the right to get married, period. End of talk. To even raise the question, with such people, constitutes bigotry.

That, no person of integrity and respect for others ought to countenance. Those who are deeply convinced that their position is right should not need to bully people: only to state the facts and exhibit their implications, clearly, logically, and calmly. A phrase from the Second Vatican Council's decree on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, is very much to the purpose: "The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power." I refuse to agree that any alteration of one of the fundamental building blocks of any human society -- perhaps the single most fundamental building block -- should or can be accomplished, or even halted, without an honest investigation of the realities behind the current state of affairs, and the implications of the change being considered.

That such implications are too little considered is, I think, adequately illustrated by the fact that Catholic Charities in the District was forced to shut down its adoption and foster care services after the passage of the new laws on marriage -- not because it objected to the laws, but because those laws would have compelled such organizations to provide services to lesbian and gay couples as well, even if such services violated their religious beliefs. One of my great disappointments with the gay movement generally is that, in its understandable (and, with qualifications, laudable) desire to establish equality and liberty for homosexuals, it does not seem prepared to look closely nor to keep a strict conscience when it comes to recognizing other people's liberty and equality. That is not right.

Pilgrims and Aliens

The debate over immigration into the United States seems to be heating up a bit -- whether this is a function of increased violence in the north of Mexico, or the polarized nature of American politics, or both. Arizona's recently instituted law has been defended as just and prudent by conservatives and bitterly attacked as implicitly racist by liberals.

I do not claim any solid opinion on the matter, let alone an answer. However, I do feel strongly that Christians are allowing their judgment of the question to be unduly influenced by political considerations that are entirely worldly -- whether the worldliness is right-wing or left-wing is of no interest to me. The influence of the World upon the Church is my bete noire; something with the persistence of a pet peeve, the enmity of a jealous rival and the seriousness of blasphemy.

In the hopes of remedying that, rather than attempting to provide a solution to the problem -- which, given my poor understanding of politics, I could not plausibly expect to do -- I would like to lay out seven principles that seem necessary to the proper framing of the problem. This has the advantage of making the problem clear; for, in this as in most political debates in our nation, each side is starting without any defined terms or defended premises; they exhibit only passionate rhetoric based on a mixture of power and ideology, which are not the same things as statecraft and ideas. This causes much hatred: never having bothered to realize what our own premises are, let alone examine them, we are then so shocked by others having different premises that they have never examined that the only possible explanation for their revolt against all common sense is that they are malicious or pinheaded demagogues. This does not make for mutually intelligible discourse, let alone civic civility.

But I digress. One of the roles of the Church in society (Dante, though today famed chiefly for his Hell, outlines this in his treatise On Monarchy) is to form the consciences of all men, and most especially of Catholics. The Church as an institution does not and must not wield temporal power, but she does wield influence upon the temporal powers indirectly, by helping all men to see the realities of right and wrong. Or, as C. S. Lewis says somewhere, theology (whether natural or revealed) tells us what ends are desirable; politics tells us what means are effective; and theology tells us which of these means are consistent with justice and love.

Taking several points of Catholic theology (though I imagine these would be acceptable to Orthodox or Protestants also), as well as several points of American history, I think we can at least put ourselves in the right frame of mind to answer the question of immigration justly.

1) A nation does have the right to protect its borders. Both military invasion and the incursion of criminal individuals are violations of the rights of nations, which may be met if necessary with violent force. It has, more generally, the right to enforce its own laws, provided that they are just; there is, of course, no point in having laws if one does not enforce them, something that God says plainly He instituted governments to do (Rom. 13.1ff). (Enforcing an unjust law is of course an act of injustice. Enforcing a neutral law, or one made for practical rather than moral reasons, is just.)

2) All human beings are made in the image of God; nations are not. Now, this does not mean nations are simply conveniences or fictions -- they have traditionally been regarded by Christians as being spiritually guarded by an order of angels, called Principalities. However, nations are not, like men and women, made in the image of God. Nations exist to serve persons, not the other way around; even if a man serves his country by dying for it, he is ultimately dying for his fellow citizens -- that is, other people -- rather than an idea. It is worthwhile to keep in mind that every nation will cease to exist before any person will; for persons will never cease to exist. Every one of us is immortal, stamped with the image of God. No nation is.

3) Welcoming the poor, the disfranchised, and the alien is an act of mercy, one which was not only encouraged but assumed in the Old Testament, which contains the only set of laws for a government that can be unequivocally called Biblical. When God tells His people, "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Ex. 22.21), He is not only requiring the Israelites to treat foreigners justly. He is doing that; but note that there is no "if." It is taken for granted that there will be aliens within their gates. This was in-keeping with the ancient notion of hospitality that has withered practically to nothing in our own day. Nor was ancient Israel unique in this regard; every ancient culture set great store by hospitality, and many associated it with the commands of the gods -- as in a Greek variant of the Flood myth, in which wrath is visited upon mankind because of his refusal to show hospitality to gods disguised as poor strangers. Our own rejection of the long human tradition of hospitality is bizarre -- and, it may be added, unchristian (cf. Hebrews 13.2).

And Scripture affirms not only the command to welcome, and to some extent provide for, the stranger (cf. Deut. 24.19-22), but warns us with terrible solemnity that if we ignore God's command, we will be punished. Traditional Catholic catechesis included a mention of "sins that cry to heaven," one of which was said to be the sin of the Sodomites. Nowadays people usually think of, well, sodomy, but Ezekiel illuminates it for us: "Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but they did not aid the poor and the needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it" (Ezek. 16.49-50; cf. Deut. 27.19). The duty of almsgiving is especially incumbent upon the citizens of a wealthy democracy -- for we have unparalleled freedom to behave generously and unparalleled resources with which to do so. In the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats, it seems to be the hook on which everything hangs.

4) Every person is obliged to live justly and lovingly toward all other men. We have, however, a hierarchy of obligations: our obligations to our family, for instance, outweigh our obligations to strangers. And one of these special obligations is love of our country, and love of our compatriots. Yet we must be vigilant and examine our consciences to be sure that we are not allowing any particular obligation to obscure the universal obligation that still impinges upon us. Every crackpot morality, every claptrap heresy, is the result of allowing some particular truth to muscle other particular truths aside -- in so doing, destroying our perception of universal truth. (For instance, the Gnostic heresies took the truth that human sexuality has to be disciplined, sometimes severely; and went off the deep end, declaring sexuality as such to be depraved, the work of an evil being.) Oversimplifications like this are tempting because they are, intellectually and practically, a great deal easier than the rigorous balance that is essential to Catholic doctrine. Everybody finds falling off easier than walking on a tightrope, regardless of which side they happen to fall on.

5) To be blunt, there is a point at which hostility to immigrants becomes rank hypocrisy. I am not asserting that our cultural attitude has reached that point, or that laws in Arizona or elsewhere have reached that point, nor positively denying it; I am only saying that there is such a point, and that that fact ought to be kept in mind. For -- with apologies to any of my audience who are of purely Amerindian stock -- we are a nation of immigrants; we are the children of immigrants, some of us immigrants ourselves and others only one or two generations removed; our nation purchased the stolen liberty of immigrants for two centuries; we thrust the original inhabitants of the lands we live in from their places, making them immigrants somewhere else; and for a long time we congratulated ourselves on the generous welcome we extended to immigrants. One of our most prominent national monuments, the Statue of Liberty, has this written on a plaque near its base:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Is this a binding statement of American law? No. But it is certainly an expression of our national heritage, our national identity; and if we are serious about our national borders on those grounds, it is an expression we must honestly reckon with.

It is easy to reply -- and, in the case of those who would thus reply, true -- that it was not we, but our ancestors, who made the decision to immigrate; we were born here. We cannot be held responsible for their decision. That is true, up to a point. We cannot be held directly responsible for the actions of another, whether a relative or not; but we can be held responsible for whether we approve of their actions or not. And if we approve of their actions, we ought to take a philosophically consistent stance on comparable actions. Furthermore, their actions have secured for us great prosperity and liberty: we live in one of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most democratic nations on the face of the globe. We must, therefore, acknowledge that we cannot treat our own ancestors' decision as a matter of indifference to ourselves; we have a vested interest in it; it cannot be summarily dismissed as irrelevant. Do we approve, or not? And are our attitudes toward contemporary immigration, over the Rio Grande rather than the Atlantic, in harmony or discord with our attitudes towards our forefathers, and why?

6) There are prudential questions to be considered; that is, questions of practicality. Many who cross the border are criminals -- seeking victims, or a market for their wares, or refuge from their own police. Not all are by any means -- indeed, given that many criminals make a habit of darting back and forth across the border, it is doubtful whether any significant proportion of permanent immigrants are criminals, and a considerable proportion come specifically to seek employment. Nevertheless, the depredations of foreign criminals are serious, and such problems as this deserve the most careful deliberation.

7) Finally, one thing we are very apt to forget in every political discussion is that we are talking about human beings. It is easy to lose a sense of others' humanity when we talk about movements, tendencies, policies, means, laws, demographics, sectors, interests ... the mind reels. Remembering that we are discussing not "immigrants" but real, living, breathing human beings will not decide the issue for us, but it will both cloud and clarify our minds: cloud them momentarily with emotion, and then, when we have conquered emotion, we will perhaps remember the real import of our decision, precisely because our hearts have been roused to the moral dimension of dealing with other people, and not with labeled counters. This question brings itself to bear upon human beings, not upon a cost-benefit ratio. Of course the practical effects do not determine what is just; but it is well to bear them in mind.

The Morals of the Mushroom Cloud

The topic of the atomic bombings of Japan, which closed the Second World War, cropped up with some friends a couple of times as the semester was ending. It is a subject that I have visited and revisited over the years, without knowing why: my personal links to Japan may have something to do with it. I find myself in a minority in adamantly rejecting the decision taken by our nation, but there are few things of which I am so absolutely convinced, as that this was a war crime.

It may seem academic even to discuss the matter. After all, the dead are dead and cannot be brought back to life by argument. However, I am persuaded that this act represented -- and represents for us, to the extent that we give it our approval -- a radical compromise with evil; and that cannot be permitted: not to Catholics, not to Christians, not to self-respecting human beings.

For we must always remember that it is not only the things we do which influence our souls; nor only the things we think. The actions of others influence us also, even if we neither directly assist nor suffer them; for the whole question of innocence is not simply question of what we have done, but what we would do -- how our souls have been shaped by thought, word, and deed, including our responses to the actions of others: keeping them out of our soul by opposition or welcoming them in by approval, rightly or wrongly. By giving something our approval, we involve ourselves in it -- not practically, but spiritually. And the spirit is too valuable a thing to be compromised. It is our very self.

The issue at hand is whether the U.S. was justified in using the atomic bomb on Japan as she did.

Now, the fact that this was a war-time act situates it in the territory of Just War Theory, a favorite topic of several Christian philosophers, beginning with St Augustine. One of the basic elements of Just War Theory (reiterated endlessly over the centuries, most recently in the Catechism of the Catholic Church) is that non-combatants are not to be touched. Hiroshima did include secondary military headquarters; however, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets not although, but because they were both large urban centers -- in other words, the bombings would result in severe damage to the civilian population. Damage to non-combatants in these strikes was not collateral. It was intended. This, if we accept Just War Theory at all, is an atrocity. The Catechism has the following to say (without directly citing the events of 1945): "The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. 'The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.' Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely. ... 'Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation'" (secs. 2312-2314, emphasis original).

This actually yields a surprisingly clear syllogism for our use:
1. All acts of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities, etc., are war crimes (Major Premise)
2. These acts of war (the atomic bombings) were directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities (Minor Premise); therefore
3. These acts of war were war crimes (Conclusion)
With which we have the syllogism Barbara in the first mode, for all you logic nerds out there. (I hope you are both well.)

I have only once heard or read an attempt to evade the charge that it was not really intended as an attack on civilians. Paul Fussell, in his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," sets forth the argument that, days before Hiroshima, leaflets were dropped on the city warning people to get out. For this particular argument, I have approximately the same sympathy as with that of a murderer who defends himself by pointing out that he courteously sent death threats before carrying out the actual killing.

Defenders of the bombings may take several more reasonable tacks. One, favored by the more pragmatic, is that the bombings saved lives in the long run: because the war ended so shortly thereafter, unnumbered American soldiers survived it. Some, taking a more universal perspective, will point out that Japanese soldiers, and even Japanese civilians, were likewise saved from the attrition of a slow march into the heart of the Japanese Empire. I have heard more than once about the last-ditch machinations of the Japanese government to arm the elderly, the women, and the children in a final effort to defend the nation.

Which, in fairness, makes perfect sense in view of the Potsdam Declaration made by the Allies earlier that year. It was, in the view of the Japanese government, a rehash of the Cairo Declaration of 1943 (which it cited). It was the Cairo Declaration which required of Japan not simply surrender, but unconditional surrender. The alternative presented to the Empire was a full invasion, which, in the Allies' words, would mean "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland." What country would not make plans to arm its people so that they could defend themselves against that kind of threat?

Here comes the joke, though. Note that the Cairo Declaration, and that of Potsdam which reaffirmed it, demanded an unconditional surrender. Anything less, any peace terms which might be offered by the Japanese Empire, were being rejected categorically. The joke is that one of the other essential elements of Just War Theory is that any war, to be just, must be fought only to reach peace. Being able to unconditionally impose one's own will upon the opposing side is not a prerequisite, and in fact is unjust if it obstructs a reasonable prospect of peace. It could theoretically be argued that only an unconditional surrender from Japan could possibly have resulted in peace; but that can scarcely be proven. It could also theoretically be argued that, by insisting upon an unconditional surrender -- which, aimed at Japan, was not prima facie a realistic demand -- the Allies themselves made it necessary (if indeed it was) to drop the atom bomb. I do admit that this joke is not particularly funny.

Going back to the argument that it saved lives, whether American or Japanese (for I cannot abide even to answer the stance that it saved American lives at the expense of Japanese, as if we were worth more than they), it can only be said that this is not true.

That is, American soldiers were prevented from dying in the Second World War, and went home -- to die anyway: from cancer, or after crossing organized crime, or when they were shipped out to the next wars in Korea and Vietnam, or fifty years later asleep in their beds. Everyone dies. We know that, if we let ourselves. Whether a person dies in war does not make a difference about whether they will die at some point: the rate still holds at one per person, 100% (with allowances for those assumed a la Elijah, or raised from the dead Lazarus-style). Whether a person dies in war does certainly make a difference to what sort of pain they and their families go through -- though, it must be said, not necessarily a negative difference. The man who died at Iwo Jima as a war hero is a source of family pride, when, had he come back, he would have been traumatized by his experiences, estranged himself from his family and friends, and drunk himself to death. An imagined storyline, of course. But so are all the speculations about what would have happened between the Allies and Japan if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.

In any event such an argument is hardly tenable among Christians. For what ultimately matters is not how or when a man dies, but that "it is appointed for a man to die once, and after that to face the judgment." And no man will be judged according to the manner in which he died; but we are solemnly warned, repeatedly, by our Lord Jesus Himself, that "the dead were judged according to what they had done." To die, innocent, is a happy death: a fate to be hoped for. To die, morally compromised, is to risk your soul -- perhaps, to be damned. Everyone is going to die; what we need to be concerned about is not avoiding it as long as possible, for that is to think the way the World does, but to die having traveled as close to Christ as we possibly can. And we can hardly expect to travel close to Christ if we not only practice injustice, but defend it as integrity.

I do not claim it easy to maintain moral clarity in the face of such questions as this. It is also, I admit, far easier to sit writing about Hiroshima on a netbook than to sling a gun on my back and sail off, very probably, to be killed on the coast of Honshu, or captured and horrifically tortured. But if we believe in the Four Last Things -- death; judgment; Heaven; Hell -- in any real sense, we have to maintain that moral clarity. I believe that any price is worth paying to preserve one's innocence -- not that I imagine that I would pay any price. I know for a fact that I would sell my innocence for a lentil stew, because I have, God only knows how many times. But is what I or anyone would actually do of any consequence? The question before us is not what we, in our stupidity, cowardice, or selfishness, would in fact do. It is what is right. It is a question of whether, objectively, our innocence is worth everything, not whether we would pay everything to keep it. And if we do believe in the Four Last Things, then we had damn well better believe that innocence is worth everything, because innocence (or rather, that innocence God bestows on us on repentance, forgiving our lack of it) means everlasting bliss, and guilt, obstinately defended, means everlasting torment.

Does this mean I would rather have seen Americans and Japanese fighting to the bitter end -- in Taiwan, China, Okinawa, in the very streets of Tokyo? A thousand times, yes. No one would want that for its own sake. But I would rather see good, honest, loyal American and Japanese men fall as soldiers, one of the noblest deaths afforded to our broken race, than see children's faces full of broken glass and pregnant women with their skin melted by radiation. For one soldier to kill another is, at least, within the possibilities of a just war, and the soldier stands a very good chance of going to his death, to the extent that this is possible for anybody, prepared. For soldiers to kill non-combatants -- well, we have a word for what Al-Qaeda soldiers do in killing American civilians, and it is not an attractive one.

As Christians, it is vitally necessary for us to have clear heads on this question. Remember, we are the salt of the earth -- i.e., something that is supposed to preserve, prevent things from going bad, by being extremely unlike the thing we are preserving, as unlike as salt is unlike meat. We must not absorb the assumptions and attitudes of the surrounding culture: for instance, that preserving physical life is worth every moral compromise, or that anything that brings a war to an end is ipso facto justifiable, or even (though of course we would not put it this way) that whatever we did must be right because we are America. When we do that, we cease to fulfill one of the chief functions for which God put us into society -- to be a beacon of light in the midst of darkness (and if the very light in us is darkness, how great is that darkness!), proclaiming the eternal and vivifying truths that right is more important than might, that the soul is journeying at all times to damnation or salvation, that the real root of peace lies in justice rather than military, political, or economic force. And if the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be seasoned? Or what is it good for, save to be thrown out, and trampled underfoot by men?

Holy War, Holy Peace

Many Christians, within the Catholic Church and without it, have taken the position that all war -- or even all violence of any kind -- is wrong. Dorothy Day, whose cause for canonization has been opened, noted in The Long Loneliness that the Catholic Worker movement (which she founded together with Peter Maurin) was not only pacifist but anarchist. The pacifist viewpoint is gaining ground, whether in pure or more diluted forms, among Christians of the rising generation, partly perhaps because of the leftward swing that the churches in America are experiencing.

I was, and remain, highly sympathetic to the pacifist position. At present my eligibility for the military is a non-issue, due to being gay, but if and when the current policies are repealed I intend to apply for the status of a conscientious objector.

This is not because I am a pacifist. I am not. The Scriptures make it clear, in passages such as Romans 13, that the secular authorities have been established by God -- not, admittedly, with the same directness, the same purpose, or the same protection from the Holy Spirit afforded to the Church. The Church was founded by God Himself and continues to be indwelt, in the whole and in all her members, by that same God. This is not true of any state. Some regimes, Christian ones included, have made valiant attempts at theocracy: the Byzantine Empire, Tudor England, Calvinist Geneva, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But that is as alien to the reality of Christian belief as every other sin that guises itself as an angel of light.

Yet I digress. The Bible states plainly that secular rulers, in their own capacity, are representatives of God -- not a revelatory sense, but in a practical sense. In order for life to function at all, there must be some practical restraint of human evil, some order, some justice in the practical and not merely the ideal realm.

Set apparently against this are such passages as "Do not resist an evil person ... turn the other cheek." And in the context of daily squabbles between villagers, which would probably have been to the fore in the minds of Jesus' original audience, that is exactly right (surprise). Every trace of resentment, of bitterness, of revengefulness, must be given no quarter by the Christian in his own heart. But Jesus gives no indication that He is here setting forth any political theory, and it would be pretty surprising if He did, given that politics was a subject He rarely addressed directly, except to say that thing so blasphemous to American conservatives even within the Church: "Pay your taxes."

The problem with rigorous pacifism -- that is, the rejection of all forms of violence as intrinsically wrong, or even simply as worse than any of the evils it would prevent -- is that it is, in this respect, actually inconsistent with Catholic teaching. For of course, to insist that the use of force is always wrong does not merely eliminate all possibility of a just war; it eliminates the possibility of a just government (how could there be policemen, or prison guards, or a justice system in general, or even laws?) -- thus bringing us from pacifism to anarchism. Nor could there be any sort of discipline in schools; so we proceed from political to educational anarchy. Nor, realistically, could any punishments be conducted by parents, if such punishments are morally worse than simply letting the child go its merry way. Strict pacifism thus lands us at a rather austere picture of humanity, in which neither government nor school nor family exist in any practical sense of the words -- and so, quite apart from making the Old Testament pretty startling unjust in every possible respect, putting one in mind of Hobbes' description of man's life without society: "Nasty, poor, brutish and short."

Some people would allow for internal violence, but say that it ought always to stop short of war. For convenience, this may be labeled the semi-pacifist position. This is rather attractive, but unfortunately it suffers the fatal flaw of inconsistency. If it is moral for a government, when necessary, to impede or even harm its own citizens to prevent them injuring others, why is it suddenly immoral for them to do the same to foreigners? Are the lives of its own citizens worth less? Is it butting into other countries' business by defending its own citizens?

Many semi-pacifists would doubtless point out that very few wars have ever been fought for strictly defensive reasons. That is true. That is why, in a rather vague sense, Christians should indeed be "anti-war"; most wars are wrong. There is, according to the consensus of Catholic theologians, such a thing as a just war, but its criteria are rarely met, for they are stringent:

1. They must be fought in self-defense. All aggressive wars are intrinsically unjust. Note that this contains a tacit acknowledgment of how horrible war is even int he act of saying it can be defended, for no just defense. can take place unless an unjust attack has already taken place. (Some would argue that this criterion should be read strictly, so that wars which claim to be pre-emptively defensive are disqualified.)

2. Every peaceful means of resolving the conflict must have been exhausted first. This may be because they have been tried and found wanting, or because they have been shown to be impractical or ineffective. (For example, the aggressor may offer to settle a conflict in return for a monetary payment, but if the country cannot afford such a payment, that particular peaceful means would be demonstrably impractical.)

3. The damage the aggressor will inflict must be lasting, grave, and certain. "Hitler is going to kill all the Jews" would meet these criteria; "Hitler is going to make us wear totally stupid clothes" would fall somewhat short.

4. The damage the aggressor would inflict must be worse than the damage the war will do. So, for instance, if the only practical means of keeping your country from being destroyed by an invasion is to destroy it yourself, the war would not be worth it, and would therefore be unjust even in self-defense (defending yourself by ceasing to have a self is not logically plausible, QED).

5. Hand in hand with that, there must be a serious prospect of success. If, let us say, Sealand (a pretend-nation in the North Atlantic, consisting -- quite literally -- in about six or seven people) were invaded by Great Britain, it would be unjust for Sealand to take up arms, because a serious prospect of beating Great Britain does not exist. France, sure.

6. Non-combatants must not be touched. This includes not only children and the elderly (and, in most cultures until recently, women), but even non-combatant military assistants, according to most formulations of Just War Theory. So, you can bomb an AA battery while it is manned, but not a munitions factory during working hours -- because munitions workers are not actually in combat.

There are a lot of elaborations of these principles -- the principle of proportionate force, for instance, which dictates that enough force and no more must be used to stop an attack (which raises serious doubts about whether atomic weapons can ever be justly used); or the principle of fighting for peace, which means that the conflict must be ended as soon as is reasonably possible -- neither side may, for instance, insist on an unconditional surrender (which the United States did with Japan in the Second World War; I understand that attempts to surrender conditionally on the part of the Japanese were turned down, simply on the grounds that it was not an unconditional surrender).

Obviously this knocks nearly, if not absolutely, every war off the 'eligible' list for just wars. And so the rigorous application of Just War Theory would mean an awful lot of conscientious objectors among Christians an awful lot of the time, which, to be frank, I contemplate with some pleasure. After all, can any government -- can our government -- be relied upon to lead us only into just wars?

That being said, any war which really met these criteria would, I think, be not only just, but even morally obligatory. Chesterton said it with greater clarity and succinctness than I could manage: "There is no inconsistency in loving men and fighting them, if we fight them fairly and for a good cause."

The wars that have been most attacked for injustice and wickedness in recent times are the Crusades. It is said that fighting a war for a religion is evil. But surely this is quite backwards. Fighting for power, for money, for pleasure: these are wicked wars. But fighting to defend what we believe is holy -- how could we respect ourselves if we refused to do that? Admittedly the wars called the Crusades were in some respects on shaky moral ground, though for rather different reasons (and far less so) than most people think, mostly in that there was really some imposition of Catholicism involved, not simply the defense of it. Admittedly the actual conduct of every war, the Crusades included, exhibits much injustice; a criticism that can be leveled at all human behavior. But a religion can almost be defined as that which we are willing to die to defend. That is why the martyr and the crusader are, in the eyes of historic Christianity, regarded so similarly; as in Dante's heaven, where the two species mingle in the glories of Mars, their own shed blood dyeing the planet red. Ultimately, the only war really worth fighting is the war to defend what we regard as holy.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half-heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred;
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall;
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
-- GKC, Lepanto 15-22

A Matter of Conscience

A Man For All Seasons, originally a play and eventually made into an excellent film, is about the martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, the courageous chancellor of England who refused to cooperate with King Henry VIII's rape of the holy Church. This is a selection from the play; the Duke of Norfolk, Master Secretary Cromwell, and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, are interrogating the imprisoned saint.

NORFOLK Oh, confound all this ... (With real dignity) I'm not a scholar, as Master Cromwell never tires of pointing out, and frankly I don't know whether the marriage was lawful or not. But damn it, Thomas, look at those names ... You know those men! Can't you do what I did, and come with us, for fellowship?

MORE (Moved) And when we stand before God, and you are sent to Paradise for doing according to your conscience, and I am damned for not doing according to mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?

CRANMER So those of us whose names are there are damned, Sir Thomas?

MORE I don't know, Your Grace. I have no window to look into another man's conscience. I condemn no one.

The ability to respect others' consciences, and to reverence one's own, seems sadly eroded nowadays. Of course, it may only be nostalgia that makes older periods seem any better; or it may equally be considerable exposure to authors like Chesterton or Lewis, who quite definitely had the power of respecting conscience in themselves and others, and may have been as exceptional in their own time as they would be today. But, whether it bloomed more fruitfully in the past or no, it is a skill which we have a responsibility to learn.

There are a thousand examples -- as, for instance, a dearly loved friend who wishes to become a missionary to Moslems, and also harbors a definite animosity for Muhammad. This is worrying to me, for it is questionable whether any meaningful dialogue, missionary or otherwise, can take place between any two people if one of them believes the other, or the other's beliefs, to be evil. There would be no need for dialogue unless one party thought the other wrong; but wrong is not the same thing as evil. Evil cannot be argued with like heresy, it can only be exorcised like a devil. And freelance exorcism is not always appreciated, nor notable for its success.

However, the point that I will take as exemplary for this post is the fact, much protested, that the Catholic Eucharist is a closed Eucharist. Walk into most Protestant services, and anyone may partake, provided that they are Bible-believers. Some churches regard even that restriction as excessive. But walk into a Catholic Mass, and you will likely find a note in the bulletin or missal asking that only Catholics in good standing partake of Communion. And this is exactly what the teaching and discipline of the Catholic Church declare and expect.

There are exceptions, which are usually made for those communities of Christians (for instance, the Eastern Orthodox) who are already known to believe in the Real Presence. But of course one cannot build a theology by relying on the exceptions; the norm must come first, and then the exceptions. But the same why underlies both, in this case as in theology generally, and that why is a matter of conscience.

But stop a moment. Conscience, like tolerance, is one of many god-terms in our culture. By god-term, I mean a term that resembles God: in that if you attach the term to something, that thing becomes inviolable; and in that the term itself is a counter for something that nobody understands. We are in need of a refresher on its real meaning. Conscience does not mean what we happen to feel like doing, although few would be so bone-headed as to actually say that. It does not even necessarily mean doing what we find morally comfortable. Some moral choices, though perhaps fewer than we would like to believe, are fraught with complexity, and there are some which genuinely ought to cause us discomfort even when we make the right choice. Corrie ten Boom, in her heart-wrenching autobiography The Hiding Place, recounts one such circumstance when she lied to Nazis in Holland: "Only as I walked out of the building did I begin to tremble. Not because, for the first time in my life, I had told a conscious lie. But because it had been so dreadfully easy."

To paraphrase several authors (including the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church, sections 1776-1802), conscience is the capacity for discerning and acting upon what is right and wrong. This can often bring us out of our comfort zone, thereby risking our lives. In all seriousness, obedience to conscience can be highly painful, and the whole point of someone's being a martyr is that it can indeed cost you your life to obey your conscience.

This means that conscience is, or involves, three things. First, we have right and wrong as they really are, objectively, in the outside world; or, if you prefer your terminology Platonic-Augustinian-Berkeleyan (you nerd), in the mind of God. Second, we have the human faculty for discerning what that truth is. Third, we have the pressure exerted by the conscience upon the human will to do what is right and avoid what is wrong.

Note how this brings together the will and the intellect. Catholics speak often about formation of conscience. This sounds difficult to understand, but it simply means how well-trained our ability to perceive the truth about good and evil is. Someone who has been taught from childhood that sex outside marriage is perfectly all right, and believed it -- because, after all, the authorities have said so -- that person would be said to have a poorly formed conscience, at least with regard to chastity. They would believe things that are, in fact, erroneous. However, because their conscience was badly formed, they would be significantly less guilty for, say, fornication than someone who was properly trained about chastity. (This is not to say that they would escape all moral guilt by any means, particularly if they had the opportunity of correcting their conscience on their own initiative and failed to do so. Nor is it to say that they will escape the practical negative consequences of sexual immorality -- any more than a child who was never warned not to climb too high will escape the pain of falling down, despite the fact that they do not have the moral guilt of a child who was warned and did it anyway.)

In short, how responsible a man is for his actions depends, not only on whether he obeyed the pressure on his will to do what appears to be right, but upon his understanding of what is right, and where he got that understanding. St Thomas Aquinas justly carried this principle very far: if I recall accurately, he even taught that someone who, mistakenly but honestly, believed Christianity to be untrue, would be morally culpable for converting to it. The fact that what they did, considered externally as it were, was right, cuts no ice. They believed themselves to be doing wrong, and they are for that reason guilty; for the intention of offending God is always wrong, and is in fact the essential constituent part of the wrongness of every sin.

Now, let us plug that back into the example selected earlier, that of the closed Catholic Eucharist. Many Protestants are offended by this; I was at first, but when I considered it from their perspective that ceased.

The Catholic Church believes herself to be the one true Church, i.e., the sacramental manifestation of the Body of Christ. She is a sign of the Church, and, like the Eucharist, she also is what she signifies. This is why the Eucharist is normally reserved to Catholics.

But she resembles the Eucharist in another way. We do believe that, when the bread and wine are consecrated, they cease to be bread and wine and become Jesus Christ's body and blood, soul and divinity. No part of Him is missing. Yet His being is not exhausted by the rite. It is not the sort of thing that could be. It is not a material, of which we have only so many ounces; it is an identity, without number, weight, or measure. We do not have "less Jesus" if we receive a fractured Host or abstain from the Chalice. His whole self is totally present in every part of the matter; just as, though it may have a sort of interface with the brain in particular, your soul is not locally present in that one part of your body and absent from the others.

Likewise, though the Catholic Church is (we believe) the Church, it does not follow from this that those outside of the Catholic Church in a visible sense are outside of the Body of Christ. We cannot judge another person's reasons for being outside the visible Body of Christ, and therefore we do not presume to comment on their eternal destiny; man looketh on the outward appearance, but God upon the heart. Yet we are sternly warned by St Paul, in I Corinthians 11, that one who eats without discerning the Body and the Blood eats and drinks judgment upon himself. For this reason, he says, many among you are weak and sick, and some have died. As it is none of our business to comment on their immortality, so it is none of our business to risk their mortality. The state of a given non-Catholic Christian's conscience, with respect to the Catholic Church, may be positively spotless -- but how can we be asked to take responsibility for it?

This was why I was so hurt when a godly woman of my acquaintance, a year or two ago, came out with an uncharacteristic and startling harshness against the fact that the Catholic Eucharist is closed. She spoke of it as arrogant, as judgmental, as an assertion that it is "our" table rather than Christ's. Quite apart from being offended on the basis of what we believe (which is my own problem), I was extremely wounded by her failure to consider the position of our consciences. I had, and have, no objection to anybody thinking that the Catholic perspective is in fact wrong. But when considering whether our behavior is proud, or hypocritical, or judgmental, or anything else, what counts is not primarily what the person making the evaluation thinks true, but what the person or institution being evaluated thinks true. The Catholic Church believes certain things about the Eucharist, and her disciplines reflect those beliefs. Whether those beliefs are true is, while terribly important, beside the point when we are asking specifically whether those disciplines are arrogant. Even if wrong, we are obliged to do what we perceive to be right. And that, though it may easily be done in an arrogant way -- we are all sinners -- is not arrogance itself.

Of course, the point is not simply to defend the Catholic practice of a closed Eucharist. The point is that, when discussing anything or judging any act, we must consider not only our own moral feeling but the state of the other's conscience. Magnanimity -- that is, giving others the benefit of the doubt; being generous in the face of suspicion; putting the best interpretation upon others' words and deeds -- is not merely a social pleasantry. It is a responsibility of charity. Even, perhaps, of justice.

CRANMER Then the matter is capable of question?

MORE Certainly.

CRANMER But that you owe obedience to your King is not capable of question. So weigh a doubt against a certainty -- and sign.

MORE Some men think the earth round, others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King's command make it round? And if it is round, will the King's command flatten it? No, I will not sign.

CROMWELL (Leaping up, with ceremonial indignation) Then you have more regard to your own doubt than you have to his command!

MORE For myself, I have no doubt.

CROMWELL No doubt of what?

MORE No doubt of my grounds for refusing this oath.

The Quick and the Dead

This being All Souls' Day, I thought I would take a look at the practice of praying for the departed. This will be a little bit more polemical than most of my posts have been thus far.

According to the cheat sheet in the back of my Bible, there are a total of fourteen works of mercy. Seven are corporal: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, bury the dead; seven are spiritual: admonish the sinner, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the sorrowful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive all injuries, pray for the living and the dead.

It is commonly believed that prayers for the dead are derived from what are, inaccurately, called the Apocrypha. It is true that the only explicit Scriptural reference to prayers for the dead comes from a passage not accepted as canonical by most Protestants (Anglicans can go either way). II Maccabees, alluded to occasionally in the New Testament (e.g. Hebr. 11.35b, cf. II Macc. 7), is a literary account of the Jewish revolt against the religious persecution of the Seleucid Empire in the second century BCE. The relevant passage describes Judas Maccabee and his men, after a battle, performing the last corporal work of mercy (burying the dead) and combining it with the last spiritual work of mercy:

"Then under the tunic of every one of the dead they found sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the Law forbids the Jews to wear. And it became clear to all that this was why these men had fallen [cf. Josh. 7]. So they blessed the ways of the Lord, the righteous Judge, who reveals the things that are hidden; and they turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out. ... [Judas Maccabee] also took up a collection, man by man, to the amount of two thousand drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. In doing this he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin." -- II Macc. 12.40-42a, 43-45

Although the books of the Maccabees are not accepted by the Jews as Scripture, this does reflect the practice of some Jews at the time, and contemporary Orthodox practice: for nearly a year after their death, Orthodox Jews to this day pray for their dead.

The key is the mention of the resurrection. As St Luke mentions in Acts 23.6-9, "The Sadducees say there are no such things as resurrection, or angels, or souls; but the Pharisees acknowledge all three." It is a little-realized fact that, although He clashed with them on spiritual grounds more often than anybody else -- and perhaps not least because they were more widespread, numerically and geographically, than the other sects of Judaism -- Jesus and the Pharisees shared an overwhelming majority of their doctrine. The original premise of praying for the dead was a doctrine still accepted by both Protestant and Catholic Christians: that death is not the end, that the soul survives death and will receive bodily resurrection and judgment at the End, and that the worldly habit of talking about death as the end and the dead as the non-existent -- which has crept even into Christian usage -- is simply wrong.

Messianism aside, it was primarily the heart attitude of Jesus and 'the Nazarenes,' rather than dogmas, that distinguished them from the Pharisees; which is why St Paul was able to play the Pharisees off against the Sadducess, when the Sanhedrin was convened for the express purpose of condemning him. Though the book's status as canon was in dispute, this part of II Maccabees was probably written partly as a polemic against the Sadducee doctrine that humans have no souls and will not be resurrected -- doctrines found chiefly in literature written during the intertestamental period (e.g. I and II Maccabees, Daniel, Wisdom).

It is therefore, based simply on the historical data, more than possible that the earliest Christians did pray for their dead; for the reason that would have occurred to them not to do so, coming immediately from the Jewish matrix of the faith, would have been a denial of the resurrection, which was (well, and still is) heretical. This may be in the back of the mysterious reference to baptism for the dead in I Corinthians 15.

The standard Protestant reason for dissenting from this ancient practice is rather different. No Protestants that I know are conspicuous for resembling the Sadducees in this regard. For one thing, their beards are not nearly long enough, except maybe for my friend Nazim's. But the reason put forth by Luther, Calvin, and co. for rejecting prayers for the dead was twofold: first, when they determined that the Deuterocanonical books (I and II Maccabees et al.) were not Scripture, they no longer felt that there was Biblical support for the practice; second, they felt that the practice encouraged, or was even premised upon, a belief in Purgatory, which they rejected for similar reasons.

When I was a Calvinist I thought our grounds for rejecting the additional books of the Catholic canon were rather silly. Rejecting them on dogmatic grounds didn't make any sense to me -- surely we ought to settle what Scripture is first, and then derive our doctrine from that, rather than deciding what we think and then subjecting Scripture to our own litmus test of validity? And the argument that the Jews rejected them cut no ice either. After all, the amount of the New Testament accepted by the Jews is small; nay, negligible. Yet that had never stopped us from accepting it.

I think I still take that view. However, I have come to appreciate some of the arguments in favor of a Jewish Old Testament, even though I do not find them persuasive -- as, for instance, the point that to them were committed the oracles of God (Rom. 3.1ff). But even taking that into consideration, if the Jewish people have the privilege of determining the contents of the Old Testament, then how much more ought they to have a say in how it is to be interpreted? And it is only the Orthodox Jews, who have maintained the two-and-a-bit-thousand-year-old practice of praying for the dead, who can be viewed as the heirs of the Judaism that existed in Jesus' time; Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaism all have as much or more to do with the dialogue between Judaism and modernity as they do with the internal developments of the Jewish faith since Christ's day. Moreover, it is the Orthodox who are organically descended from, and most closely approximate, the Pharisees in particular: the Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots all perished within about a century of the Crucifixion, and the Samaritans can scarcely be regarded as the main current. As for the Alexandrian Jews, they were precisely the sect of Judaism that accepted the additional books which appear in the Catholic canon. So if we credit the Jews with the right to the greater act of determining the Old Testament canon, and therefore correspondingly with the lesser act of interpreting that canon, it hardly seems logical to rule out a practice that we originally got from them.

Now, about the connection between prayers for the dead and Purgatory. It must be noted that Purgatory is not part-time Hell, as most Protestants have been led to believe. The word in Latin literally means "place of cleansing," and that is just what the Catholic Church teaches about Purgatory. Those who die in the friendship of God, but who have not yet reached the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, as St Paul says in Ephesians, are purified, so as to be able to enjoy the vision of God, in which the blessedness of the dead consists. It is sometimes described as punishment, but it is not retributive. It is corrective; just as setting a broken bone is not retributive punishment for breaking it, but nonetheless will probably hurt.

It might be argued that Purgatory does not appear in the Bible. I am not so sure. Having accepted the doctrine for years simply on the strength of the Christian tradition, I was intrigued by this verse that I had never noticed, about a year ago:

"And some of those who are wise shall fall, to refine and to cleanse them and to make them white, until the time of the end, for it is yet for the time appointed." -- Daniel 11.35

Smack in the universally accepted part of Daniel. Reflections on I Corinthians 3.10-15 could be regarded as pointing in the same direction; and at least one major theologian of the primitive Church, Origen -- what makes it more piquant, he was a formidable scholar of Scripture -- regarded the parable of the unforgiving servant (Matt. 18.23-35) as a discourse on this same subject. In other words, whether the Bible speaks to Purgatory depends not so much on whether the Catholic or the Protestant canon of the Old Testament is correct, as it does upon what is the proper interpretation of various parts of the New.

But why make a fuss over praying for the dead in the first place? Sure, the Catholic Church lists it as one of the works of mercy -- but that's a didactic tool, not a set of demands. Well, I dare say that, if the dead can receive help from our prayers, they would welcome them. In the writings of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, a visionary of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it is said that Protestants usually spend far longer in Purgatory than anybody else, not because they are any worse than Catholics (frequently the reverse is true), but because so few people aid them by prayer.

But, quite apart from the practical dimension, this is one of the points over which Catholic-Protestant ecumenical discussion has to take place. Catholics and Protestants can certainly cooperate over a pretty wide range of issues, but that is not the same thing as being united -- I pray that they may be one, just as We are one, Jesus said to the Father in John 17. Not talking about our divisions does not make them disappear. A lowest-common-denominator approach to Christian unity suggests contempt for the truth as such, and is inconsiderate of the feelings of those who treasure things that lie beyond the bounds of the LCD -- and, moreover, it implies that the Holy Spirit cannot be trusted to guide us into all the truth (John 14.26, 16.12-14). If we are serious about achieving Christian unity, we have to be willing to talk about the things that constitute obstacles to it.

Of course, that may seem abstract; not everyone is inclined to care deeply about the cause of reunion. Permit me to make a suggestion. We all acknowledge that none of us, except by Divine revelation, can know whether another person is saved. Might we not, then, pray that the dead have received salvation? After all, as long as we do not know whether something has happened or not, we may pray for it: once we do know, it falls into the category of God's known will, which is to be submitted to. But until that point, it makes very little difference whether the things we don't know are past or future; for all are known to God. Might we then, in consequence, take prayers for the final salvation of the dead, whether we believe in Purgatory or not, as a starting point for further discussion?