The Gifts of the Holy Spirit

When St. Augustine was preparing to begin his first pastoral assignment he wrote a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. In that work he laid the foundation for the whole of Catholic Moral theology, by developing the relationship between the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Beatitudes, and the Petitions of the Our Father.

In his development of this great outline of moral teaching, he presented the Beatitudes in terms of stages in the Christian life. These stages led from humility or poverty in spirit to wisdom and the vision of God.

Check out the slides on the link for the relationship that St. Augustine saw among the Gifts, Beatitudes and Our Father.

Kmiec's Time Article on Benedict XVI, Pelosi and Scalia

Recently, I was asked, informally, to comment upon an the article linked in the title by Douglas Kmiec. Kmiec wrote the article analyzing the statement of Pope Benedict on the occasion of Speaker Pelosi's visit to the Holy See. Kmiec thought that the Holy Father was breaking tradition with the past by stating that legislators and judges had the responsibility of upholding the natural law. Of particular note is this quotation from the article:

To get a sense of just how sharp a break with the past this is, all one has to do is take a look at what Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, himself a Roman Catholic, wrote in 2002 in an essay in First Things. "[Abortion involves] ... private individuals whom the state has decided not to restrain. One may argue (as many do) that the society has a moral obligation to restrain. That moral obligation may weigh heavily upon the voter, and upon the legislator who enacts the laws; but a judge, I think, bears no moral guilt for the laws society has failed to enact," he wrote. "Thus, my difficulty with Roe v. Wade is a legal rather than a moral one ... [I]f a state were to permit abortion on demand, I would — and could in good conscience — vote against an attempt to invalidate that law for the same reason that I vote against the invalidation of laws that forbid abortion on demand: because the Constitution gives the federal government (and hence me) no power over the matter."

Until the Pelosi statement, the prior instruction from the Church's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and encyclical writing seemed to confirm Scalia's reasoning. There was an implicit understanding that the Church's admonition to its faithful to change the law permitting the choice of abortion had to be understood and applied in light of the scope of office. Catholic legislators make policy and could be so instructed, but judges, as Scalia wrote, had "no moral responsibility for the laws [their] nation has failed to enact."

I should say, first of all, that I think the article is not a very clear one, but we are dealing with two very difficult subjects, Constitutional Law and the Natural Moral Law. The article misses the point and I will explain why this is.

I am not sure that I could agree with Scalia about the legal argument but it is something that we all must pay attention to because it is a crucial matter in understanding law in this country. Historically, Scalia’s position seems to have merit but he is walking a very thin line on the moral issue. According to Scalia, the Natural Law has no place in Supreme Court Jurisprudence. I am quite sure that this is inaccurate, but, in light of changes in the Court's jurisprudence in last 100 years, it is a weighty argument. Essentially, Scalia’s position boils down to this: The Federal Government has no authority in the abortion issue; State governments are the ones who “discover” the law (apply the Natural Law) in these matters and the federal government was given no power to do so. Thus, it is not a Natural Law issue but a Constitutional matter, arising out of the limited form of govern instituted by the Constitution, involving polity among the various states and the federal government. Kmiec, in my view, misses the point.

Scalia is clever. He is using an argument arising out of the federalist political arrangement in the abortion matter. I do not think he means all judges cannot do anything. I think he means federal judges, but I could be wrong. This is clear though, he is not saying that abortion should be allowed in the states. He is rather saying, obliquely, from a constitutional point of view, it is a question of each state’s police power. As far as I can tell, Scalia never really addresses whether or not state judges could counteract legislation favoring abortion, but I believe he might allow that they could (as in the case of a pro-abortion law clearly contradicting the state constitution). But, the federal government was given no authority at the nation’s inception to intrude in the matter. This is why he would not have intruded in the abortion matter in Roe. So, the federal government exceeded its authority in striking down a state law on the matter.

The tricky part for Scalia is this: Scalia is saying that the US Supreme Court cannot adjudicate claims based upon Natural Law. However, natural Law was very influential in our nation’s legal and political formation and was not completely foreign to Supreme Court Jurisprudence for over a hundred years. I have never felt that Scalia has really articulated his position very clearly, but he might intend, being a wise jurist, to be vague. (I do not know everything he has said on the subject).

But the Pope and Scalia are in agreement regarding Roe v. Wade. It was a bad decision. When courts create laws they become legislators. The Court overstepped its authority. The US Supreme Court has legislated abortion and it will have to rectify the situation if it is to be remedied. It would seem to me, however, that Scalia and the Pope would agree on this for different reasons, even though Kmiec seems to miss that point in his analysis. The Pope is telling all Catholics that the Natural Law prohibits abortion but he is not saying how the situation here must be rectified (i.e., The Pope is not rewriting the Constitution). It is a bit difficult to read to what extent the popes intend to lay the burden on a particular governmental body or figure. Scalia is saying, I think, as a judge of the Federal Government, he has no “competence” in matters for which federal powers are not expressly given in the Constitution. But, according to both, Roe v. Wade is bad law, for different reasons, and should be overturned under the current circumstances.

Pelosi, Sebelius, Kennedy, and other Errant Catholics

Speaker Pelosi , Governor Sebelius (soon to be Secretary Sebelius) and Representative Patrick Kennedy, among a whole host of politicians who claim to be Catholic, are getting a great deal of awful theological advice and, in their own way, have become errant theologians themselves. We have all heard Nancy Pelosi's foolish remarks about abortion. Recently, some correspondents have sent statements made by Gov. Sebelius and Rep. Kennedy.

Gov. Sebelius has said,

My Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred, and personally I believe abortion is wrong. However, I disagree with the suggestion that criminalizing women and their doctors is an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the number of bortions in our nation.

There is another way. By working in support of the common good we can better protect human life and the dignity of all people.

If we work hard and match our rhetoric with our actions, we can create a culture that is more welcoming of mothers and treasuring of our children. We must redouble our efforts on prevention and personal responsibility. We must stand with women who feel so alone that abortion seems like their only choice. These women need people to walk with them, not cast stones at them....

If we truly wish to reduce the number of abortions further, we need to work together to truly promote a culture of life, by helping women and families get the support they need when facing unexpected pregnancies and to continue to reduce the number of abortions. Health care, child care, job opportunities, affordable housing—they are all the building blocks of a culture of life and we can use them to build a future where abortion is extremely rare.

In response to a constituent who wrote to ask him to vote against the Freedom of Choice Act, Patrick Kennedy wrote:

As you may know, the Freedom of Choice Act would codify into law the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which ensures a woman's right to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. In addition, this legislation also attempts to preserve a women's right to choose by preventing any legislation that would interfere or cause undue burden. I support the primary purpose of the Freedom of Choice Act, which is to ensure a woman's right to choose by making it public law, so that the national dialogue in regards to women's reproductive health and abortion may take a more fruitful course than in the past.

Regardless of where each of us stands on the issue of abortion, we can both agree that no one wants a woman to be faced with the choice to terminate her pregnancy. As former President Clinton has said, 'abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.' Therefore, I believe the dialogue of this nation should be centered on how to prevent unintended pregnancies, so that the need for abortion is greatly reduced. One important step we can take in addressing this issue is by ensuring comprehensive sex education, which instills in youth and young adults the merits of abstinence and safe-sex.

These Catholic politicians, like so many others, have all been mislead into believing that one can support laws which uphold the so-called right to abortion as long as one is personally opposed to abortion or wishes to reduce the number of abortions somehow through some unspecified social policies. The theologians behind this coaching are no doubt, themselves, badly mistaken about the meaning of freedom and the nature of law. One wonders if these theologians are the same ones that were on the list of President Obama's Catholic Advisory Council.

The statements made by these politicians demonstrate an absurd notion of human freedom, one that is completely inconsistent with human nature. Consider carefully what they are saying. A person has a right to abortion because it is a free choice. A woman has a right to kill her unborn child because of freedom. But, would reason not dictate, rather, that killing innocent human beings is not consistent with human freedom? Indeed, since we are speaking of freedom which properly belongs to human beings, would it not be more correct to say that the proper exercise of human freedom excludes the killing other innocent human beings? The mental deformity that allows one to believe that freedom includes the right to kill the innocent is so completely depraved that it should be called uncivilized and barbaric.

The codification of this notion of freedom in a national law permitting abortion is the creation of the worst kind of injustice in codified law. Since such a law sanctions the attack upon innocent human life, it makes law, which is supposedly for the common good, an enemy of the fundamental good of human life. There is no reasonable proposition that would justify the sanctioning of the destruction of the good of the life of one in the name of the good of freedom of another. How could one human's authentic good, in this case freedom, possibly be the cause for permitting the annihilation of another person's right to live? If such a law cannot be considered unjust and, indeed, barbaric, by all reasonable people because it contradicts the good of human life, on what basis would any law against human killing be based? There are only two elements in the equation--freedom of choice and defenseless human life. Is it that none of the theologians giving this bad advise to these politicians see the unreasonableness? If all they are asserting in the end is some political notion of freedom and rights, then, are we not saying that any form of human oppression can be justified in the name of freedom?

These theologians and politicians have contributed to the continuing downhill slide into an anarchical tyrrany of relativism.

Resuming Posts

I have been away for a while due to holidays and number or other pressing commitments at the seminary, but I am going to be returning to the blog. I noted recently Diocese of Scranton has posted Bishop Martino's instruction regarding the duty of the minister of Holy Communion. This is an edifying and proper (i.e., particular) application of the universal moral law. Given the treatment afforded the subject in other posts on this blog, this sentence was of particular note: "Those whose unworthiness to receive Holy Communion is known publicly to the Church must be refused Holy Communion in order to prevent sacrilege and to prevent the Catholic in question from committing further grave sin through unworthy reception." (attributed to Bishop Martino by the Chancellor, James B. Earley) It is difficult to understand why anyone having pastoral responsibility over the administration of the sacraments would disagree with this statement and not seek zealously to guard against the evils that the statement envisions. As I have stated before, as far as I can tell, no one has been able to articulate a moral or legal defense for allowing notoriously grave sinners to receive Holy Communion.

The Sin of the Politician or Public Official that Votes for Or Upholds the Validity of Permissive Abortion Laws

The last two installments of this series of post indicated that formal cooperation in abortion was a reason why pro-abortion politicians must be judged unworthy to receive Holy Communion and must, therefore, be denied the Sacrament by the minister. When Benedict XVI was prefect of the CDF he indicated that formal cooperation in abortion was a reason why the politician was unworthy. Indeed, that cooperation in the results of such immoral laws are the cause for serious concern among the Church’s ministers. In Evangelium vitae, no. 73, John Paul II raised the issue of these laws saying, “In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to ‘take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it.’” This quotation is from the Declaration on Procured Abortion, no. 22. Cardinal Ratzinger’s 2004 letter referred directly to this idea insofar as it spoke of campaigning and voting for the immoral law. Here is the relevant statement from the Declaration on Procured Abortion: “It must in any case be clearly understood that whatever may be laid down by civil law in this matter, man can never obey a law which is in itself immoral, and such is the case of a law which would admit in principle the liceity of abortion. Nor can he take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law, or vote for it. Moreover, he may not collaborate in its application.”

The interesting point about these texts from Evangelium vitae and the Declaration on Procured Abortion is that the issue is not so much the cooperation in one or more procured abortions, but the cooperation in the creation of intrinsically immoral laws. In the next post, the blog will take a closer look at this issue.

Works cited:

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration on Procured Abortion (18 November 1974), No. 22: AAS 66 (1974), 744.)

Revisionist Moral Thought: Proporotionalism, Consequentialism, Relativism

This post is going to depart from the line of posts on Politicians and Holy Communion. I was asked recently by a priest to help with some questions he had about the various revisionist moral systems that had developed in recent years. I thought blog readers might want to consider some of the points I made in response.

"The first point I should make is that the problems with some of the new moral systems are fundamental problems that are essentially anthropological. I will explain this briefly. Morality is always about the pursuit of Happiness. In the Gospel, Jesus preaches the Beatitudes as His answer to the question about human happiness. Happiness, in this context, is the experience of the reaching the goal of human existence, and in Catholic theology, this goal is something we are attracted to and not something imposed upon our nature by extrinsic rules. Our supernatural end is obtainable only by grace.

"The problem for many modern systems is that they do not have a clear concept of human nature. There is no clear “starting point” for reasoning about what constitutes authentic human goods. Without a beginning point, it rather difficult if not impossible to describe how to get to one’s end or goal. In other words, it would be impossible to identify definitively what constitutes authentic or true “goods” for human beings since, under such systems, there is no clear idea of what would constitute human happiness. In Catholic thought the good is identified with those things that contribute to the fulfillment of human nature. On the other hand, revisionist moral theories are preponderantly dependent upon the subjective intention of the moral agent. In authentic Catholic thought, what the agent is actually doing can be clearly identified as contrary to man’s ultimate end in some cases. With intention as the primary determinant of right or wrong in revisionist theories, however, everybody can have their own subjective morality. The idea of the common good becomes nothing more than an idealistic platitude sometimes sought in democratic processes.

"This lack of a foundation in revisionist theories leads to conflicts in modern theories between the moral law (inscribed on the heart, which the Church helps to identify with moral definitions) and freedom, between freedom and nature, between salvation and morality, and between conscience and the moral law. (Servais Pinckaers is my source for this) The list goes on. But in the Church’s moral theology, since all of these things flow out of the creation of man in the image and likeness of God, there is no conflict among these, all of them having the same source. To put it another way, for revisionists, since there is no such thing as the human good, an act is not morally judged by its conformity to the good of human nature. It is judged by some other means of valuing such as the maximum expression of freedom, or a calculation of the consequences, or whatever one judges to be the best outcome in a particular situation, and so on. So one can see that one of the pervasive weaknesses revisionist systems is that there is not clear theory of value.

"So, modern theories attempt to explain human freedom, conscience, and law without them being tied to the concept of the “good” understood as that which is fulfilling of human nature. In Catholic doctrine and theology, freedom, conscience, law, etc., all derive from a common origin, that is the creation of the human subject. The moral law, in its many forms is an expression of the wise and providential ordering of the universe by the Creator. Moral law defines goods that human freedom and conscience seek as a means of attaining authentic human happiness when human nature is fulfilled.

"Relativism emphasizes the ability of the subject to decide what is good for himself. Consequentialism evaluates behavior on the basis of a calculation of the positive and negative effects of an action, though there is little agreement on how far one has to go with this or how one is to judge what is positive and negative. Proportionalism evaluates the act on the basis of the pre-moral or physical good outweighing the pre-moral or physical evil. All three of these deny the idea that, in theory, something is always evil. Thus, some revisionists have had to admit, for example, that one can never say that rape is always and everywhere evil, according to their thought, until one knows the circumstances and the intention. Catholic doctrine holds that rape is always morally evil no matter the circumstances or intention, even though the subject might not be morally culpable.

"It is out of that context that I can recommend certain reading. All of these books are available online.

The Splendor of Truth: Veritatis Splendor and the Renewal of Moral Theology, eds. Augustine di Noia and Romanus Cessario, Scepter Publishers

Morality: The Catholic View, by Servais Pinckaers

There is a good introductory textbook which is suitable for high school use which contains brief descriptions of these systems.
It is Our Moral Life in Christ, Aurelio Fernandez and James Socias."

Campaigning and Voting for Permissive Abortion Laws Place the Politician in an Objective Situation of Grave Sin, i.e., Manifest Grave Sin

It is clear from the last post that the traditional moral teaching, presented in the earlier posts, prevails regarding the role of the minister in the administration of Holy Communion according to the 2004 letter of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. In fact, the future pope’s statement is utterly congruent with and reaffirms traditional moral principles on the administration of Holy Communion and the minister’s responsibility. The statement includes the pastoral element of meeting with the offender and instructing him or her on the recipient’s duty not to approach reception of the sacrament until the objective situation of sin is remedied. The instruction given by Cardinal Ratzinger precisely outlines the steps which must be taken if when the politician is in an objective situation of grave sin. This is an instruction to the ministers of the sacrament and it is precisely the kind of action which must be taken if the minister, himself, is to avoid the sins of immoral cooperation and scandal. The conclusion that one must make, following upon the statement is unmistakable: In keeping with the minister’s moral duties regarding the administration of the sacraments, he must deny the Holy Eucharist to those who do not remedy the public situation of sin created by campaigning and voting for permissive abortion laws.

When Cardinal Ratzinger wrote that letter, he characterized the sin of the Catholic politician who campaigns and votes for abortion as formal cooperation in the grave sin of abortion. In this case, the cooperation of the politician in abortion is the issue. This is an important point. A formal cooperator is one who agrees with the immoral act, either in the intention (the motive for having an abortion) or the object (the abortion as a means to an end) or both, of the person or persons who are the principal agents of the grave sin of abortion. According to the principles of cooperation, the formal cooperator is equally guilty of the sin as the principal agent because the cooperator adopts the evil outcome of the principal agent’s actions as his or her own. Thus, the politician who formally cooperates by consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion laws is guilty of all the instances of the sin of abortion that he or she seeks to permit through the campaigning and voting for the permissive laws. The critical factor for the minister of Holy Communion is that these sins are "manifest" by virtue of the public nature of the activity in the political life of the state. The minister has the right and the responsibility to take cognizance of this manifest state of sin.