church

Pope Can’t Equate Caring for Immigrants With Abortion

Deal W. Hudson
April 10, 2018

Pope Francis get’s it. He understands why 52 percent of Catholic voters helped to elect Donald Trump in the face of fierce resistance from nearly all the of the U.S. Bishops, and the pontiff himself.

What Pope Francis gets is precisely what has historically pushed Catholic Democrats to vote for Republican presidents such as Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump — the abortion issue.

To remedy this, the pope has published an Apostolic Exhortation, “On the Call to Holiness in Today’s World,” with the resulting headline from The New York Times: “Pope Puts Caring for Immigrants and Abortion on Equal Footing” (Jason Horowitz, April 9, 2018).

The headline, unlike most on the Catholic Church, is not an exaggeration, as seen in the following from the Pope, “Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned.”

This is no mere throw off line; he reiterates it, connecting the issue of abortion and immigration directly to politics: “Some Catholics consider it [migrants] a secondary issue compared to the ‘grave’ bioethical questions. That a politician looking for votes might say such a thing is understandable, but not a Christian, for whom the only proper attitude is to stand in the shoes of those brothers and sisters of ours who risk their lives to offer a future to their children. (Emphasis added) “Such a thing is understandable,” yes, Pope Francis gets it — he realizes that a political candidate who is pro-life will attract Catholic voters when pitted against a rival who supports abortion-on-demand while insisting our national borders remain porous for the thousands of illegal immigrants who cross it each month.

The context of these statements in an exhortation on the “Call to Holiness,” suggests Pope Francis realizes the issue of abortion for Catholic voters is not a “single issue” at all — abortion connects to concerns about the moral dissipation of the culture in general.

Catholics regard a pro-life candidate as someone who will stand against the increasing tawdriness of culture which mocks religion and puts deviance on display. In other words, a pro-life candidate resonates with the still socially conservative America. (This is why I predicted pro-life Catholics would support Trump as early as February, 2016).

In 2016, Catholic voters rocked the liberal, Democrat-aligned, Catholic establishment by ignoring the nonstop attacks on Trump and his “wall” by Catholic bishops, priests, nuns, professors, and journalists. Indeed, their voices chimed in with the same message throughout the campaign: Immigration is a “life issue,” putting it on par with the defense of innocent life. Pope Francis now seeks to codify that message. But it won’t succeed, and I will explain why.

His apostolic exhortation ignores the basic moral problem in equating immigration with abortion: prudential judgment (see my explanation here). Any Catholic’s opinion and action on what the bishops have called “Welcoming the Stranger Among Us” has no single answer.

Do we support the “catch and release” ordered by President Obama? Do we support enforcing our laws pertaining to entering the United States? Do we build walls? No church teaching obligates a Catholic to a specific answer to these questions of public policy.

On the other hand, the question about whether to abort or not to abort has only one answer — no. Abortion is not a prudential matter. Some have called it one of the “non-negotiables,” others a “settled issue,” but the moral difference is clear.

Certainly Pope Francis is right about this: at a general level, both abortion and immigration do meet on equal ground — the principle of loving one’s neighbor. But, as has been explained, that moral equality doesn’t confer equality on type of moral judgments Catholics are obliged to make, one is liable to a variety of answers, the other is not.

To give an example of the distinction, here is a portion of letter written by then President of the USCCB, Archbishop Wilton Gregory to President Bush about the Iraq War: As Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory, then president of the USCCB, wrote to President George W. Bush: “People of good will may apply ethical principles and come to different prudential judgments, depending upon their assessment of the facts at hand and other issues” (“Letter to President Bush on Iraq,” Sept. 13, 2002).

I’m not convinced that Pope Francis recognizes the “good will” of those Catholics who disagree with his view of immigration. As he puts it, “This is not a notion invented by some Pope, or a momentary fad. In today’s world too, we are called to follow the path of spiritual wisdom proposed by the prophet Isaiah to show what is pleasing to God.”

Pope Francis has done his best to prop up the those Catholic Democrats who continue to promote abortion, support government funding of Planned Parenthood, and ignore the church’s teaching on life. His apostolic exhortation does not to change Catholic moral teaching because, as I have shown, the claim the Pope is trying to make cannot be rationally defended.

In spite of the headlines, the Pope’s gift to the Democrats will not be of much use to them in propping up their Catholic credentials. Lay Catholic voters will see through this claim just as they saw through the church’s barrage of anti-Trump rhetoric in the historic 2016 presidential election.

Read Newsmax: Pope Can’t Equate Caring for Immigrants With Abortion | Newsmax.com
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On Being Divisive

By Deal W. Hudson

Every group has its code words. These words serve an important social function they enable the members of the group to deliver a harsh judgment on others without accountability. In the Catholic world, when someone is called “divisive,” it means he is too conservative to be trusted. Those who are “divisive” threaten the “unity of the Church” by raising questions about the loyalty of its leaders to its teachings. Strange, isn’t it?

Not everyone understands the code, but not everyone is supposed to. The code serves to protect those who don’t want to be troubled by troubling questions. The code kept Church leaders from answering questions about the growing influence of active homosexuals in the priesthood. When Catholic publications such as Crisis raised this question, they were labeled “divisive.”

If Church unity must be protected from the Church’s teaching, then what kind of unity do we have? It is the kind of unity that keeps priests from reminding their parishioners of the Church’s position on birth control or homosexuality, the kind that allows a college to call itself Catholic while its faculty consistently misrepresent the Church’s teachings.

This arrangement may be appropriate for a big-tent political coalition. Parties form coalitions in order to achieve a majority vote; if they excluded everyone who doesn’t affirm every plank in the platform, they’d lose. But is this the kind of unity the Church should be seeking—a unity preoccupied with numbers? Such is the pseudounity of those leaders who don’t want the “divisive” influence of sound Church teaching to embarrass cafeteria Catholics.

Some will say, quite rightly, that the unity of the Church is first of all a unity in Christ—a person, not a principle. They will argue that faith is a personal journey rather than the intellectual acceptance of a creed and moral teachings. “Pastoral care” thus requires that Catholics should not be made to feel less Catholic for the rejection of this or that teaching.

Some, in fact, may use pastoral care as an excuse to ignore the content of the faith, but the moral dimension of the spiritual life cannot be dismissed. The question remains whether we will continue calling all Catholics to a full recognition of Catholic teaching. This type of evangelism—an evangelism directed to those already in the Church—risks the very divisiveness that most of the present leadership abhors. Dissent is so often encountered and so rarely challenged that is has been normalized. It begins to look imprudent—that is, divisive—even to remark on it. At least those who dissent within a political coalition are more honest about it. And political leadership rarely fears invoking the platform to pull coalition members into line.

Looming very large for our bishops is the issue of homosexuality in the priesthood. This issue will test their willingness to discuss the real causes of the sex-abuse scandal. Whether they are ready to meditate seriously on the intersection of homosexual orientation as an “objective disorder,” homosexual acts as morally evil, and the vocation of the celibate priesthood remains to be seen.

Given the obvious state of affairs in our priesthood, anyone who pushes these questions will likely be shoved aside as a divider. To borrow a phrase from St. Thomas Aquinas, now is the time to distinguish in order to unite. There is no real unity in the Church as long as its people are deceived and its teaching ignored.

Published in Crisis Magazine, September 1, 2002

Sigrid Undset: One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church

Editor’s note: The Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) is best known for her trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter published between 1920 and 1922. Undset would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924 while her many novels, memoirs, hagiographies, and miscellaneous works would make her a major figure in world literature. The same year she was honored with the Nobel Prize, Undset was received into the Catholic Church at age 42 becoming a lay Dominican. Her life both before and after her conversion was turbulent, filled with spiritual struggle, exile, and grief, but finally crowned with both the satisfaction of survival and peace of mind.  Her works, especially Kristin, have been credited with helping many readers find their way into the Church.  Crisis published the first English translation of this Undset essay.

One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church

Published December 1, 1995

If all the converts who entered the Catholic Church were to tell about their road to Rome, it would probably appear that no two of them followed exactly the same route. It does not surprise us, having accepted the claim of the Church to be the “pillar and ground of truth,” that as many roads lead to Rome as there are human minds.

When people stubbornly hold on to the hope that it is impossible to find any absolute truth, it is because they fancy that life would lose its excitement, would have no freedom, if there really existed one truth — one alone in which all other truths are contained.

Most of us have felt at some time that it is insufferable that two plus two always makes four. We have all known the longing for a dream world where two times two is five, or zero, or seven, or whatever we want at the moment. Of course, the freedom of the dream world is quite illusory. In fact, the number of dreams and combinations of dreams is not unlimited. The life of dreams is bound by laws to a higher degree than most people think. But what I don’t know can’t hurt me. That’s how people think. What glorious freedom, to fly into a world where people decide for themselves the nature and property of things. In the reality into which we are born, the nature and property of things is already given, everything is knit together by laws. For people as they are, there is only one possibility for freedom: they must find their own way through this whole net of causes and connections.

The attempt to find the way ends all too often in becoming ensnared and hung up in it. In this world we can only attain one kind of freedom, that which our Lord spoke of when he said: “The truth shall make you free.” But even after this truth has been acknowledged and a person is set free so that the deterministic factors in life can no longer bind one in chains, this freedom is maintained at no less a cost than the continual struggle against the powers from which one has escaped. First and foremost against the temptation to look back and long for the old romantic dream world, where two and two can be whatever, and one decides for oneself what shall be true.

To this extent, it is understandable when modern man exerts all his inventiveness to escape from the authority of the Church. In any case this is how it looks to those who have tried to escape from everything that came to them demanding to be authoritative. The effort not to be bound — and this fight against a Church that has always openly declared that it demands that its authority be acknowledged — are not unique to modern man. The same tendency was shown with great force already in Jerusalem in the days before the pascha in the year our Lord was crucified.

However, there are probably only a few converts who are prepared to explain their own conversion, why their resistance to one who calls himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life, a resistance dictated by fear and mistrust, has been overcome. It does not happen without the cooperation of the mystical and supernatural power that theologians call grace. We can only say that one day we had to acknowledge that our resistance was perhaps illegitimate.

We have a basic mistrust for all authority that is of this world, and at the same time our human nature is subject to an incurable desire for authority. We want teachers who can teach us something. We want teachers who can give us prohibitions and commands. We want someone over us whom we can depend on and admire, even love. Even in my childhood it didn’t take terribly much cleverness to discover this mistrust, even if the world’s hunger for authority had not taken the pathological forms that it has taken since then. The question arises, do we long for authority because in reality we are created to bow to an authority that has the only legitimate right over us — the right of the creator, the author of life?

“Think for yourself” was enjoined on us constantly at the school that I attended. But when I followed this advice to the best of my ability — and the result was that I thought something other than the teachers had meant that I should think — I soon discovered that they were unpleasantly surprised. They couldn’t consider my differences with them to be other than an improper desire to oppose them.

The first person who gave me a kind of complete picture of the conservative viewpoint was the Lutheran minister who confirmed me in the state church. It made a very negative impression on me. I became especially upset when he dealt with the sixth commandment with us. Almost exclusively, he dealt with the girls from the folk school. He warned them against getting mixed up with men who wanted to pick them up on their free afternoons, and he told a frightening story about a young girl he had been to visit in the hospital: there she lay, destroyed “merely because of one kiss.” I thought angrily, the girl hadn’t committed any sin — but the fellow on the other hand! And I knew well that in our class, “ladies” often did things that were many times more immoral than a servant girl’s jumping into bad luck. That virginity was a positive value, a reservoir of strength, not just a negotiable value in the marriage market, no one could expect a priest of that spiritual milieu to enjoin on us. It was a bit of bad luck and a funny thing if a woman became an “old maid.” I had read what Luther wrote about virginity, and it had made me very anti-Lutheran.

That this priest himself acted in good faith, that he was prepared to suffer and offer himself for his unattractive concept of God, I did not doubt, even at that time. It did not occur to me to take his version of Christianity to be a more authentic version of Christianity than any of the other versions I had come across. Even so, my confirmation instruction had made it clear to me that I did not believe in the religion that I had held in childhood.

In Protestantism, as I came to know it, almost every person I met who was on the whole religiously inclined had his “personal conviction” or his “independent conception” of Christianity. The God taught to us by my religion teacher in school was rather more sympathetic than a Uranien god-human, but not more humane than the most sympathetic person I was prepared to conceive of: wise, but not wise beyond all human understanding. Like so many young people from a free-thinking milieu, I had gotten the impression that one’s faith was a private matter, not to say a minor matter. I also had my faith, but even at that time I didn’t think I needed any God, but that he should be there to approve my own ideas of right and wrong, honor and dishonor, my ideals and judgments. They were as they might be after my nature and education: I understood enough to know, I myself was able to defend these ideas without a God who was one with me.

A God who was the “Absolute Other” and also a person who could communicate with me, whose ways were not my ways, whose distinct and unconquerable will could be distinct from my own will, I was not bold enough even to conceive of it. Those who spoke to us in the name of Christianity had not only sought justification for their usual way of thinking. Very many of them had given up historic Christianity as a teaching that was no longer tenable, even if they, purely on the grounds of feelings, could not give up their view of life that was colored by Christianity. They had given up faith in Jesus Christ, truly God and truly man, but they continued to worship Jesus, the carpenter’s son, as an ideal human and human ideal. Dogmas: truths revealed from “the Other Side and formulated in human language,” they could not believe in, but they believed in religious intuition and a religious genius in men.

I was certainly not disposed to worship any form of humanity — surely not a person who said of himself, “learn of me, for I am gentle and humble of heart,” even though he used a language against his opponents that, speaking kindly, was arrogant. I accepted as proven (without asking for proofs) that the historical Jesus was a religious genius whose intuition had brought mankind’s concept of God many steps upward in the path of development. At that time we always proceeded from the thought that development was always the same as improvement. But it didn’t seem to be of interest to me that a young Jew nineteen hundred years ago had gone around and assured people that their sins were forgiven — especially when he said of himself, “who can convict me of sin.” He couldn’t know from his own experience how it felt to have done something to another person that one would give all to have undone — to have fallen short of one’s own best purposes so badly that it seemed one couldn’t forgive oneself.

I knew what it was to be sorry for cruelty to others, secret cowardice, and indolence when indolence was unpardonable. For self evidently I did not know how to live in accord with my own private religion in such a way that I would be content with myself. Even less did I want to descend to that which was most miserable of all: to compare myself to people who, seemingly at any rate, lived after easier standards. I knew well I did not know them from inside, and so I could not really judge them. And as far as I knew, they had never said that they accepted my moral concepts either.

I was still far from believing that Jesus was God revealed in the Incarnation and that the Church was the organism in that he remained to do the work of salvation which he, nineteen hundred years ago had completed on the cross.

But I saw more clearly that the new systems of religion, either built on godlessness or on humanism plus a kind of deism, were not in the least more scientific than the old religions. Just the opposite. They built in ever higher degree on hypotheses and were in the highest degree matters of taste. Many of the current opinions that, without criticizing them, I had let go in one ear, but unfortunately not out the other, were in reality loose opinions or speculations determined by time or milieu.

I don’t know how many times I heard that God was the wish expressed by a human dream and that faith in life after death was probably invented by an unfitting greed for more life than that portion nature found fitting to give each of us. Now, I saw that the first supposition was a knife that cut both ways. I knew that people believed in a life after death, but that it seldom was an appealing form of life. They believed in Hell or Hades as a fact they were content to experience. For myself, I couldn’t find any form of eternal life that was not appalling in length. All the goods of the world finally receive their charm because we know that we do not have permission to use them long. The miracle of the seasons goes through our bone and marrow for we know, sooner or later, a spring will come that we will not experience. One year the first snow will fall on a mound of dirt under which we will lie.

It was the old story — I had rejected the beliefs and disbeliefs of others because they were sadly full of their own idiosyncrasies. But I realized that my own thoughts, to a large extent, were also decided by my idiosyncrasies. Naturally I could continue to believe in “my own power and strength” knowing well that it wasn’t much to believe in. But those who in the old days had managed with so weak a faith had not presented it as being other than a hand weapon with which they could cut their way through a short life.

I could not lose the feeling that the one who isolates himself in this way is a traitor, even though I couldn’t say what this betrayal consisted of, or what I had betrayed. I believed in a brotherhood of man, although it was impossible to convince myself that I believed in human perfectibility. I believed only in the dumbness and intelligence of man, in human good and evil and courage and cowardice, and in the unstable nature of each person. Even so I felt that what the Salvation Army soldier had said was true (she had been our servant in my childhood) that God loves sinners. “The greater sinner a person is, the more he loves him.” He has to love those, humanly speaking, most perfect people most highly: they always stand in danger of sinning in their minds and in their thoughts in a worse way than the common decent cheat and whore can dream of.

Human solidarity consists in all of us being common heirs of a bankrupt estate. After the bankruptcy of the fall into sin, a common loss of our ability to rise above the point of failure in our virtue and insight makes it impossible for anyone to lead other people anywhere but astray. Only a supernatural intervention can save us from ourselves. The Christian churches teach that Jesus Christ is himself that intervention — God, who was born of a woman, made himself one with our nature, and allowed himself to be killed for the sake of our sins, has shown us the way to eternal life. Not Hell or Hades, which people had always looked to with reluctant fear, but a life in and with God, the eternal blessedness of which we are not prepared to conceive. Already in the life we live here on earth we can experience such contact with the divine that we know life can be happy, even a life without end, when we renew our strength from the strength of which everything in the world is an outpouring.

At last I had come so far that I certainly did not believe in God. But neither did I believe in my disbelief. Proofs that force us, against our will, to accept Christianity as one accepts, for example, a demonstrated family relationship in botany, are out of the question. Otherwise, how could Christ say that “he who believes and is baptized shall be saved, but he who does not believe shall be damned”? This does not presuppose that the power of judgment should not be used. In the last instance it is with the will that man either will isolate himself in the hell of his egotism or will commend himself to God and be freed from the constraints of ego-worship, unto eternal possibilities.

I had nothing else to do than go to a priest and ask to be taught everything that the Catholic Church really teaches. That the Catholic Church was identical with the Church that Christ had founded, in itself, I had never doubted. For me the question of the authority of the Catholic Church was exclusively a question of the authority of Christ. I had never understood the history of the Reformation as other than a history of a revolt against Christianity, even if it was a revolt by believing Christian men who subjectively hoped that the true Christianity was something which agreed better with their own ideals.

The customary objections to Catholicism that I had heard had never made a great impression on me, although I had gained a rather vague conception that there was certainly something in the prejudices against the Church that were so widespread. There are prejudices — and there are two special reasons for them. The one is our displeasure at giving up our favorite fantasies that we are afraid a teaching church will take from us. The other is the scandal poor Catholics in many ages have caused — the dark backside of the shining doctrine of the communion of saints.

It should be easier for people today, I think, to discover what is meant by the merits of the saints as a treasury from which the whole Church profits. Clearly in our day not only Catholics, but Christians of all sects and nuance, experience that all of Christianity must atone for what each of us unholy Christians owes God and our neighbor. No human solidarity is so absolute as the solidarity between the living cells in the body of Christ.

In and of itself the cult of the saints that the Church has fostered from the beginning answers a need that appears to be ineradicable in our nature. We want to venerate the saints. For want of better we have hero worship of kings and queens, sportsmen and artists, film- stars and gangsters. We set some of them on pedestals to admire something of ourselves in them. In the saints, God’s purpose for us is realized, when he, to use the words of the Offertory, “wonderfully created human nature and still more wonderfully renewed it.” Only facing the saints can we find a solution to our need for hero worship, without at the same time worshipping something of our own nature, which it is cowardly or demeaning to do.

And the veneration of Mary? I have always thought that a matter of course: if anyone believes that God has saved us by himself taking on our flesh and blood, he must embrace with affection her in whose womb he built his human body and this with a special deep reverence, gentleness, and sympathy with the inconceivable difficulties of her life on earth, as well as a shared joy in her unutterable place in the kingdom of God. Because it is true that the son of Mary is both true God and true man, so the son is the son in all eternity and she the mother in all eternity, although he is the creator and she is his creation.

Because I believe that Jesus Christ is God who created us, I believe that he has built his Church as it is required for people. What God has given me through his Church is difficult to express in words. He himself has said that he gives us his peace, but not the peace that the world gives — it is of another sort. Perhaps it can be compared to the peace that reigns over the sea, the great depth. Bad weather and good weather on the surface do not influence it, neither does the rare animals that live and eat each other in the depths. It is the practical experience that the kingdom of God is within us. Even if surrounded by one’s own unpeaceful self, which is half real and half illusion, we experience that God in a supernatural manner is in us continually and establishes his kingdom in us — against our own attacks on it.

Why Does the Media Hate the Church?

Deal W. Hudson
Published March 31, 2010

It’s sad to watch the New York Times and the Washington Post, along with MSNBC, attack Benedict XVI. The story they concocted over the past few weeks, with the help of retired Bishop Rembert Weakland about Rev. Joseph Murphy, is risibly tenuous.

These once-great newspapers trivialize themselves by publishing front-page stories making obvious their chronic disregard of the Catholic Church and, especially, the Pope. Nothing else but a kind of seething hatred explains their willingness to ignore the canons of credible reporting and comment.

The Church’s staunchest defender in this country is Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, who has been countering this latest attack from the first blow. Donohue calls the New York Timesstory on Father Murphy the “last straw,” but no doubt there will be more straw to ignite Donohue’s flaming pen. (And it won’t be from the pages of the Summa Theologiae, which its author deemed as “so much straw” in the hours before his death.)

I asked Donohue, and a number of other experts, the question, “Why does media like the New York Times and the Washington Post hate the Church and the Pope – what’s the source of the animus?”

Donohue replied, “As I said in today’s New York Times op-ed page ad, it stems from three issues: abortion, gay marriage, and women’s ordination. So, when they can nail the Church on promiscuity, they love it. The goal is to weaken the moral authority of the Church so it won’t be as persuasive on issues like health care.”

Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, agrees the media wants to weaken the Church. He echoes what his friend the late Bob Novak used to tell me about the mainstream media; it is “the most secular, liberal group in the country. The Catholic Church stands for everything you and I believe (though I’m not a Catholic) and for practically nothing the media likes. But the media cannot ignore the Catholic Church because it is so strong, popular, and enduring. That leaves the media one avenue of attack: Jump on any mistakes or scandals involving the Church and don’t let go.”

Another Evangelical friend of Catholics, Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, wrote to me that the “lamestream media hates the Pope because he exemplifies the vibrancy and relevance of orthodox faith in today’s society, which many in the press find either alien or deeply troubling.” Reed also views the media as alarmed that for the “once divided Evangelicals and devout Roman Catholics, the Pope is a symbol of a faith-based constituency the media views as hostile to modernity and values-neutral ‘tolerance.’”

Some responses to my question were brief and to the point. Bishop Robert F. Vasa of Baker, OR wrote saying, “Deal, Jesus told us it would happen: John 15:18-19. Looking the passage up I found: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you” (NIV translation).

Another quotation from Scripture came from the founder of Wallbuilders, David Barton, who cited Romans 1: 28-30 to describe what happens to those who directly reject belief in God. “They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed, and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil. . . . (NIV translation).

The philosopher Francis Beckwith, a recent convert to the Catholic faith, located the source of the media’s hatred in “the narrative of secular liberalism.” “The media doesn’t want to acknowledge that Catholics even have an “intelligent” point of view,” he explained. “This is why they don’t assess arguments, they seek out scandal in order to demoralize opposition. Given its status as an unquestioned first principle, secular liberalism can not allow a divine foot in the door.”

Russell Shaw, who used to deal with the press on a daily basis as communication’s director of the bishops’ conference, also thinks, “The people in charge in those places are secularist ideologues who believe they possess the right answers.” Shaw is not particularly sanguine about the outcome of the struggle: “It would be nice to think there’s a happy ending to this story, but I doubt it. Somebody’s got to win in the end.”

The recurring theme in the answers I received was that of two powers, two opposing moral viewpoints, competing for influence. The secular power of the media detests the traditional moral teachings of the Church but does not confront it directly, preferring coverage of scandal to argument. As Jim Bopp, Jr., general counsel to National Right to Life, wrote to me, “The Pope and the Church are the strongest force making people accountable to traditional moral requirements. It therefore must be destroyed by any means necessary, even though liberals are soft on pedophilia, they are prepared to condemn the Catholic Church for not dealing harshly with them.”

The poet Matthew Arnold wrote in “Dover Beach” about loss of faith that left us on a “darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.” In this round of attacks on Benedict XVI we are witness to just such a scene. But, as Francis Beckwith reminded me, the Pope knows how to defend his faith. “This scares the crap out of the mainstream media, since it upsets the narrative: only dumb, ill-informed, people disagree with us. The narrative must be sustained at all costs, even if it means engaging in wicked defamation.”