The wisdom of Catholic confession

It's part of the wisdom of confessing to a priest that we find it far more embarrassing to reveal our sins to another human being than we do to admit them to God. The sting is far greater! It shouldn't be, of course — obviously we should be far more abashed in front of God, in prayer — but human nature works that way.

Perhaps the lack of confessing to a human being robs Protestants -- and "progressive" Catholics, who scoff at individual confession -- of an important motivator in resisting sin. After all, if you know that if you do the sin, you have to admit it to another person to get right with God, that's uncomfortable, and the thought of having to do that just might provide the strength to resist the temptation.

Down the memory hole

In 1984, George Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith has a nice job at the Ministry of Truth vaporizing inconvenient documents by shoving them into a receptacle at his desk. The receptacle is called a Memory Hole. Once the documents are ashes, history has changed.

Something similar recently happened in Sweden. It seems that one Swedish schoolbook, a textbook for religious history classes, contained two images of the Prophet Mohammed. In the wake of the torrent of violence and vitriolic hatred pouring out of the Islamic world following the publication of the Danish cartoons, Sweden has decided to pull the textbooks from the classrooms, and the publisher has taken them out of circulation.

A gesture of reasonable conciliation, you might think -- cowardly, but within the bounds of reasonability. Except that the two depictions of Mohammed weren't scurrilous caricatures from the pen of some insensitive Western cartoonist; they were both from Islamic manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries. They are a legitimate part of the historical record; when the book was written, the Swedes probably thought they were being sensitive by depicting Mohammed with historical Islamic artwork.

But historical truth doesn't matter to the imams. If you don't like something from the past, suppress it. Just shove it down the Memory Hole, and trust the suicidal West to forget the whole thing ever happened.

Divestment as a tool of jihad

David Horowitz's FrontPage magazine has a very interesting article that describes the left's highly-organized attempt to weaken Israel by getting American and European institutions to get rid of their investments in the Israeli economy. All this is smokescreened with concern over supposedly cruel Israeli treatment of Palestinians, etc., etc.

As I see it, all Israel has done in its brief existence is to build a Western-style democracy in, as Golda Meir famously commented, the one plot of Middle Eastern geography that had absolutely no oil. Palestine was an unproductive backwater until they came; now, their bit of Palestine is a world leader in technology. For this, they've been attacked ruthlessly from the first hour of their existence to the present moment.

Western civilization has already allowed millions of God's chosen people to be murdered in the Holocaust. If it allows the rest to be murdered by militant Islam, I can't help but think that God's retribution on us will swift and hard.

'Lost': blame U.S. for torture

We're all big fans of the ABC series 'Lost' here, so it was sad to see the plot take a politically correct detour. Last night's episode included more of the backstory of the Iraqi character, Said. He gets captured by U.S. troops during the first Gulf War and finds himself employed as an interpreter during interrogations of other Iraqis. One of these is his former commander, who is believed to know the whereabouts of a downed Amerian pilot. His American handler, a non-uniformed older guy (CIA, I suppose), coerces him into doing something he's never done before: torture a prisoner to extract information. He does it, and then bitterly blames the Americans for forcing this terrible experience into his life.

Never mind, I guess, that Saddam's army had regularly used torture for twenty years before Gulf War I) and taught the finer points of its techniques to thousands of its men, making it by far the more likely place a soldier like Said would learn how to do it. No, let's have him be loyal, good-hearted and decent -- until the evil Americans get hold of him.

I'm not saying Americans have never used torture (and I'm not talking about the Abu Ghraib abuses, which were mainly discomforts and humiliations, but the real thing). But you really have to have a political agenda to have Said be forced into torture by Americans -- the same dreary agenda that all of Hollywood seems to share: Blame America for everything.

The more we let these people control our impression of our country, the more the real bad guys will rejoice.

What if... ?

What if the early Christians had made a successful effort to convert the Arabs before Mohammed came along? It looks like everyone in the centuries between 300 (when Christianity was legalized) and 600 wrote the Arabs off as a difficult, scattered, and unimportant people. The Christian emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire seem not to have sent missionaries in that direction, preferring to buy off the Arab tribes now and then, to keep their occasional raids from becoming a significant distraction from the empire's struggle with its traditional enemy, the Persians.

What if, in his spiritual misery, Mohammed had been surrounded not by a polyglot paganism, but by a vibrant Christianity that had been going for a century or two?

Yes, things might have happened just as they did; he might still have wandered off to a cave and begun having those visions that have had such fateful and bloody consequences for the world.

But perhaps not. Perhaps there would have been a kindly parish priest to talk to. Perhaps there would have been a monastery nearby, where he could immerse himself in the already formidable Christian intellectual and spiritual heritage, and explore his spiritual yearnings with good guidance. Perhaps, as happened to countless others, he might simply have been helped to Christ by a Christian neighbor.

How many times did Christians think about evangelizing the Arabs during those centuries? How many times did they decide that those motley desert tribes just weren't worth it, that the Great Commandment somehow didn't apply to them?

The price of not spreading the Gospel can have repercussions stretching millennia into the future.

So why are they doing it?

Cliff May has a good article at Townhall.com discussing the reasons why the militant Islamists are doing what they're doing. He argues that those who are orchestrating the violence (and most of it is quite well orchestrated) know quite well that they're doing far more harm to the image of Islam than the cartoons were. But they know their Machiavelli: for those who would rule, "it is better to be feared than loved." For ruling is exactly what they're after: rule over non-Muslims, and even over those Muslims who would like to join the modern world.

As an aside, I think it's great that one key to understanding their behavior is contained not in some bright new analysis from some think tank, but in the writings of one who was observing politics five hundred years ago.

Another key is the long tradition of Muslim aggression against non-Muslims, and of intimidation and threats when their targets were beyond their physical reach. It was that way when Islam first exploded out of the desert in the 640's. It was that way when they started roughing up Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land in the 1000's. It was that way when Islam kept pressing into eastern Europe during the Renaissance, and besieged Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683.

And it's still that way today, when terrorism has provided an effective weapon such as Islam hasn't had since the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the 1800's.

May's article draws parallels between the Islamists and Nazi Germany; the insatiable lust to rule is common to both. I'd draw another parallel. In the mid-1930's, when the Nazis consolidated their hold on German politics, many Germans tried to oppose them, and others, less courageous, despised the Nazis but were too afraid to resist. It's the same with Islamic countries now. We keep hearing that the Islamists are a minority, and that most Muslims don't share their extremism. I'll grant that, for the sake of argument. But that minority has gained control of Iran and Syria, is close to it in Egypt and Turkey, and is flexing its muscles everywhere else. When Europe was overrun in 1939-41, it didn't matter that dedicated Nazis were a political minority in Germany; the overrunning took place anyway. And it won't matter to the rest of us that Islamists are a minority when they hold the reins of national power in a dozen countries and use oil money to buy nuclear weapons and missles.

You just gotta love that Religion of Peace...

One of those peace-loving signs at the peaceful demonstration by followers of the Religion of Peace in front of the Danish embassy in London a few days ago.

Being a person who doesn't like confrontation, I have to admit I'm a little uncomfortable with those original Danish cartoons of Mohammed (or is it Muhammad, now? Sorry, don't behead me, peaceful Muslims to whom jihad only denotes an internal struggle against one's own sins!). Still less comfortable with some of the truly vitriolic follow-on cartoons from Europeans that are popping up on the net.

With that said, none of it justifies rioting, burning down buildings, and suggesting beheadings. One gets the impression that when the chips are down, this is what the Q'uran really teaches people: spite, revenge, murder, destruction. I sure don't hear many Muslim voices speaking up and denouncing this latest round of violence as a perversion of Islam -- the excuse we heard after 9/11.

No, I'd put up this plaque on the burned-out shell of the Danish embassy in Syria: "Sacred to the memory of the Religion of Peace. Si monumentum requiris, circumspice."

Chant and praise music

The music minister at a large Presbyterian church once told me that modern "praise songs" were like Gregorian chant because they were repetitious (e.g., "Worthy, worthy, worthy, worthy, is the Lord, Oh, he's so worthy, worthy, worthy...").

This amiable fellow had had a long and pretty distinguished career as a classical vocal soloist, but I guess he had never spent any time carefully listening to, or better yet, singing chant. If he had, he would have known that although chant will sometimes spread a single syllable over several notes, it never repeats itself gratuitously the way praise music habitually does. When chant does repeat a phrase or sentence, it's part of a verse-and-response structure that makes contextual sense. The longest sections of chant in the Ordinary -- the Gloria, Credo, and Pater Noster -- have no repetition at all.

Chant does deliver the words more slowly than we would normally speak them, and maybe that's where some of the confusion comes in. But that's part of its effectiveness: it gives us time to slow down, quiet down, and really let the meaning of the words we're singing soak in.

That democracy of the dead

Chesterton's remark about a "democracy of the dead" is hardly news, but since this is a journal of thoughts I've found it interesting to encounter, here it is again:

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

I love this, because it's a slap in the face to the pride that's peculiar to our times: that the people of the past were ignorant loons because they didn't know certain things (usually technological) discovered in our lifetime. Why study Socrates or Aquinas, we say. Why read Utopia or The Consolation of Philosophy? So boring! After all, Boethius and More and all those other dead people had no computers, no internet! They never downloaded anything! They didn't know about DNA or even electricity! How could they have anything useful to say to us, who are so much better informed?

As if, after sixteen years of oh-so-modern schooling, the average college graduate today could put together two coherent sentences about any of those technological developments.

Burdens

I was at Borders a few days ago, and a book called A Calendar of Saints: Lives of the Principal Saints of the Christian Year was on the remaindered rack. Quite a nice book for eight bucks. I was paging through it tonight and found this, by Bernard of Clairvaux:

The character of God's eternal and just law is this: that those refusing to be ruled by God's gentleness will have the misfortune of being ruled by their own selves; that whoever voluntarily throws off the gentle yoke and light burden of charity will be obliged to carry the unbearable burden of their own will.

It had occurred to me before this that Christ said "My yoke is easy and my burden is light." He didn't say, "I have no yoke or burden to give you." Just that His was the lightest one you could pick up. A heck of a lot lighter than the one you'll end up making for yourself, otherwise.

It's trivial (not)

In the Middle Ages, education preserved and developed one of the gems of understanding of the ancient Roman world: the concept of a foundation of three subjects -- Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. Whatever speciality each educated person might eventually take up, he would start with those things, and not go on to specialization until he had learned them.

Together, these three subjects gave a student the chief things he would need to use that unique gift to human beings: the ability to understand and articulate thoughts and emotions through words, and thus to come closer to Truth.

It seems to me that there's a close analogy in that choice of subjects to teaching how to build a beautiful building (at which the the Roman and Medieval worlds were masterful).

Grammar taught about the bricks of language and how to mortar them together.

Logic taught how to take the pieces that one could make with bricks and mortar -- walls, pillars, and so on -- and engineer a building that would stand up to wind and weather.

Rhetoric taught how to make that building beautiful. And beauty has great power to convince.

These three foundational subjects were known as the trivium, or the three paths. It's a reflection of how far the modern world has fallen in understanding that the only derived word people now know is "trivial," meaning unimportant.

I'm not saying that grammar, logic, and rhetoric should be taught to the exclusion of the other subjects we've come to expect in university curricula. I'm only saying that they're the foundation, and without the foundation, the rest of what we try to build will always be shaky, and will often be ugly.

St. Mary's School RIP

A few weeks ago, I was trying to find some pictures online of my old parish church and school, St. Mary's in Fullerton, CA. I didn't find any photos, but I did see an announcement that after 80-some years, the parish school had closed in May of 2005, supposedly due to declining enrollment. There was also a strong hint in the newspaper story, however, that the closing may also have been related to the huge payouts the Orange County diocese has had to make as a result of the clerical abuse scandal.

Whatever the reason, it's sad. Only forty years ago, the classrooms of St. Mary's were bursting with 55 children each! And each class in my years there (1956-64) was taught by a habited nun -- the only exception being the kindly Mrs. Clark in third grade. (In case you've heard today's teachers complain about the noisy chaos in their classrooms of 25, let me assure you that our classrooms were always quiet and orderly -- and I never saw a nun hit anyone, with anything, to keep it that way). I saw from the privateschool.org website that class sizes had dwindled to between 15 and 20 before the end. And this despite the influx of Hispanic families to Fullerton, which should have resulted in a steady supply of new Catholic children to be educated.

It's sometimes difficult to grasp the enormous changes I've seen.

Tough topic

Pope Benedict has just published his first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est. No beating around the bush with this guy -- he goes right to the topic of love, the utter distortion of which has been the trademark error of the modern world. If you want to know in what sense God really is Love (hint: it's not the way it has been defined by the Kumbaya generation) and what implications that holds for every expression of every type of human love, this is a great place to start.

Last weekend's West Coast Walk for Life

I had thought about going up for last Saturday's Walk for Life in San Francisco, but after listening to an organizer's warnings about the vicious reception the march would probably get in that bastion of tolerance and openness to ideas, I distrusted my ability to stay cool in the face of it. Today I found this site (h/t: The Cafeteria is Closed) with plenty of photos and even some video. In retrospect, I wish I had taken part. The march discipline appears to have been great, the opposition mostly just nasty and ridiculous, and the police out in force and determined to protect the marchers' safety and the right of the march to go forward without being blocked or interfered with.

Unnatural death

I needed some light reading a few days ago, and pulled Dorothy Sayers' Unnatural Death off the shelf. It's one of the delightful series of mysteries she wrote around the character of Lord Peter Wimsey. And it was a very good read, another great romp through the vanished England of nearly a century ago. But it also contained a sentence that carried an unsettling resonance with today's world.

At the very end, when the murderer has been identified, Wimsey's friend Inspector Parker is musing on the case, and says:

She probably really thought that anyone who inconvenienced her had no right to exist.

When Unnatural Death was published in 1927, the murderess' point of view was enough to startle even a police inspector. Eighty years later, we accept her attitude 3,000 times a day. According to Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute, it's the chief reason given by women in the US for having an abortion: the child in the womb would be an inconvenience if it were allowed to develop. No matter that everything we've learned about life in womb since 1973 has tended to reinforce the humanity of the unborn child. The pregnancy, let alone bringing up the child afterwards, would upset plans for school, social life, travel, career advancement, etc., etc. So terribly inconvenient to the pursuit of happiness.

And our enlightened age applauds. We are, after all, so much more sophisticated than Inspector Parker in that primitive year of 1927.

Darwin's Black Box, ch. 1

I'm starting to read one of the seminal popular works of the Intelligent Design movement, Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box, published in 1996. Behe is a professor of biochemistry, so he knows whereof he writes.

I'll say, early on, that I don't think that serious ID proponents think Darwin was all wrong, still less that they agree with the "young-earth creationists" who take the Biblical account of creation literally.

And sure enough, Behe writes in chapter 1:

Many people think that questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent to espousing creationism. ... For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. ... I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world.

But then he delivers the kicker:

Although Darwin's mechanism -- natural selection working on variation -- might explain many things, I do not believe it explains molecular life.

And that, it appears, is going to be the battleground described in the book. Darwinism does a fair job of theorizing about large-scale adaptation, like the famous case of the Galapagos finches' beaks; but it has a much harder time accounting for life at the molecular level -- the level, indeed, at which life actually happens. He takes Darwin's mid-nineteenth-century speculation on how the human eye might have developed, and puts it up against the biochemical knowledge of our own time, 150 years later. Even Behe's simplified summary of what has to happen, chemically, for the eye to detect and transmit one "round" of photon reception is stunningly complex. One is left with the impression of a biological machine whose parts are far more intricate than Darwin imagined (the cell was thought to be a simple blob of uncomplicated carbon-based mush). And so the task for Darwinists is to explain how such intricate machines could have developed by the slow accretion of tiny, random variations.

More about this as I get farther on in the book.

A sense of sacred space

Because my interest in photographing stained glass has meant a growing interest in church architecture, I put a book called Theology in Stone by Richard Kieckhefer on my Amazon wish list, and my wife was kind enough to put it under the tree this Christmas. I'm sure I'll have more comments to make about it as time goes on, but here's one excerpt I found myself thinking about:

One is reminded of J. L. Pearson's declaration that his business was "to think what will bring people soonest to their knees." But then Pearson worked within the established forms of Gothic revival, whose vocabulary anyone would have recognized as whispering a summons to reverence. Saarinen's accomplishment [in designing the boxlike, hypermodern interior of Christ Church Lutheran in Minneapolis] was to achieve a similar effect without the conventions of recognized sacred architecture, engendering a spirit of reverence with what might have seemed -- and in the hands of another architect might well have been -- the desacralized vocabulary of a modern aesthetic.

I have two thoughts about this.

• "Bringing people to their knees" seems like just what you want a church to do. So if an older style of architecture is nearly 100% sure to engender the spirit of reverence one wants in a church, why risk millions of dollars building in a new style, when the result might well be a building that drives people away, or worse, erodes their faith?
• I'm glad he agrees with me that the modern aesthetic has a desacralized vocabulary. I've nearly always found "modern" churches sterile and deeply depressing. Like this one.
  

December 25: not a recycled pagan holiday after all

I've always thought I knew that we Catholics decided to celebrate Christ's birthday on December 25 as a repurposing, if you will, of a pagan holiday prevalent in Rome at the time of the early church -- the solstice feast of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun.

Turns out, according to this article, that Sol was the latecomer to the party. Christians had probably already staked out December 25 as a good day to celebrate Christ's birth as much as a century before the emperor Aurelian proclaimed the observance of Sol Invictus in A.D. 274. They didn't have very accurate reasons for doing so, but they seem to have grabbed the date first.

A more detailed article on the subject is available here.

So, when someone tells you that Christians "stole" the date of Christmas from the (peaceful, tolerant, eco-friendly) pagans, don't let 'em get away with it.

"Always winter and never Christmas"

That's the way the deplorable condition of Narnia under the White Witch is described at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

For its author C. S. Lewis, this must have been a particularly powerful image for a world in which all real joy had been suppressed: the slushy chill of December in turn-of-the-century Belfast, but with all its excitement and anticipation gone, and nothing ahead but an imminent return to the boarding schools that Lewis loathed.

It strikes me as an apt image for what the ACLU, People for the American Way, and other such groups are trying to establish in this country: a winter "holiday" season without its chief holiday, without the event that the majority of Americans regard -- when they think of it, which is not as often as they should -- as the real source of true, deep, and everlasting joy. Oh, they'll let us have Hanukkah because they say it has become only a "cultural" event (this would probably be a surprise to most Jews, but let that go); they'll let us have Kwanzaa because it's politically correct to do so; they'll let us have the Solstice because it carries a frisson of fashionable paganism with it. And they'll let us have the counterfeit joy of frantic gift-giving and party-going and overeating because those things take our mind off the wintry chill of hearts without Christ. And besides, it's good for business.

But Christmas? Uh-uh. The public square is to be just the ultimately grim, ice-bound wasteland that Lewis wrote of: winter, but never Christmas.

A few childhood memories

I grew up in southern California in the 1950's and '60's, and so had my elementary-school education in the last years of the "old" Catholic Church, that is, the Church before Vatican II. Of course, what you experience in childhood profoundly affects your entire life's outlook, and so my impression of what the Church is and should be was formed in an environment light-years distant from the predicament the Church finds itself in today. Whereas today's Catholic Church in the U.S. is timid, left-leaning, and weak, the Church of my youth was strong, conservative, and vibrantly confident of its role in the nation and the world.

My little parish in Fullerton, California was blessed with a beautiful little mission-style church with ten or twelve magnificent stained-glass windows. I loved being up in the little choir loft. A pair of driveways, parallel to the right side of the sanctuary, led into the courtyard behind, and were separated from each other by a narrow strip of lawn with neat boxwood hedges, with a small shrine to the Virgin Mary at the far end and a flagpole at which the 8th-grade students raised the flag every morning during the Pledge of Allegiance.

Across the driveways was the two-story school building, built in the 20's, with tall windows and hardwood floors. The first floor housed the classrooms for the 5th though 8th grades, the library, the tiny school office, and a closet-sized "store" where you could buy pencils, paper, and other essentials. The second floor housed an auditorium -- home to many a school play and science fair -- and a kitchen. The driveways entered the grounds through an arched colonnade that ran from the school building to the sanctuary. Everything was roofed in red Spanish tile.

Behind the sanctuary was the rectory, home to three priests during my time there -- Frs. Siebert, O'Brien, and O'Malley. (Today, a parish in the L.A. area is lucky to have even one priest it can call its own). Across the courtyard, behind the big school building, were the lunch benches. In the courtyard, beside the rectory, and facing toward the lunch benches as if to bless us while we sat there, was another statue of the Virgin -- donated by a family whose daughter had been killed in a playground accident. Behind the courtyard was a low, cinder-block building, put up in the late '40's, that housed grades 1 through 4. And behind it, finally, was the playground.

That was then.

I knew that the lovely parish church burned to the ground around 1970, a victim either of arson or a misbehaving devotional candle. The warm, homey, mission-like church where I had my first Holy Communion, where I had studied the stained glass for hours, and where I gone to Mass every First Friday with the whole school, was replaced with the sort of "modern" church that was popular back then -- cold and sterile, as much like a warehouse as a church.

I went back there earlier this year, just to see how my old parish and its school had otherwise changed. The new church was still there -- more's the pity. The old two-story school building, with its big windows and hardwood floors, where I had answered Fr. O'Brien's acerbic questions in Confirmation class and been taught by the unflappably sweet-tempered Sister Genevieve Marie, had been torn down, replaced by an ugly, nondescript thing. The pretty lawn, with its shrine to the Virgin and its flagpole, was gone too, removed to make the driveways wider, and the colonnade had been demolished, too. The rectory had been replaced with a concrete-block affair that played host to the priest who came by on Sundays and Wednesdays -- no one really lived there anymore.

The overall impression: shrunken, tawdry, and depressing.

Quite a bit like what the Church in America has become, overall. The physical uglification of the place where I did so much of my growing up is mirrored in the vulgarization of the Church that was so strong and confident.

And that should help to explain a bit further why the imagery of Dover Beach seems to me so vivid and apt:

The sea of faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-winds, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.