Dear Friends,
During the present debacle at my beloved university, I have said to some of you, "During my thirty years on the faculty of the University of Notre Dame, the university as an institution has never been unambiguously pro-life." The piece below by Fr. Raymond de Souza, from the National Catholic Register, does a really good job of explaining the details and putting them into context. (The only significant event that is left out is the "debate" about abortion between Fr. Jim Burtchaell and the infamous Daniel Maguire in 1987. The very giving of a platform to Maguire, the worst -- morally and intellectually -- of the pro-abortion Catholic theologians, was in my opinion an abomination. Janet Smith and I wrote a long Observer piece at the time making that very point. We were, of course, laughed at and berated as enemies of free speech.)
I hold out little hope that Notre Dame will change course after all these years. But if you're into faint hopes, I want to go on public record as saying that if there is any hope at all for Notre Dame surviving as a genuinely Catholic university, that hope has an Australian accent. Fr. Wilson Miscamble, CSC, is, in my estimation, the only possible replacement for Fr. Jenkins who would have even a fighting chance of righting this ship. Accept no substitutes. Any other name you might hear floated around is a snare and a delusion and merely a continuation of the weak and/or unfaithful leadership Notre Dame has had for so long. The chances of Miscamble actually acceding to the presidency of Notre Dame are as minuscule as can be. He is just too intelligent, too academically distinguished, too Catholic, and too courageous. This is an intolerably scary combination for those who want to stay the corrupt course we have been on for so long.
This is my last hurrah on this particular point. But I owe at leas t this much to all the ordinary faithful Catholics in the pews who have been scandalized by the university time and again even as they have been quietly building a deep and lasting culture of life right under the noses of those who have led the university astray.
Please feel free to send this email and accompanying article on to anyone you please.
Best wishes on the memorial of St. Catherine of Siena,
Fred
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Importance of Cardinal Ratzinger in the Magisterium from 1981-2005
“On several occasions after meeting with his closest collaborators about the drafts of documents and official decisions, John Paul II would say to those closest to him: ‘We have to return to the subject again. It was obvious from his expression that Cardinal Ratzinger is not entirely convinced. We must reflect on it further.’”[1]
[1] Andrezej Koprowski, L’Osservatore Romano, Wednesday, 8 April, 2009, 14.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Class: MHP: Truth, Freedom and the Human Person
I) Homeland Security: Any one-issue religion that pretends to absolute truth is fundamentalist and equivalent to “religious totalitarianism.”
News Report: April 12, 2009
Homeland Security on guard for 'right-wing extremists'
Returning U.S. military veterans singled out as particular threats
WASHINGTON – A newly unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warns against the possibility of violence by unnamed "right-wing extremists" concerned about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty and singles out returning war veterans as particular threats.The report, titled "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," dated April 7, states that "threats from white supremacist and violent anti-government groups during 2009 have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent acts."It suggests that worsening economic woes, potential new legislative restrictions on firearms and "the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks."
The report from DHS' Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines right-wing extremism in the U.S. as "divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups) and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.""[T]he consequences of a prolonged economic downturn – including real estate foreclosures, unemployment and an inability to obtain credit – could create a fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past," the report says.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Official Document:
(U//FOUO) Rightwing Extremism: Current
Economic and Political Climate Fueling
Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment
7 April 2009
(U) Prepared by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch, Homeland Environment Threat Analysis
Division. Coordinated with the FBI.
(U) Scope
(U//FOUO) This product is one of a series of intelligence assessments published by the
Extremism and Radicalization Branch to facilitate a greater understanding of the
phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States. The information is
provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement
officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks
against the United States. Federal efforts to influence domestic public opinion must be
conducted in an overt and transparent manner, clearly identifying United States
Government sponsorship.
[Notice that there is such an instrument as “the Extremism and Radicalization Branch” of the “Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division Coordinated with the FBI.” The large question is: Who decides what is “Extremism and Radicalization?” And we find the following statement with an asterisk at the bottom of the page:
“* (U) Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration].”
II) Epistemological Presuppositions to the Above:
The Real War
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published NYT (op. ed.) Tuesday, November 27, 2001
“If 9/11 was indeed the onset of World War III, we have to understand what this war is about. We're not fighting to eradicate "terrorism." Terrorism is just a tool. We're fighting to defeat an ideology: religious totalitarianism. World War II and the cold war were fought to defeat secular totalitarianism “Nazism and Communism” and World War III is a battle against religious totalitarianism, a view of the world that my faith must reign supreme and can be affirmed and held passionately only if all others are negated. That's bin Ladenism. But unlike Nazism, religious totalitarianism can't be fought by armies alone. It has to be fought in schools, mosques, churches and synagogues, and can be defeated only with the help of imams, rabbis and priests.
The generals we need to fight this war are people like Rabbi David Hartman, from the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. What first attracted me to Rabbi Hartman when I reported from Jerusalem was his contention that unless Jews reinterpreted their faith in a way that embraced modernity, without weakening religious passion, and in a way that affirmed that God speaks multiple languages and is not exhausted by just one faith, they would have no future in the land of Israel. And what also impressed me was that he knew where the battlefield was. He set up his own schools in Israel to compete with fundamentalist Jews, Muslims and Christians, who used their schools to preach exclusivist religious visions.
After recently visiting the Islamic madrasa in Pakistan where many Taliban leaders were educated, and seeing the fundamentalist religious education the young boys there were being given, I telephoned Rabbi Hartman and asked: How do we battle religious totalitarianism?
He answered: "All faiths that come out of the biblical tradition of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have the tendency to believe that they have the exclusive truth. When the Taliban wiped out the Buddhist statues, that's what they were saying. But others have said it too. The opposite of religious totalitarianism is an ideology of pluralism” an ideology that embraces religious diversity and the idea that my faith can be nurtured without claiming exclusive truth. America is the Mecca of that ideology, and that is what bin Laden hates and that is why America had to be destroyed."
The future of the world may well be decided by how we fight this war. Can Islam, Christianity and Judaism know that God speaks Arabic on Fridays, Hebrew on Saturdays and Latin on Sundays, and that he welcomes different human beings approaching him through their own history, out of their language and cultural heritage? "Is single-minded fanaticism a necessity for passion and religious survival, or can we have a multilingual view of God” a notion that God is not exhausted by just one religious path[RAC1] ?" asked Rabbi Hartman.
Many Jews and Christians have already argued that the answer to that question is yes, and some have gone back to their sacred texts to reinterpret their traditions to embrace modernity and pluralism, and to create space for secularism and alternative faiths. Others “Christian and Jewish fundamentalists” have rejected this notion, and that is what the battle is about within their faiths.
What is different about Islam is that while there have been a few attempts at such a reformation, none have flowered or found the support of a Muslim state. We patronize Islam, and mislead ourselves, by repeating the mantra that Islam is a faith with no serious problems accepting the secular West, modernity and pluralism, and the only problem is a few bin Ladens. Although there is a deep moral impulse in Islam for justice, charity and compassion, Islam has not developed a dominant religious philosophy that allows equal recognition of alternative faith communities. Bin Laden reflects the most extreme version of that exclusivity, and he hit us in the face with it on 9/11.
Christianity and Judaism struggled with this issue for centuries, but a similar internal struggle within Islam to re-examine its texts and articulate a path for how one can accept pluralism and modernity” and still be a passionate, devout Muslim” has not surfaced in any serious way. One hopes that now that the world spotlight has been put on this issue, mainstream Muslims too will realize that their future in this integrated, globalized world depends on their ability to reinterpret their past.
III) “Dominus Iesus:”
1. 1. The Lord Jesus, before ascending into heaven, commanded his disciples to proclaim the Gospel to the whole world and to baptize all nations: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; he who does not believe will be condemned” (Mk 16:15-16); “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the world” (Mt 28:18-20; cf. Lk 24:46-48; Jn 17:18,20,21; Acts 1:8.”
2. “...The roots of these problems are to be found in certain presuppositions of both a philosophical and theological nature, which hinder the understanding and acceptance of the revealed truth. Some of these can be mentioned: the conviction of the elusiveness and inexpressibility of divine truth, even by Christian revelation; relativistic attitudes toward truth itself, according to which what is true for some would not be true for others; the radical opposition posited between the logical mentality of the West and the symbolic mentality of the East; the subjectivism which, by regarding reason as the only source of knowledge, becomes incapable of raising its “gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being”;8 the difficulty in understanding and accepting the presence of definitive and eschatological events in history; the metaphysical emptying of the historical incarnation of the Eternal Logos, reduced to a mere appearing of God in history; the eclecticism of those who, in theological research, uncritically absorb ideas from a variety of philosophical and theological contexts without regard for consistency, systematic connection, or compatibility with Christian truth; finally, the tendency to read and to interpret Sacred Scripture outside the Tradition and Magisterium of the Church.
On the basis of such presuppositions, which may evince different nuances, certain theological proposals are developed — at times presented as assertions, and at times as hypotheses — in which Christian revelation and the mystery of Jesus Christ and the Church lose their character of absolute truth and salvific universality, or at least shadows of doubt and uncertainty are cast upon them….”
6. “Therefore, the words, deeds, and entire historical event of Jesus, though limited as human realities, have nevertheless the divine Person of the Incarnate Word, “true God and true man”13 as their subject. For this reason, they possess in themselves the definitiveness and completeness of the revelation of God's salvific ways, even if the depth of the divine mystery in itself remains transcendent and inexhaustible. The truth about God is not abolished or reduced because it is spoken in human language; rather, it is unique, full, and complete, because he who speaks and acts is the Incarnate Son of God[RAC2] . Thus, faith requires us to profess that the Word made flesh, in his entire mystery, who moves from incarnation to glorification, is the source, participated but real, as well as the fulfilment of every salvific revelation of God to humanity,14 and that the Holy Spirit, who is Christ's Spirit, will teach this “entire truth” (Jn 16:13) to the Apostles and, through them, to the whole Church….”
9. “In contemporary theological reflection there often emerges an approach to Jesus of Nazareth that considers him a particular, finite, historical figure, who reveals the divine not in an exclusive way, but in a way complementary with other revelatory and salvific figures. The Infinite, the Absolute, the Ultimate Mystery of God would thus manifest itself to humanity in many ways and in many historical figures: Jesus of Nazareth would be one of these. More concretely, for some, Jesus would be one of the many faces which the Logos has assumed in the course of time to communicate with humanity in a salvific way.”
The Person of Jesus Christ is God and Absolute truth. The key to get at what is going on here is to distinguish two epistemological levels such as Philips remarks to Nathanael: a) we have found the Messiah; b) Come and see! The one tells us “about” Christ. The other is “to experience Christ” for ourselves directly.
IV) The absolute is the human person made in the image of the Son of God. The mechanics of this Christian anthropology is self-determination that is the true meaning of human freedom. Self-determination is the absolute that produces the uniqueness of each person and way of thinking. It is the key to the document Dignitas Humanae: religious freedom.[1] That is, because of the absolute truth of self-mastery, self-possession, self-gift, each person decides for himself how he will direct himself to God – or not.
a) The Ikon of Freedom: “The crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lilies it fully in the total gift of himself, and calls his disciples to share in his freedom” (Veritas Splendor” #85).
b) Self Determination (self mastery): as mechanism of freedom. Karol Wojtyla wrote in Naples in1974 on the occasion of the 700 anniversary of the death St Thomas Aquinas:
“In Vatican II’s Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, we read that ‘the human being, who is the only creature on earth that God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself or herself except through a disinterested gift of himself or herself’ (24)…
“(I)f we wish to accentuate fully the truth concerting the human person brought out by Gaudium et Spes, we must once again look to the personal structure of self-determination….
“Only if one can determine oneself… can one also become a gift for others. The Council’s statement that ‘the human being… cannot fully find himself or herself except through a disinterested gift of himself or herself’ allows us to conclude that it is precisely when one becomes a gift for others that one most fully becomes oneself. This ‘law of the gift,’ if it may be so designated, is inscribed deep within the dynamic structure of the person [as absolute].”[2]
Only by mastering myself do I become more radically unique as self. The irreducible difference of persons as free totalities that cannot be reduced to numbers is based on this power that is grounded in the truth of Christ as God-man. For He masters His human will to live out His obedience to death on the Cross (Jn. 6, 38). He is not killed. He wills and determines Himself to die.
This also applies, then, to the freedom and autonomy we possess to decide about ourselves and think the way we can – as our thought and desire. The declaration of religious liberty is all about this.
All of this, then, is to assert that true freedom and pluralism is not the result of relativism, but the result of the absolute truth of the human person as revealed prototypically in Jesus Christ,[3] who is the perfect image of God. The absolute truth of Christ is not an exception to man, but his revelation and meaning.
[1] “The Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. Freedom of this kind means that all men [this is an “absolute”] should be immune from coercion on the part of individuals, social groups and every human power so that, within due limits, nobody is forced to act against his convictions nor is anyone to be restrained from acting in accordance with his convictions in religious matters in private or in public, alone or in associations with others. The Council further declares that the right to religious freedom is based on the very dignity of the human person as known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself. This right of the human person to religious freedom must be given such recognition in the constitutional order of society as will make it a civil right.
“It is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are person, that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore bearing personal responsibility, are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth. But men cannot satisfy this obligation in a way that is in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy both psychological freedom and immunity from external coercion. Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective attitude of the individual but in his very nature;” Dignitatis Humanae: Declaration of Religious Liberty, December 7, 1965
[2] Karol Wojtyla, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination” Person and Community Lang (1993) 194.
[3] Gaudium et spes #22: “In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling…
[RAC1]“As a remedy for this relativistic mentality, which is becoming ever more common, it is necessary above all to reassert the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ. In fact, it must be firmly believed that, in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son of God, who is ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ [Jn. 14, 6], the full revelation of divine truth is given: ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the son wishes to reveal him’ [Mt. 11, 27]: ‘No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has revealed him’ [Jn. 1, 18];
For in Christ the whole fullness of divinity dwells in bodily form’ [Col. 2, 9-10].
[RAC2]The key is the thomistic text: S.. Th. II-II, 58, 3 Respondeo: "Now actions belong to supposits and wholes and, properly speaking, not parts and forms or powers, for we do not say properly that the hand strikes, but a man with his hand, nor that heat makes a thing hot, but fire by heat, although such expressions may be employed metaphorically. Hence, justice properly speaking demands a distinction of supposits, and consequently is only in one man towards another. Nevertheless in one and the same man we may speak metaphrically of his various principles of action such as the reason, the irascible, and the concupiscible, as though they were so many agents: so that metaphorically in one and the same man there is said to be justice in so far as thea reason commands the irascible and concupiscible, and these obey reason; and in general in so far as to each part of man is ascribed what is becoing to it. Hence the Philosopher (Ethic. v. 11) calls this metaphysical justice." Note also this propriety of attribution of action to "supposits" or persons is critical in the case of the humanity and divinity in Christ. The whole of Constantinople III depended on getting this right with regard to the freedom of the human will and its personal identity with the divine.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
The "Working Person" as Response to the Ideologies of Capitalism and Socialism (Intrusive Government)
The constant conversation concerning the economy at the present moment is dyadic, oscillating between the individual and the social.
1) The individual is the conservatism of free enterprise and entrepreneurship giving free reign to ingenuity, imagination, hard work and the creation of wealth. Its controlling limit is the interplay of the market forces that are driven by the non-virtuous mechanism of supply and demand that work out as if there were a virtuous providential hand. On that Adam Smith remarked:
... In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose ... be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.
2) The social takes the form of governmental intervention from top down that regulates the distribution of wealth extrinsically and ideologically thus violating the subsidiarity or autonomous freedom of the person.
3) At most, what I hear is the need for the addition of the moral dimension to be introduced into one, other or both of these economic and social models. However, what is never heard is the position of the Church which is not a mean between the two, nor even merely a moral intervention on the same noetic level of inquiry. The offering of the Church is the working person who “finds self by the sincere gift of self” (Gaudium et spes #24).
In most summary fashion, I would offer that this Christian anthropology of Gaudium et Spes #24 contains within it the seed of the solution to entire social crisis we are in. The “finding of self” corresponds to the principle of subsidiarity, while “sincere gift of self” corresponds to the principle of solidarity. Capitalism is an ideological structure that hides within it, and if not disclosed, masks the internal dynamic that gives it force, i.e. of the person determining self (freedom). Socialism is the other ideological structure that hides within it, if not disclosed, the relational dimension of the person to love and serve the other.
Both ideologies have a root in the Christian anthropology that has its prototype the Person of Jesus Christ. Removed from that Root, they are most pernicious and carry seeds of social death within them. However, as Christ is the root of the truly secular by way of the divinized autonomy of His human nature, so also capitalism and socialism have a true secular nature when embedded in this Christian anthropology.
Hence, we are not dealing with an antinomy between capitalism and socialism, but a complementarity of dimensions when the human person is rightly envisaged and understood as the central life source. In the light of this, consider the following of John Paul II’s “Centesimus Annus:”
“42. Returning now to the initial question: can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?
The answer is obviously complex. If by "capitalism" is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a "business economy", "market economy" or simply "free economy". But if by "capitalism" is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.
The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World, as does the reality of human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries. Against these phenomena the Church strongly raises her voice. Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. The collapse of the Communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution. Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.
43. The Church has no models to present; models that are real and truly effective can only arise within the framework of different historical situations, through the efforts of all those who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social, economic, political and cultural aspects, as these interact with one another.84 For such a task the Church offers her social teaching as an indispensable and ideal orientation, a teaching which, as already mentioned, recognizes the positive value of the market and of enterprise, but which at the same time points out that these need to be oriented towards the common good. This teaching also recognizes the legitimacy of workers' efforts to obtain full respect for their dignity and to gain broader areas of participation in the life of industrial enterprises so that, while cooperating with others and under the direction of others, they can in a certain sense "work for themselves"85 through the exercise of their intelligence and freedom.
The integral development of the human person through work does not impede but rather promotes the greater productivity and efficiency of work itself, even though it may weaken consolidated power structures. A business cannot be considered only as a "society of capital goods"; it is also a "society of persons" in which people participate in different ways and with specific responsibilities, whether they supply the necessary capital for the company's activities or take part in such activities through their labour. To achieve these goals there is still need for a broad associated workers' movement, directed towards the liberation and promotion of the whole person.
In the light of today's "new things", we have re-read the relationship between individual or private property and the universal destination of material wealth. Man fulfils himself by using his intelligence and freedom. In so doing he utilizes the things of this world as objects and instruments and makes them his own. The foundation of the right to private initiative and ownership is to be found in this activity. By means of his work man commits himself, not only for his own sake but also for others and with others. Each person collaborates in the work of others and for their good. Man works in order to provide for the needs of his family, his community, his nation, and ultimately all humanity.86 Moreover, he collaborates in the work of his fellow employees, as well as in the work of suppliers and in the customers' use of goods, in a progressively expanding chain of solidarity. Ownership of the means of production, whether in industry or agriculture, is just and legitimate if it serves useful work. It becomes illegitimate, however, when it is not utilized or when it serves to impede the work of others, in an effort to gain a profit which is not the result of the overall expansion of work and the wealth of society, but rather is the result of curbing them or of illicit exploitation, speculation or the breaking of solidarity among working people.87 Ownership of this kind has no justification, and represents an abuse in the sight of God and man.
The obligation to earn one's bread by the sweat of one's brow also presumes the right to do so. A society in which this right is systematically denied, in which economic policies do not allow workers to reach satisfactory levels of employment, cannot be justified from an ethical point of view, nor can that society attain social peace.88 Just as the person fully realizes himself in the free gift of self, so too ownership morally justifies itself in the creation, at the proper time and in the proper way, of opportunities for work and human growth for all.”[1]
[1] John Paul II, “Centesimus Annus” 42-43.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The Magnitude of Benedict XVI's Pontificate: Global Paradigm Shift
"In the homily at the beginning of his pontificate, Benedict XVI said that he had no program of his own, if not the one that comes to us from the Lord Jesus Christ. This was a clear reminder of what is essential in Christianity. The new pontificate also situated itself in substantial continuity with that of John Paul II, whose main collaborator in terms of decisive content was Joseph Ratzinger.In this context, it is not difficult to identify some of the priorities of Benedict XVI's pontificate.
I) GOD:
The first and greatest priority is God himself, that God who is too easily pushed to the edges of our lives, focused on "doing," especially through "techno-science," and on "enjoyment-consumption." That God is even expressly negated by an evolutionist "metaphysics" that reduces everything to nature, to matter-energy, to chance (random mutations) and to necessity (natural selection), or more often is said to be unknowable according to the principle that "latet omne verum," all truth is hidden, as a result of the restriction of the horizons of our reason to that which can be experienced and measured, according to the view now prevalent. That God, finally, who has been proclaimed "dead," with the assertion of nihilism and the resulting collapse of all certainty.
Jesus Christ:
The first effort of the pontificate is therefore to reopen the road to God: but not, however, by having the agenda dictated by those who do not believe in God and rely only upon themselves. On the contrary, the initiative belongs to God, and this initiative has a name, Jesus Christ: God reveals himself to us in some manner in nature and conscience, but he has revealed himself in a direct and personal manner to Abraham, Moses, the prophets of the Old Testament, and in an unprecedented manner he has revealed himself in the Son, in the incarnation, cross, and resurrection of Christ. There are therefore two paths, that of our search for God and that of God who comes in search of us, but only the latter of these permits us to know the face of God, his deep mystery, his attitude toward us.
II) Prayer:
This brings us to the second priority of the pontificate: prayer. This is not only personal prayer, but also and above all prayer "in" and "of" the people of God and the body of Christ, meaning the liturgical prayer of the Church.In the preface to the first volume of his "Opera omnia," recently published in German, Benedict XVI writes: "The liturgy of the Church has been, since my childhood, the central activity of my life, and also became the center of my theological work." We can add that today it is the center of his pontificate.This brings us to a controversial point, especially after the motu proprio permitting the use of the preconciliar liturgy, and even more after the lifting of the excommunication from the four Lefebvrist bishops. But even before this, Joseph Ratzinger had made this point very clear. He was one of the great supporters of the liturgical movement that paved the way for the Council, and one of the main proponents of Vatican II, and has always remained so. But with the implementation of the liturgical reform in the first years following the Council, he opposed the prohibition against using the missal of St. Pius V, seeing this as an unnecessary cause of suffering for the many people who loved that liturgy, in addition to being a rupture with the previous praxis of the Church, which, in the successive reforms of the liturgy in history, had not prohibited the liturgies in use until then. As pontiff, he has thus believed it necessary to remedy this inconvenience by making it easier to use the Roman rite in its preconciliar form. He was also driven to do this by his fundamental duty as promoter of Church unity. Moreover, he was moving in the direction already begun by John Paul II. In this spirit, the lifting of excommunication was granted in order to facilitate the return of the Lefebvrists, but certainly not in order to dispense with the essential condition of this return, which is full acceptance of Vatican Council II, including the validity of the Mass celebrated according to the missal of Paul VI.
III) Interpret Vatican II: Hermeneutic of Reform = Newness in Continuity: Two levels of Experience: sense perception [Jesus of Nazareth] and moral value [Jesus the Christ].
In the positive sense, Benedict XVI has clarified the interpretation of Vatican II in his speech to the Roman curia on December 22, 2005, distancing himself from the "hermeneutics of rupture," which has two forms: the prevalent one, which sees the Council as constituting a radical novelty, and "the spirit of the Council" as much more important than the letter of its texts; the other, on the opposite extreme, sees only the tradition before the Council as valid, and the Council as a rupture rife with harmful consequences, as the Lefebvrists themselves maintain.
Benedict XVI proposes instead the "hermeneutics of reform," or newness in continuity, supported before him by Paul VI and John Paul II: this means that the Council constitutes a great novelty, but in continuity with the one Catholic tradition. Only this kind of hermeneutics is theologically sustainable and pastorally fruitful.We have thus brought to light another priority of the pontificate: to promote the implementation of the Council, on the basis of this hermeneutics.
IV) Christological or Christocentric Priority
In the same perspective, we can speak of a "Christological" or "Christocentric" priority of the pontificate. This is expressed in particular in the book "Jesus of Nazareth," an unusual effort for a pope, to which Benedict XVI dedicated "all of his free moments." Jesus Christ, in fact, is the way of God the Father, he is the substance of Christianity, he is our only Savior.
For this reason, there is terrible danger in the separation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, a separation that is the result of a unilateral absolutization of the historical-critical method, and more precisely an application of this method on the basis of the presupposition that God does not act in history. Such a presupposition, already by itself, represents in fact the negation of the Gospels and of Christianity. In this case as well, it is a matter of expanding the room for rationality, giving credit to a form of reasoning that is open, not closed, to the presence of God in history [the Absolute Person Who self-determines and thus grounds human freedom]. This book puts us in contact with Jesus, and in this way introduces us into the substance, into the profundity and novelty of Christianity: reading it is an effort that costs a bit of exertion, but repays this abundantly.
***
V) Rebuild Culture - Restore Reason
At this point, we can return to the first priority, God, in order to take into consideration also the rational and cultural effort of Benedict XVI, for the purpose of opening contemporary reason to God and of making room for God in behavior and life, personal and social, public and private: particularly important here is the address in Regensburg, the more recent one in Paris, and also the one in Verona in 2006.As for contemporary reason, Benedict XVI develops a "criticism from within" of scientific technological rationality, which today exercises cultural leadership. This criticism does not concern rationality in itself, which on the contrary has great value and merit, since it allows us to understand nature and ourselves as never before possible, and to improve enormously the practical conditions of our lives. It concerns, instead, its absolutization, as if this rationality constituted the only valid understanding of reality.Such an absolutization does not proceed from science as such, nor from the great men of science, but rather from a "vulgate" that is very widespread and influential today, and yet is not science but a rather old and superficial philosophical interpretation of it. Science, in fact, owes its successes to its rigorous methodological limitation to that which can be experienced and measured. But if this limitation is universalized, by applying it not only to scientific research but to reason and human understanding and as such, it becomes unsustainable and inhuman, since it would prevent us from rationally pondering the decisive questions of our lives, which concern the meaning and purpose for which we exist, the orientation to give to our existence, and would force us to entrust the answer to these questions solely to our sentiments or arbitrary choices, detached from reason. This may be the most profound problem and also the drama of our present civilization. Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI goes a step further, demonstrating that reflection on the very structure of scientific knowledge opens the way to God.
One fundamental characteristic of this knowledge is, in fact, the synergy between mathematics and experience, between hypotheses formulated mathematically and their experimental verification: this has produced the monumental, ever-increasing results that science is making available to us. But mathematics is a pure and "abstract" result of our rationality, which pushes beyond everything that we can imagine and represent materially: this happens in particular in quantitative physics – where a single mathematical formulation corresponds at the same time to the image of a wave, or of a particle – and in the theory of relativity, which implies the image of the "curvature" of space. The correspondence between mathematics and the real structures of the universe, without which our scientific predictions would not come true and our technologies would not work, therefore implies that the universe itself is structured in a rational manner, such that there exists a profound correspondence between the reason inside of us and the reason that is "objectified" in nature, or rather intrinsic to nature itself. But we must ask ourselves how this correspondence is possible: thus emerges the hypothesis of a creative Intelligence, which is at the origin of both nature and our rationality. The analysis, nonscientific but philosophical, of the conditions that make science possible therefore brings us back toward the "Logos," the Word of which Saint John speaks at the beginning of his Gospel.
Benedict XVI is not, however, a rationalist, he understands very well the obstacles that obscure our reason, the "strange penumbra" in which we live. For this reason, even at the philosophical level, he does not propose the reasoning that we have seen as an apodictic demonstration, but as "the best hypothesis," which requires on our part that we "renounce a position of domination and risk that of humble listening": the contrary, therefore, of the attitude that is widespread today, and is called "scientism."
In the same way, it cannot be called "scientific" to reduce man to a product of nature ultimately the same as all the others, denying that qualitative difference which characterizes our intelligence and our freedom. Such a reduction constitutes, in reality, the complete overturning of the point of departure for modern culture, which consisted in the defense of the human subject, or of his reason and freedom.
For this reason, as Benedict XVI said in Verona, precisely today the Christian faith presents itself as the "great yes" to man, to his reason and freedom, in a socio-cultural context in which individual freedom is emphasized on the social level, making it the supreme criterion of every ethical and legal decision, and in particular in "public ethics," while however denying freedom itself as a reality intrinsic to us, meaning as our personal capacity to choose and to decide, beyond biological, psychological, environmental, and existential conditioning and determinism.
For this reason, there is terrible danger in the separation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, a separation that is the result of a unilateral absolutization of the historical-critical method, and more precisely an application of this method on the basis of the presupposition that God does not act in history. Such a presupposition, already by itself, represents in fact the negation of the Gospels and of Christianity. In this case as well, it is a matter of expanding the room for rationality, giving credit to a form of reasoning that is open, not closed, to the presence of God in history [the Absolute Person Who self-determines and thus grounds human freedom]. This book puts us in contact with Jesus, and in this way introduces us into the substance, into the profundity and novelty of Christianity: reading it is an effort that costs a bit of exertion, but repays this abundantly.
***
V) Rebuild Culture - Restore Reason
At this point, we can return to the first priority, God, in order to take into consideration also the rational and cultural effort of Benedict XVI, for the purpose of opening contemporary reason to God and of making room for God in behavior and life, personal and social, public and private: particularly important here is the address in Regensburg, the more recent one in Paris, and also the one in Verona in 2006.As for contemporary reason, Benedict XVI develops a "criticism from within" of scientific technological rationality, which today exercises cultural leadership. This criticism does not concern rationality in itself, which on the contrary has great value and merit, since it allows us to understand nature and ourselves as never before possible, and to improve enormously the practical conditions of our lives. It concerns, instead, its absolutization, as if this rationality constituted the only valid understanding of reality.Such an absolutization does not proceed from science as such, nor from the great men of science, but rather from a "vulgate" that is very widespread and influential today, and yet is not science but a rather old and superficial philosophical interpretation of it. Science, in fact, owes its successes to its rigorous methodological limitation to that which can be experienced and measured. But if this limitation is universalized, by applying it not only to scientific research but to reason and human understanding and as such, it becomes unsustainable and inhuman, since it would prevent us from rationally pondering the decisive questions of our lives, which concern the meaning and purpose for which we exist, the orientation to give to our existence, and would force us to entrust the answer to these questions solely to our sentiments or arbitrary choices, detached from reason. This may be the most profound problem and also the drama of our present civilization. Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI goes a step further, demonstrating that reflection on the very structure of scientific knowledge opens the way to God.
One fundamental characteristic of this knowledge is, in fact, the synergy between mathematics and experience, between hypotheses formulated mathematically and their experimental verification: this has produced the monumental, ever-increasing results that science is making available to us. But mathematics is a pure and "abstract" result of our rationality, which pushes beyond everything that we can imagine and represent materially: this happens in particular in quantitative physics – where a single mathematical formulation corresponds at the same time to the image of a wave, or of a particle – and in the theory of relativity, which implies the image of the "curvature" of space. The correspondence between mathematics and the real structures of the universe, without which our scientific predictions would not come true and our technologies would not work, therefore implies that the universe itself is structured in a rational manner, such that there exists a profound correspondence between the reason inside of us and the reason that is "objectified" in nature, or rather intrinsic to nature itself. But we must ask ourselves how this correspondence is possible: thus emerges the hypothesis of a creative Intelligence, which is at the origin of both nature and our rationality. The analysis, nonscientific but philosophical, of the conditions that make science possible therefore brings us back toward the "Logos," the Word of which Saint John speaks at the beginning of his Gospel.
Benedict XVI is not, however, a rationalist, he understands very well the obstacles that obscure our reason, the "strange penumbra" in which we live. For this reason, even at the philosophical level, he does not propose the reasoning that we have seen as an apodictic demonstration, but as "the best hypothesis," which requires on our part that we "renounce a position of domination and risk that of humble listening": the contrary, therefore, of the attitude that is widespread today, and is called "scientism."
In the same way, it cannot be called "scientific" to reduce man to a product of nature ultimately the same as all the others, denying that qualitative difference which characterizes our intelligence and our freedom. Such a reduction constitutes, in reality, the complete overturning of the point of departure for modern culture, which consisted in the defense of the human subject, or of his reason and freedom.
For this reason, as Benedict XVI said in Verona, precisely today the Christian faith presents itself as the "great yes" to man, to his reason and freedom, in a socio-cultural context in which individual freedom is emphasized on the social level, making it the supreme criterion of every ethical and legal decision, and in particular in "public ethics," while however denying freedom itself as a reality intrinsic to us, meaning as our personal capacity to choose and to decide, beyond biological, psychological, environmental, and existential conditioning and determinism.
VI) Retrieve Person as Freedom (Self-Determination - Not Conformism)
Precisely the reestablishing of a genuine concept of freedom is another priority of the pontificate, the last of which I will speak.
This concerns personal and social life, both public structures and personal behaviors. Benedict XVI disputes, that is, the ethics and the conception of the role of the state and its secularism that he himself has called "the dictatorship of relativism," according to which there is nothing that is good or evil in itself, objectively, but everything must be subordinated to our personal decisions, which automatically become "rights of freedom." This excludes, at least on the public level, not only the ethical norms of Christianity and every other religious tradition, but also the ethical guidelines founded on the nature of man, meaning the profound reality of our being. This is a radical break, a genuine split with the history of humanity: a break that isolates the secularized West from the rest of the world.
The Absolute is Person-in-Relation:
In reality, personal freedom is intrinsically relative to other persons and to reality, it is freedom not only "from," but "with" and "for," it is shared freedom that is realized only in combination with responsibility. In concrete terms, Benedict XVI is sometimes accused of insisting unilaterally on anthropological and bioethical topics, like the family and human life, but in reality he similarly stresses social and environmental topics (although certainly without indulging in "ideological pollution"). His third encyclical, which is now imminent, will be dedicated to social topics. The common root of this twofold insistence is God's "yes" to man in Jesus Christ, and in the concrete it is the Christian ethics of love of neighbor, beginning with the weakest.
God in the World is Christ, and "other Christs"
I conclude by returning to the beginning. Speaking in Subiaco the day before the death of John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger invited everyone, including men of good will who are unable to believe, to live "veluti si Deus daretur," as if God exists. But at the same time, he affirmed the need for men who keep their eyes focused on God, and act according to this focus. It is only in this way, in fact, that God can return in the world. This is the meaning and the purpose of the current pontificate.
This concerns personal and social life, both public structures and personal behaviors. Benedict XVI disputes, that is, the ethics and the conception of the role of the state and its secularism that he himself has called "the dictatorship of relativism," according to which there is nothing that is good or evil in itself, objectively, but everything must be subordinated to our personal decisions, which automatically become "rights of freedom." This excludes, at least on the public level, not only the ethical norms of Christianity and every other religious tradition, but also the ethical guidelines founded on the nature of man, meaning the profound reality of our being. This is a radical break, a genuine split with the history of humanity: a break that isolates the secularized West from the rest of the world.
The Absolute is Person-in-Relation:
In reality, personal freedom is intrinsically relative to other persons and to reality, it is freedom not only "from," but "with" and "for," it is shared freedom that is realized only in combination with responsibility. In concrete terms, Benedict XVI is sometimes accused of insisting unilaterally on anthropological and bioethical topics, like the family and human life, but in reality he similarly stresses social and environmental topics (although certainly without indulging in "ideological pollution"). His third encyclical, which is now imminent, will be dedicated to social topics. The common root of this twofold insistence is God's "yes" to man in Jesus Christ, and in the concrete it is the Christian ethics of love of neighbor, beginning with the weakest.
God in the World is Christ, and "other Christs"
I conclude by returning to the beginning. Speaking in Subiaco the day before the death of John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger invited everyone, including men of good will who are unable to believe, to live "veluti si Deus daretur," as if God exists. But at the same time, he affirmed the need for men who keep their eyes focused on God, and act according to this focus. It is only in this way, in fact, that God can return in the world. This is the meaning and the purpose of the current pontificate.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Anselm
"I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand" - Proslogion
“The inspiration to embark upon this study came from the need to objectivize that great cognitive process which at its origin may be defined as the experience of man: this experience, which man has of himself, is the richest and apparently the most complex of all experiences accessible to him. Man’s experience of anything outside of himself is always associated with the experience of himself, and he never experiences anything external without having at the same time the experience of himself.”[1]
In a later study, Wojtyla introduces the connection of this experience of the self, and the sense of consciousness that accompanies it. He says: “In order to interpret the human being in the context of lived experience, the aspect of consciousness must be introduced into the analysis of human existence. The human being is then given to us not merely as a being defined according to species [that is the Aristotelian reduction of man to the category of “rational animal”], but as a concrete self, a self-experiencing subject. Our own subjective being, and the existence proper to it (that of a suppositum) appear to us in experience precisely as a self-experiencing subject. If we pause here, this being discloses the structures that determine it as a concrete self. The disclosure of these structures constituting the human self need in no way signify a break with reduction and the species definition of the human being – rather, it signifies the kind of metholdological operation that may be described as pausing at the irreducible. We should pause in the process of reduction, which leads us in the direction of understanding the human being in the world (a cosmological type of understanding), in order to understand the human being inwardly. This latter type of understanding may be called personalistic. The personalistic type of understanding the human being is not the antinomy of the cosmological type but its complement.”[2]
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of these words. In them Wojtyla introduces the reader – particularly in the West where the rational has been limited to only the scientific method, and everything outside the method is irrational – to the realism of the subject which had been consigned (if we may) to the dustbin of subjectivism and relativism. It is unspeakably important to recover being as subject and subject as being where the person – the subject “I” - “constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”[3]
To write this truth large, Anselm is saying that faith – as act of the whole person transcending self in response to the Person Who is the Revelation of the Father, Jesus Christ – gives us an experience of our “I” as Being that enlightens reason fulfilling the desire of the human person to “know” the divinity. Revelation is not a series of conceptual abstractions that form or fit categories of the mind. Revelation is a Person. Truth is a Person. Christianity is not a religion of the Book. It is an existential experience, or it is not revelation. And it takes place “in” me as I become “another Christ” by mimicking the self-gift that Christ is as Relation-Mission from the Father.
Hence, Anselm’s affirmation that “I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, --that unless I believed, I should not understand.”
This point of Anselm that was the beginning of the flourishing of intelligence for the high middle ages, of which Thomas and Bonaventure were the zenith, is the broadening of reason that Benedict asks for the present moment (a new “Axial Age”?).
“Up now, slight man! Flee, for a little while, your occupations; hide yourself, for a time, from your disturbing thoughts. Cast aside, now, your burdensome cares, and put away your toilsome business. Yield room for some little time to God; and rest for a little time in him. Enter the inner chamber of your mind; shut out all thoughts save that of God, and such as can aid you in seeking him; close your door and seek him. Speak now, my whole heart! Speak now to God, saying, I seek your face; your face, Lord, will I seek (Psalms xxvii. 8). And come you now, O Lord my God, teach my heart where and how it may seek you, where and how it may find you” … For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, --that unless I believed, I should not understand.
John Paul II wrote in Fides et Ratio:
"15. The truth of Christian Revelation, found in Jesus of Nazareth, enables all men and women to embrace the “mystery” of their own life. As absolute truth [my emphasis], it summons human beings to be open to the transcendent, whilst respecting both their autonomy as creatures and their freedom. At this point the relationship between freedom and truth is complete, and we understand the full meaning of the Lord's words: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32).
Christian Revelation is the true lodestar of men and women as they strive to make their way amid the pressures of an immanentist habit of mind and the constrictions of a technocratic logic. It is the ultimate possibility offered by God for the human being to know in all its fullness the seminal plan of love which began with creation. To those wishing to know the truth, if they can look beyond themselves and their own concerns, there is given the possibility of taking full and harmonious possession of their lives, precisely by following the path of truth. Here the words of the Book of Deuteronomy are pertinent: “This commandment which I command you is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven that you should say, 'Who will go up for us to heaven, and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?' Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will go over the sea for us, and bring it to us, that we may hear and do it?' But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart, that you can do it” (30:11-14). This text finds an echo in the famous dictum of the holy philosopher and theologian Augustine: “Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth” (Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas).(21)
These considerations prompt a first conclusion: the truth made known to us by Revelation is neither the product nor the consummation of an argument devised by human reason. It appears instead as something gratuitous, which itself stirs thought and seeks acceptance as an expression of love. This revealed truth is set within our history as an anticipation of that ultimate and definitive vision of God which is reserved for those who believe in him and seek him with a sincere heart. The ultimate purpose of personal existence, then, is the theme of philosophy and theology alike. For all their difference of method and content, both disciplines point to that “path of life” (Ps 16:11) which, as faith tells us, leads in the end to the full and lasting joy of the contemplation of the Triune God. "
[1] Karol Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” D. Reidel Publishing Co. (1979) 3.
[2] Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Lang (1993) 213.
[3] John Paul II, “Fides et Ratio,” #83.
Friday, April 17, 2009
"Walker Percy the Philosopher," Revisited
“Walker Percy the Philosopher”[1]
Walker Percy sees our culture as a diseased patient who has already died – perhaps around 1914. The name of the culture was Christendom. The greater difficulty beyond ascertaining death is to name the disease; or, as he says, “if not to isolate the bacillus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable.”[2]
Percy was acutely sensitive to the bacillus, and all the male Percy’s before him. His biographer Jay Tolson remarked: “The problem, specifically, was depression – a wracking, disabling depression… partly hereditary”[3] that engulfed his great-grandfather (suicide), his two uncles (LeRoy accidentally shot himself) and his father who deliberately shot himself after a previous attempt at slashing his wrists. Walker suffered acutely from the same fugues, melancholy and meaninglessness. While in medical school at Columbia, he was seeing a psychotherapist on a regular basis. While interning at Bellevue’s pathology lab, he contracted tuberculosis, was sent to a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Percy reports: “I lived a strange life then. For weeks I saw no one, except the person who brought me food, on a try, three times a day, and occasionally a doctor. I read and read.”[4] What did he read? Thomas Mann, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard. He left the sanatorium and the practice of medicine, returned to the south, traveled with Shelby Foote to New Mexico and there expanded his read to Gabriel Marcel, Heidegger, Mounier, Jaspers, and Sartre. Like Kafka, the scientist, he was on the hunt in search of the bacillus that was killing him (and everyone else).
What did he seek? Himself. Not himself in a selfishness of everything “for me,” but the identity and the reality of me as a unique subject; a “me” that did not fit into any category. He was not, I will argue, in search of abstract thought or immateriality as the key to conceptual knowing, but the unique and un-repeatable “me” that had fallen through the categorical “gaps” of scientific abstraction.
The thesis of Joseph F. Previtali’s “Walker Percy the Philosopher” seems to have interpreted Percy’s diagnosis of the malaise as a materialist entrapment that can be cured by an apologetic of immateriality in the human person, and this by the immateriality involved in the semiotics of sign-giving or naming. He writes: “Since we know that there are some times when the signified and the signifier are purely material, we can conclude that the intellect, at least sometimes, must be that which has immateriality.”[5] This would be the traditional neo-scholastic response to the reduction of sensible reality to mere matter and measurement. Percy, indeed, uses the Helen Keller experience of naming the water at the well in Tuscumbia, Alabama as the eureka moment when it seems that she has escaped from the dyadic physiology of stimulus (S) - response (R) as the connecting of the Braille symbol for water to the wet liquid. Previtali says: “To emphasize the immateriality of the coupler, Percy asks the reader to draw a picture of someone asserting a proposition or judging a painting or composing a piece of music. As the reader comes to learn, Percy knows that it is not possible to do so. Here we have the climactic discovery of Percy’s investigation into human nature: the human intellect must have an immaterial element in order to account for the phenomenon of human language.”[6]And Previtali is led to think that Percy is fixing his attention on the psychic work of abstraction and immaterial conceptualization from whence comes the name. He presumes that Percy’s philosophical perspective is an “Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysical view.” [7]
He is clearly right in that symbolization has taken place which is a “throwing” (Ballein) “together” (sym) of name (an abstraction) and individual thing by the verb “is.” Percy says: “A child points to a flower and says ‘flower.’ One element of the event is the flower as perceived by sight and registered by the brain: blue, five-petaled, of a certain shape; and the spoken word ‘flower,’ a Gestalt of a peculiar little sequence of sounds of larynx vibrations, escape of air between lips and teeth, and so on. But what is the entity at the apex of the triangle, that which links the other two? Peirce, a difficult, often obscure writer, called it by various names, interpretant, interpreter, judge. I have used the term ‘coupler’ as a minimal designation of that which couples name and thing, subject and predicate, links them by the relation which we mean by the peculiar little word ‘is.’ It, the linking entity, was also called by Peirce ‘mind’ and even ‘soul.’
“Here is the embarrassment, and it cannot be gotten round, so it might as well be said right out: By whatever name one chooses to call it – interpretant, interpreter, coupler, whatever – it, the third element, is not material.
“It is as real as a cabbage or a king or a neurone, but it is not material. No material structure of neurons, however complex, and however intimately it may be related to the triadic event, can itself assert anything. If you think it can, please draw me a picture of an assertion.
“A material substance cannot name or assert a proposition.
“The initiator of a speech act is an act-or, that is, an agent. The agent is not material” [8](bold mine).
In this text, Percy is not referring to the work of an immaterial intellect, precisely because “intellects” do not work. The agent of the naming is an “interpretant,” a “interpreter,” and a “judge.” The “coupler,” the “namer” is not “the human intellect”[9] as Previtali suggests. Rather, and in accord with the best of thomistic anthropology where “actiones sunt suppositorum,”[10] the coupler or namer is an “act-or, that is, an agent. The agent is not material.” Previtali assumes that the coupler is the intellect as “immaterial agent.” Having identified agency with the intellect as a medium of knowing names and not the knower, he then finds himself with the false problem of “how… the immaterial part of the intellect interacts with our brain matter in the phenomenon of coupling the sign and the signified?”[11] Discovering that Percy does not deal with such a problem because he never entered into it, he suggests that “it is reasonably likely that the Aristotelian hylomorphism of St. Thomas Aquinas would be Percy’s response to the question of interaction, and it does seem to be the most cogent answer to this problem of interaction.” He then goes on to say: “In this view, the human being is a single substance composed of a unity of body and soul of materiality and immateriality… Given Percy’s desire for an anthropology that expresses an integration of body and soul, this view would seem to be most in line with his thinking.”[12]
I would suggest Percy’s whole endeavor works on a different level, namely, the level of the subject as “I.” Percy’s take on Helen Keller’s discovery in the act of naming the water is not that she discovered thought. Rather, she discovered herself – her existential “I” - in the exercise of her subjectivity by “throwing” the sign and at the water and uniting them in “meaning.” She experienced herself as a “thrower,” an agent exercising causality.
Percy’s whole discovery is the act of conjoining of signs with signified by a signifier. His problematic is that there is no sign that can be “thrown” at the sign-user whereby he is signified. “Semiotically,” he says, “the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up. The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself.”[13] Hence, the signifier cannot have “substance” as its “name” since the signifier as active agent is irreducibly “I” as in George, or James or Helen. “You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me”[14]
Of course, the question arises as to how the singular can be intelligible in human cognition without being rendered an abstract, conceptual universal. Two things stand out immediately. One, the act of being (esse)is irreducibly singular. Yet, as act of all acts,[15] it is the supreme and only source of created intelligibility. As Maritain remarked: “Existence… is the consummation or completion, in the mind, of intelligibility in act. It corresponds to the act of existing exercised by things. And this act of existing is itself incomparably more than a mere positing without intelligible value of its own; it is act or energy par excellence; and as we know, the more act there is the greater the intelligibility.”[16] Secondly, (and decisively) the encyclical “Fides et Ratio” points to the human person - as concrete “as a cabbage or a king or a neuron” and yet immaterial - as the “privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”[17] This knowledge – unmediated by sensible perception or abstraction and categories - that accrues to the experience of the “I” as symbolizing agent is not concept but consciousness[18] as Helen describes it.[19]
Karol Wojtyla expressed the need, as we approached the Third Millennium, to undergo this migration of seeing the human person as existential subject rather than as the objectivized mental category, “rational animal.”[20] He went on that “the antinomy of subjectivism vs. objectivism, along with the underlying antinomy of idealism vs. realism, created conditions that discouraged dealing with human subjectivity – for fear that this would lead inevitably to subjectivism.” But as “we are seeing a breakdown of that line of demarcation… we can no longer go on treating the human being exclusively as an objective being, but we must also somehow treat the human being as a subject in the dimension in which the specifically human subjectivity of the human being is determined by consciousness. And that dimension would seem to be none other than personal subjectivity.”[21]
Previtali ends by saying that “the ultimate end of Percy’s quest is to discern the implications for human existence of this newfound discovery that man is indeed more than just an organism interacting with an environment. Percy proposes that our unique nature is such that our search for fulfillment reaches beyond the here and now.” [22] Such a conclusion squares with his thesis that Percy’s discovery is the immateriality of the intellect, and therefore the immateriality of the soul that transcends the here and now into immortality.
But, in line with the perspective that Percy is talking about the self not only as immaterial, but more deeply as “subject,” I would submit that Percy’s thesis has much to do with the world of here and now. His explicit complaint and suffering – “the modern malaise” - is the feeling “in the deepest sense possible that something has gone wrong with one’s very self? When one experiences the common complaint of the age, the loss of meaning, purposelessness, loss of identity, of values, and so on?”[23] The partial and temporary solution he proposes points to the recovery of – not immateriality – but of identity… even as “neurotic.”[24] Being able to be named such by the “experts” is an achievement in identity and becomes in this moonscape a glimpse of recovery: “I may be sick but how happy I am when I can present my doctor with a sickness or a symptom or a dream which is recognized as a classical example of such-and-such a neurosis: I am an authentic neurotic.”[25]
[1] Joseph F. Previtali, “Walker Percy the Philosopher,” Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, 31, Number 4, Winter 2008, 26-31.
[2] Walker Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Signposts in a Strange Land ed. Patrick Samway, The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus, Giroux (1991) 206.
[3] Jay Tolson, “Pilgrim in the Ruins” Chapel Hill, (1992) 28.
[4] Robert Coles, “Walker Percy – An American Search” Atlantic-Little Brown (1978) 66-67.
[5] Previtali, op. cit. 29
[6] Previtali, op. cit 29.
[7] Previtali, op. cit. 29.
[8] Walker Percy, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind,” Signposts in a Strange Land ed. Patrick Samway, The Noonday Press (1991) 287.
[9] Previtali, op. cit. 29
[10] S. Th. II-II, 58, 2, Respondeo: “Now actions belong to supposits and wholes and, properly speaking, not to parts and forms or powers, for we do not say properly that the hand strikes, but a man with his hand, nor that heat makes a thing hot, but fire by heat, although such expressions may be employed metaphorically.”
[11] Previtali, op. cit. 30
[12] Ibid.
[13] Walker Percy, “Lost in the Cosmos,” Noonday Press (1996) 106-107.
[14] Ibid 107.
[15] S. Th. I, 4, 1 ad 3: “…Ipsum esse est perfectissimum omnium; comparator enim ad omnia ut actus. Nihil enim habet actualitatem, nisi inquantum est; under ipsum esse est actualitas omnium rerum, et etiam ipsarum formarum.. Under non comparator ad alia sicut recipiens ad receptum, sed magis sicut receptum ad recipiens.” ”Cum enim dico esse hominis, vel equi, vel cuiuscumque alterius, ipsum esse consideratur ut formale et receptum, non autem ut illud cui competit esse.
[16] J. Maritain, “Existence and the Existent” Image (1956) 27-28.
[17] John Paul II, “Fides et Ratio” #83: “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being [actu essendi], and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”
[18] K. Wojtyla, “We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts and experiences.” The Acting Person Reidel (1979) 44.
[19] “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” in Walker Percy, “Message in the Bottle,” Noonday Press (1995) 35.
[20] Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Person and Community (1993) 209.
[21] Ibid 210.
[22] Previtali, op. cit.
[23] Walker Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Signposts… op. cit. 211.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid
Walker Percy sees our culture as a diseased patient who has already died – perhaps around 1914. The name of the culture was Christendom. The greater difficulty beyond ascertaining death is to name the disease; or, as he says, “if not to isolate the bacillus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable.”[2]
Percy was acutely sensitive to the bacillus, and all the male Percy’s before him. His biographer Jay Tolson remarked: “The problem, specifically, was depression – a wracking, disabling depression… partly hereditary”[3] that engulfed his great-grandfather (suicide), his two uncles (LeRoy accidentally shot himself) and his father who deliberately shot himself after a previous attempt at slashing his wrists. Walker suffered acutely from the same fugues, melancholy and meaninglessness. While in medical school at Columbia, he was seeing a psychotherapist on a regular basis. While interning at Bellevue’s pathology lab, he contracted tuberculosis, was sent to a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Percy reports: “I lived a strange life then. For weeks I saw no one, except the person who brought me food, on a try, three times a day, and occasionally a doctor. I read and read.”[4] What did he read? Thomas Mann, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard. He left the sanatorium and the practice of medicine, returned to the south, traveled with Shelby Foote to New Mexico and there expanded his read to Gabriel Marcel, Heidegger, Mounier, Jaspers, and Sartre. Like Kafka, the scientist, he was on the hunt in search of the bacillus that was killing him (and everyone else).
What did he seek? Himself. Not himself in a selfishness of everything “for me,” but the identity and the reality of me as a unique subject; a “me” that did not fit into any category. He was not, I will argue, in search of abstract thought or immateriality as the key to conceptual knowing, but the unique and un-repeatable “me” that had fallen through the categorical “gaps” of scientific abstraction.
The thesis of Joseph F. Previtali’s “Walker Percy the Philosopher” seems to have interpreted Percy’s diagnosis of the malaise as a materialist entrapment that can be cured by an apologetic of immateriality in the human person, and this by the immateriality involved in the semiotics of sign-giving or naming. He writes: “Since we know that there are some times when the signified and the signifier are purely material, we can conclude that the intellect, at least sometimes, must be that which has immateriality.”[5] This would be the traditional neo-scholastic response to the reduction of sensible reality to mere matter and measurement. Percy, indeed, uses the Helen Keller experience of naming the water at the well in Tuscumbia, Alabama as the eureka moment when it seems that she has escaped from the dyadic physiology of stimulus (S) - response (R) as the connecting of the Braille symbol for water to the wet liquid. Previtali says: “To emphasize the immateriality of the coupler, Percy asks the reader to draw a picture of someone asserting a proposition or judging a painting or composing a piece of music. As the reader comes to learn, Percy knows that it is not possible to do so. Here we have the climactic discovery of Percy’s investigation into human nature: the human intellect must have an immaterial element in order to account for the phenomenon of human language.”[6]And Previtali is led to think that Percy is fixing his attention on the psychic work of abstraction and immaterial conceptualization from whence comes the name. He presumes that Percy’s philosophical perspective is an “Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysical view.” [7]
He is clearly right in that symbolization has taken place which is a “throwing” (Ballein) “together” (sym) of name (an abstraction) and individual thing by the verb “is.” Percy says: “A child points to a flower and says ‘flower.’ One element of the event is the flower as perceived by sight and registered by the brain: blue, five-petaled, of a certain shape; and the spoken word ‘flower,’ a Gestalt of a peculiar little sequence of sounds of larynx vibrations, escape of air between lips and teeth, and so on. But what is the entity at the apex of the triangle, that which links the other two? Peirce, a difficult, often obscure writer, called it by various names, interpretant, interpreter, judge. I have used the term ‘coupler’ as a minimal designation of that which couples name and thing, subject and predicate, links them by the relation which we mean by the peculiar little word ‘is.’ It, the linking entity, was also called by Peirce ‘mind’ and even ‘soul.’
“Here is the embarrassment, and it cannot be gotten round, so it might as well be said right out: By whatever name one chooses to call it – interpretant, interpreter, coupler, whatever – it, the third element, is not material.
“It is as real as a cabbage or a king or a neurone, but it is not material. No material structure of neurons, however complex, and however intimately it may be related to the triadic event, can itself assert anything. If you think it can, please draw me a picture of an assertion.
“A material substance cannot name or assert a proposition.
“The initiator of a speech act is an act-or, that is, an agent. The agent is not material” [8](bold mine).
In this text, Percy is not referring to the work of an immaterial intellect, precisely because “intellects” do not work. The agent of the naming is an “interpretant,” a “interpreter,” and a “judge.” The “coupler,” the “namer” is not “the human intellect”[9] as Previtali suggests. Rather, and in accord with the best of thomistic anthropology where “actiones sunt suppositorum,”[10] the coupler or namer is an “act-or, that is, an agent. The agent is not material.” Previtali assumes that the coupler is the intellect as “immaterial agent.” Having identified agency with the intellect as a medium of knowing names and not the knower, he then finds himself with the false problem of “how… the immaterial part of the intellect interacts with our brain matter in the phenomenon of coupling the sign and the signified?”[11] Discovering that Percy does not deal with such a problem because he never entered into it, he suggests that “it is reasonably likely that the Aristotelian hylomorphism of St. Thomas Aquinas would be Percy’s response to the question of interaction, and it does seem to be the most cogent answer to this problem of interaction.” He then goes on to say: “In this view, the human being is a single substance composed of a unity of body and soul of materiality and immateriality… Given Percy’s desire for an anthropology that expresses an integration of body and soul, this view would seem to be most in line with his thinking.”[12]
I would suggest Percy’s whole endeavor works on a different level, namely, the level of the subject as “I.” Percy’s take on Helen Keller’s discovery in the act of naming the water is not that she discovered thought. Rather, she discovered herself – her existential “I” - in the exercise of her subjectivity by “throwing” the sign and at the water and uniting them in “meaning.” She experienced herself as a “thrower,” an agent exercising causality.
Percy’s whole discovery is the act of conjoining of signs with signified by a signifier. His problematic is that there is no sign that can be “thrown” at the sign-user whereby he is signified. “Semiotically,” he says, “the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up. The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself.”[13] Hence, the signifier cannot have “substance” as its “name” since the signifier as active agent is irreducibly “I” as in George, or James or Helen. “You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me”[14]
Of course, the question arises as to how the singular can be intelligible in human cognition without being rendered an abstract, conceptual universal. Two things stand out immediately. One, the act of being (esse)is irreducibly singular. Yet, as act of all acts,[15] it is the supreme and only source of created intelligibility. As Maritain remarked: “Existence… is the consummation or completion, in the mind, of intelligibility in act. It corresponds to the act of existing exercised by things. And this act of existing is itself incomparably more than a mere positing without intelligible value of its own; it is act or energy par excellence; and as we know, the more act there is the greater the intelligibility.”[16] Secondly, (and decisively) the encyclical “Fides et Ratio” points to the human person - as concrete “as a cabbage or a king or a neuron” and yet immaterial - as the “privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”[17] This knowledge – unmediated by sensible perception or abstraction and categories - that accrues to the experience of the “I” as symbolizing agent is not concept but consciousness[18] as Helen describes it.[19]
Karol Wojtyla expressed the need, as we approached the Third Millennium, to undergo this migration of seeing the human person as existential subject rather than as the objectivized mental category, “rational animal.”[20] He went on that “the antinomy of subjectivism vs. objectivism, along with the underlying antinomy of idealism vs. realism, created conditions that discouraged dealing with human subjectivity – for fear that this would lead inevitably to subjectivism.” But as “we are seeing a breakdown of that line of demarcation… we can no longer go on treating the human being exclusively as an objective being, but we must also somehow treat the human being as a subject in the dimension in which the specifically human subjectivity of the human being is determined by consciousness. And that dimension would seem to be none other than personal subjectivity.”[21]
Previtali ends by saying that “the ultimate end of Percy’s quest is to discern the implications for human existence of this newfound discovery that man is indeed more than just an organism interacting with an environment. Percy proposes that our unique nature is such that our search for fulfillment reaches beyond the here and now.” [22] Such a conclusion squares with his thesis that Percy’s discovery is the immateriality of the intellect, and therefore the immateriality of the soul that transcends the here and now into immortality.
But, in line with the perspective that Percy is talking about the self not only as immaterial, but more deeply as “subject,” I would submit that Percy’s thesis has much to do with the world of here and now. His explicit complaint and suffering – “the modern malaise” - is the feeling “in the deepest sense possible that something has gone wrong with one’s very self? When one experiences the common complaint of the age, the loss of meaning, purposelessness, loss of identity, of values, and so on?”[23] The partial and temporary solution he proposes points to the recovery of – not immateriality – but of identity… even as “neurotic.”[24] Being able to be named such by the “experts” is an achievement in identity and becomes in this moonscape a glimpse of recovery: “I may be sick but how happy I am when I can present my doctor with a sickness or a symptom or a dream which is recognized as a classical example of such-and-such a neurosis: I am an authentic neurotic.”[25]
[1] Joseph F. Previtali, “Walker Percy the Philosopher,” Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, 31, Number 4, Winter 2008, 26-31.
[2] Walker Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Signposts in a Strange Land ed. Patrick Samway, The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus, Giroux (1991) 206.
[3] Jay Tolson, “Pilgrim in the Ruins” Chapel Hill, (1992) 28.
[4] Robert Coles, “Walker Percy – An American Search” Atlantic-Little Brown (1978) 66-67.
[5] Previtali, op. cit. 29
[6] Previtali, op. cit 29.
[7] Previtali, op. cit. 29.
[8] Walker Percy, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind,” Signposts in a Strange Land ed. Patrick Samway, The Noonday Press (1991) 287.
[9] Previtali, op. cit. 29
[10] S. Th. II-II, 58, 2, Respondeo: “Now actions belong to supposits and wholes and, properly speaking, not to parts and forms or powers, for we do not say properly that the hand strikes, but a man with his hand, nor that heat makes a thing hot, but fire by heat, although such expressions may be employed metaphorically.”
[11] Previtali, op. cit. 30
[12] Ibid.
[13] Walker Percy, “Lost in the Cosmos,” Noonday Press (1996) 106-107.
[14] Ibid 107.
[15] S. Th. I, 4, 1 ad 3: “…Ipsum esse est perfectissimum omnium; comparator enim ad omnia ut actus. Nihil enim habet actualitatem, nisi inquantum est; under ipsum esse est actualitas omnium rerum, et etiam ipsarum formarum.. Under non comparator ad alia sicut recipiens ad receptum, sed magis sicut receptum ad recipiens.” ”Cum enim dico esse hominis, vel equi, vel cuiuscumque alterius, ipsum esse consideratur ut formale et receptum, non autem ut illud cui competit esse.
[16] J. Maritain, “Existence and the Existent” Image (1956) 27-28.
[17] John Paul II, “Fides et Ratio” #83: “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being [actu essendi], and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”
[18] K. Wojtyla, “We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts and experiences.” The Acting Person Reidel (1979) 44.
[19] “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” in Walker Percy, “Message in the Bottle,” Noonday Press (1995) 35.
[20] Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Person and Community (1993) 209.
[21] Ibid 210.
[22] Previtali, op. cit.
[23] Walker Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Signposts… op. cit. 211.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Homeland Security to Crack Down on Anti-Abortion as "Right Wing Extremism"
Freedom of Speech (and with it freedom of religion), based on the human right of self-determination, is being translated as “right wing extremism.” Included under the rubric of “right-wing extremism” is abortion.
News Report:
Homeland Security on guard for 'right-wing extremists'
Returning U.S. military veterans singled out as particular threats
________________________________________
WASHINGTON – A newly unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warns against the possibility of violence by unnamed "right-wing extremists" concerned about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty and singles out returning war veterans as particular threats.
The report, titled "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," dated April 7, states that "threats from white supremacist and violent anti-government groups during 2009 have been largely rhetorical and have not indicated plans to carry out violent acts."
It suggests that worsening economic woes, potential new legislative restrictions on firearms and "the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks."
The report from DHS' Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines right-wing extremism in the U.S. as "divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups) and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration."
"[T]he consequences of a prolonged economic downturn – including real estate foreclosures, unemployment and an inability to obtain credit – could create a fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists and even result in confrontations between such groups and government authorities similar to those in the past," the report says.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Official Document:
(U//FOUO) Rightwing Extremism: Current
Economic and Political Climate Fueling
Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment
7 April 2009
(U) Prepared by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch, Homeland Environment Threat Analysis
Division. Coordinated with the FBI.
(U) Scope
(U//FOUO) This product is one of a series of intelligence assessments published by the
Extremism and Radicalization Branch to facilitate a greater understanding of the
phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States. The information is
provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement
officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks
against the United States. Federal efforts to influence domestic public opinion must be
conducted in an overt and transparent manner, clearly identifying United States
Government sponsorship.
[Notice that there is such an instrument as “the Extremism and Radicalization Branch” of the “Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division Coordinated with the FBI.” The large question is: Who decides what is “Extremism and Radicalization?” And we find the following statement with an asterisk at the bottom of the page:
* (U) Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that are primarily hate-oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration].
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Austin Ruse @ the UN: Observe!
I attended, watched – and listened – as Austin Ruse – personally - saved the Vatican Mission at the UN from being trashed as “Disney World” and ejected back in the late ninety's. There were X number of signatures for such an ejection. Austin moved the machinery, matched them, surpassed them in numerical signatures, and then held a press conference in the UN itself (that I attended) in which he made a superb, courageous, articulate and convincing ripost to all queries by a roomful of correspondents. It was masterful and successful as we witness the presence of the Holy See at this moment in NY. This appeal is worthy of help.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Today's Friday Fax
BARACK OBAMA IS THE MOST PRO-ABORTION PRESIDENT IN US HISTORY…
…ALREADY HE IS HAVING A MAJOR IMPACT AT THE UN…
…PLEASE HELP THE FRIDAY FAX TO FIGHT BACK…
April 14, 2009
Dear Friday Fax Reader:
Barack Hussein Obama is the most pro-abortion president in US history. In only a few months he has:
Restored US funding for the UN Population Fund, the UN’s population control agency that helped set up and run the Chinese forced abortion program.
Overturned the US ban on funding International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Center for Reproductive Rights, aggressive pro-abortion and anti-family groups that are deeply involved in forcing abortion on unwilling people all over the world, especially in Latin America.
Obama’s negotiators at the UN have already made aggressive pro-abortion and anti-family statements at the UN including signing a French declaration that seeks to make homosexuals a specially protected class at the expense of religious freedom.
Obama’s administration is gearing up to make a frightening new global attack on the unborn child.
The Friday Fax staff was there just two weeks ago when the Obama administration made its UN debut by supporting language that has been used by UN agencies, UN committees, radical lawyer and judges to impose abortion on reluctant countries.
Friday Fax staff watched in horror as the previous pro-life positions of the US were overturned in an instant by radical feminists representing the new Obama administration.
The US will now join the UN bureaucracy, Canada and the E
uropean Union as the most aggressive promoters of abortion all over the world.
This new pro-abortion coalition will actively seek to impose abortion on all the countries of Latin America, Africa, the Far East and even on the few remaining pro-life countries in Europe.
What stands in their way?
A tiny few countries willing to risk everything to defend the unborn child.
Along with them stands a handful of groups and individuals from around the world who go to huge expense to attend UN meetings.
STANDING AT THE CENTER OF PRO-LIFE RESISTANCE AT THE UN IS THE FRIDAY FAX AND C-FAM!
The Friday Fax is the only weekly source of pro-life and pro-family news coming out of UN headquarters in New York City.
The Friday Fax now has a global subscriber list of 200,000 and a global readership of half a million.
The Friday Fax has created a global village of pro-life and pro-family activists who can be called upon at any time to put pressure on the UN or on governments who want to impose abortion on unwilling people.
FRIDAY FAX SUCCESSES
Just last fall, the Friday Fax gathered the names of 500,000 individuals from around the world to endorse our UN Petition for the Unborn Child and the Family. These 500,000 names were presented to select governments and to a UN press conference that was broadcast all over the UN building.
When the Holy See was under attack by radical pro-abortion groups the Friday Fax gather the endorsement of more than 4,000 groups from all over the world who were willing to stand with the Holy See. These included the largest Protestant and Muslim groups in the world.
The Friday Fax regularly breaks news stories at the UN and our work is picked up by friendly and even unfriendly media from all over the world.
I could go on and on and in the coming weeks of this fundraising campaign I will tell you stories about our readers:
…about the UN staff member in Afghanistan who reads the Friday Fax in his hut and sends us donations…
…about the UN staff member who reaches out to us because she feels under attack in the building for her beliefs…
…about the fact that the Friday Fax is read all over the UN system by our enemies who want to know what we are saying…
In the mean time I need your help. The Friday Fax is not free! Sure, you get it for free but it is very expensive to produce, especially now that we have gone to two stories per week.
The Friday Fax now costs $177,000 per year to produce. This includes salaries, rent, expenses, printing of the hardcopy edition, and exploding email expenses.
I need to raise $70,000 over the next six weeks to help partially defray some of these expenses.
Can you help? Can you help us fight back against UN radicals and their efforts to impose abortion on unwilling peoples all over the world?
I know these are tough economic times but it is precisely in times like these that our enemies make the most progress. While most folks are focusing on the economy, they use our inattention to advance abortion.
More than anything I seek your prayers. This is a battle of powers and principalities. But I also need your financial support.
Can you afford to make a sacrificial gift of $1000 to help the Friday Fax? How about $500? I understand these are big numbers so perhaps you can help out with $100 or even $50!
There are many ways to give to the Friday Fax. You can mail us check, donate by credit card using our totally secure server connected right to a bank or by wire transfer.
YOU MAY GIVE FROM ANY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD!
Click HERE to donate or to get instructions on how to donate!
Do not hesitate. The enemy grows stronger every day. They are not waiting. They intend to do everything they can to impose abortion on the world and with Barack Obama in the White House, they have a very powerful new ally.
Please act now. Click HERE and give as much as you can.
Yours sincerely,
Austin Ruse
President
PS In next week’s appeal I will tell you how the UN Population Fund intends to block pro-lifers from attending an important and dangerous new UN conference.
PSS Please help us fight back. Go HERE and give as much as you can.
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