The Papal Visit Report-o-matic

Reprising an old idea, I have written an automated story generator for papal visit coverage.

A sample of its talents:

Washington, DC -- With his arrival at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington on Tuesday, Pope Benedict XVI began his first papal visit to the United States.

During his visit Pope Benedict, formerly known as the legalistic authoritarian oppressor of saintly dissenters Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, will visit the White House, address the United Nations, and celebrate two outdoor Masses in Washington and New York, respectively.

In the United States the Pope will find that questions about the future of the Catholic Church can be asked, and answered, by anyone.

Can the Pope shepherd his divided flock?

Will he make the Catholic Church relevant to Renaissance Faire carnies?

And, most important of all, will the Pope convert to Episcopalianism?

On Tuesday evening, the Opus Dei handpuppet Oprah Winfrey made an incoherent attack upon the Catholic Church's approval of self-trepanation and illiteracy.

"The Pope should listen to influential people like me when it comes to these issues," Oprah Winfrey said.

( Insert some quote from Chicken Soup for the Easily-Satisfied Soul )

When Pope Benedict boards his plane and leaves New York City on Sunday evening, it is certain his visit will have had a lasting effect. But on whom?

What can I say? I am easily amused. Go ahead, create your own.

More substantive blogging should resume in the next few weeks.

Another fall of man: Alypius and the gladiators

A tragedy of pride and bloodlust from Book VI of Augustine's Confessions:

[Alypius] had gone on to Rome before me to study law--which was the worldly way which his parents were forever urging him to pursue--and there he was carried away again with an incredible passion for the gladiatorial shows. For, although he had been utterly opposed to such spectacles and detested them, one day he met by chance a company of his acquaintances and fellow students returning from dinner; and, with a friendly violence, they drew him, resisting and objecting vehemently, into the amphitheater, on a day of those cruel and murderous shows. He protested to them:

“Though you drag my body to that place and set me down there, you cannot force me to give my mind or lend my eyes to these shows. Thus I will be absent while present, and so overcome both you and them.”

When they heard this, they dragged him on in, probably interested to see whether he could do as he said. When they got to the arena, and had taken what seats they could get, the whole place became a tumult of inhuman frenzy.

But Alypius kept his eyes closed and forbade his mind to roam abroad after such wickedness. Would that he had shut his ears also! For when one of the combatants fell in the fight, a mighty cry from the whole audience stirred him so strongly that, overcome by curiosity and still prepared (as he thought) to despise and rise superior to it no matter what it was, he opened his eyes and was struck with a deeper wound in his soul than the victim whom he desired to see had been in his body.

Thus he fell more miserably than the one whose fall had raised that mighty clamor which had entered through his ears and unlocked his eyes to make way for the wounding and beating down of his soul, which was more audacious than truly valiant--also it was weaker because it presumed on its own strength when it ought to have depended on Thee.

For, as soon as he saw the blood, he drank in with it a savage temper, and he did not turn away, but fixed his eyes on the bloody pastime, unwittingly drinking in the madness--delighted with the wicked contest and drunk with blood lust. He was now no longer the same man who came in, but was one of the mob he came into, a true companion of those who had brought him thither.

Why need I say more? He looked, he shouted, he was excited, and he took away with him the madness that would stimulate him to come again: not only with those who first enticed him, but even without them; indeed, dragging in others besides.

And yet from all this, with a most powerful and most merciful hand, Thou didst pluck him and taught him not to rest his confidence in himself but in Thee--but not till long after.

Recall this passage the next time you see Ridley Scott's Gladiator. The movie feints towards concern about the mob's lust for blood, only to forget its scruples in an exaltation of violent hunger.

The story of Alypius, or for that matter St. Almachius, would make a greater movie.

How Stanford scrapped a visit from Cardinal Ratzinger

The Stanford Review discusses how Stanford University rejected a proposal to invite then-Cardinal Ratzinger to lecture at the university in the 2000-2001 school year. The newspaper alleges ideological concerns played a role.

A vocal body of liberal Catholics and anti-Papists call Stanford home.

In a 2000 essay entitled “Fortress Vaticana,” religious studies professor Thomas Sheehan wrote derisively of Cardinal Ratzinger, suggesting his work was “third-rate,” “sloppy,” and theologically “vulgar.”

English professor Tobias Wolff has blamed the Church’s problems on its pursuit of “visions of cohesion and power.”

Both Sheehan and Wolff denied involvement in the decision not to invite Ratzinger, but Prof. Elizabeth Bernhardt, director of the Stanford Language Center, recalled voicing her concerns. In the event an official invitation had been extended, she said, “I would just have smoke coming out of my ears.” She also said she would have protested, but added that academic freedom is “a really important thing we all have to hold.”

Having taught a course on resistance to the Nazi regime, Bernhardt said she could not as a “matter of conscience” have condoned a visit by someone who joined the Nazi war machine. During World War II, such participation was mandatory.

Bernhardt said she opposed Ratzinger’s “ridiculous stances” on birth control and the ordination of female priests. Furthermore, Ratzinger’s title—Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith and Morals—was a legacy from the Inquisition.

Most worrisome, the pastor at the campus parish seems to have helped scuttle the proposal:

She also suspected that the event’s intent was to “embarrass” the Catholic Community. Fr. LaBelle agreed, saying that the event—far from an “open forum”—would have been designed to stir controversy in a kind of “staged argument.”

I am reminded of the passage in More's Utopia where he berates the English aristocracy for poorly educating their people and then punishing them for committing the crimes for which their lack of education has prepared them. If these Stanford professors and their like prattle on about the vulgarity and ignorance of American Christianity, they should acknowledge that acts like the refusal of a venue to a future pope ensure that American religious discussions remain at a crassly elementary level.

(via Erin O'Connor)

When Johnny Comes Marching Home

Mother Jones Magazine interviews former army Iraqi prison guards who wrestle with their consciences because they followed orders that enabled and encouraged abusive treatment of detainees.

Joseph Darby, the man who alerted authorities to the Abu Ghraib photographs, has faced harassment in his hometown because of his actions.

It is a sad, conflicted story.

via A Thinking Reed

The Frustrated Constitution

My latest column is up at InsideCatholic. The Frustrated Constitution briefly considers the powerlessness of the U.S. Constitution and the problems resulting from its near-figurehead status.

It is a tad more impressionistic than I would prefer, but I hope it will generate answers to my pessimistic question:

Given that nobody really pays attention to the Constitution, how can good government be attained?

Activists prep for the Democratic Convention in Denver

Slapstick Politics has a good round-up of the self-described anarchist groups preparing to "Recreate '68" not fifteen miles from my house.

Slapstick Politics links to a Westword essay wryly observing one anarchists' organization meeting, and also a blog called Crash the Conventions.

If dozens of radicals really are coming to Denver to pick a fight, I do not envy the task of the Denver police department. Downtown Denver is astoundingly pretty. Both the hotel near the convention center and the convention center itself are glass houses. The last thing the city needs is a rock-throwing riot.

Though I had pondered whether to leave town the weekend of the convention, I may possibly obtain press credentials for the convention and find myself reporting from the belly of the beast.

Humanist Sex Ed for Libertarians

The fall of Governor Eliot Spitzer due to his patronage of a prostitution ring has produced much insensate libertarian boilerplate. The libertarians, taking inspiration from their drunken midnight viewings of Pretty Woman, bemoan a world where sex cannot be openly sold for money.

Ross Douthat essays an attack on those who would treat sex no differently than any other human act. Be forewarned, Douthat quotes some base fellow named Will Wilkinson who writes in crude praise of mutual self-abuse. These are often the same people who treat all sex acts as equal. This habit reflects the leveling tendencies of extreme egalitarianism and echoes the jaded indiscrimination of a long-time john.

Douthat brings up the case of incest, alluding to Leon Kass' "wisdom of repugnance," and asks how the levelers can condemn such an act based on their standards, or lack thereof, which treat sex as just another form of labor.

While such a reductio ad absurdum is well and good for brief debating points and blog entries, this habit of invoking the worst grotesqueries encourages social conservatives to be lazy.

The "wisdom of repugnance" is useless unless it can be clearly stated what positive good is being repugnantly perverted.

Such an enormous good is implicit in the standard conservative argument about the relevance of sex to reproduction. While this relevance is obvious to parents and the self-reflective, the porn-saturated singletons one finds on the internet have successfully blinded themselves to this point.

"Reproduction" in sex talk is a word that can cover over what is being reproduced, namely man. With the exception of Jesus and test-tube babies, all of us were conceived through a certain ordinary sex act.

Treating all forms of sex equally means treating the sex act by which we came into the world as no different than any other.

To deny the importance of that act is to deny the importance of its product: every dead, living, and unborn man and woman.

Perhaps there is enough humanism remaining to find this general denigration of mankind repugnant. Even the most self-regarding parricide must flinch at so blaspheming his own origins, and by implication himself.

Nature, Custom, and "Evil Love"

J. Budsiszewski has penned a noteworthy reflection on nature, the under-mentioned concept of connaturality, the "second nature" of custom and habit, and the perilous case of habits gone wrong.

In his essay The Natural, the Connatural, and the Unnatural he writes:

According to what might be called the lower meaning, the natural is the spontaneous, the haphazard, the unimproved: Think of Adam and Eve in the jungle, or for that matter, think of the jungle itself. From this point of view, a human being is at his most natural when he is driven by raw desires, "doing what comes naturally," as we say. But according to what might be called the higher meaning, the natural is what perfects us, what unfolds the inbuilt purposes of our design, what unlocks our directed potentialities. Think this time of Adam and Eve in the Garden, not the jungle, or for that matter, think of the Garden itself. From this point of view, a human being is most genuinely "doing what comes naturally" when he at his best and bravest and truest -- when he fulfills his creational design, when he "comes into his own." The lower way of speaking makes nature and second nature enemies. The higher makes them friends, at least potentially.

While talk of design and purpose must, I think, at least reference the challenges of philosophical Darwinism or empiricism, Budsiszewski's exploration gives the reader much to appreciate. His distinction between nature in potentia and "second nature," nature as actualized, must be kept clear in all discussions of human nature.

Take his description of habit and custom:

St. Thomas says that something can be connatural to a being insofar as it becomes natural through habituation, because "custom is a second nature." What he has in mind here is the way that habits and customs -- and, at another level, divine graces -- fill in the blanks, so to speak, which the generalities of nature leave undetermined. The result is that we acquire new inclinations to certain things, and come to find pleasure in things in which we did not find pleasure before. There are all sorts of varieties of second-nature connaturality, for example the connaturality of the lover with the beloved, whereby our nature adapts itself to the thing which, or to the person whom, we love.

The generalities of human nature, those discovered through philosophical or scientific inquiry, cannot forget the place of custom. It is in the domain of custom, too, that character and personality are most at play, whether in fiction or in reality.

Heresiologists make poor dramatists and social critics because they believe mistakes or differences about human or divine nature drive human behavior, when in fact it is the particular flaws and perfections of individual or collective habit that have the most motive power. These heresy-hunters call hubris Pelagianism, despair Calvinism, and impiety Gnosticism. Would that intellectual error were the only cause of sin! Education and argument would then suffice to correct the wicked.

Budsiszewski shows that mankind is capable of far more crookedness:

Not only can a man come to love what is contrary to his connatural good -- he can come to hate what conduces to his connatural good. In other words, he can learn to loath those things which tend to the very happiness that he is fashioned, by nature, to seek. Evil of a particular kind will become second nature to him even though it continues to be contrary to first nature -- but just because it has become second nature to him, he will have difficulty recognizing it as evil.

How does one cure a wicked habit when it is not recognized as wicked, when evil is one's good? Rational correction has its place, but perhaps external coercion and internal self-revulsion are the only other remedies short of divine intervention. Examples of external coercion are too familiar, ranging from social pressure to legal punishment.

Self-revulsion, however, needs more examination. Perhaps every sin contains within itself its own destruction. The sated glutton realizes his doom after the last gulp leaves him empty, or the wrathful pundit flinches upon seeing his recorded rage. Budsiszewski cites one woman who rejected her self-destruction after seeing others in extremis just down her vicious path. Call it the car-wreck effect.

This self-recognition constitutes a virtue of its own, and of course sin is best fought with true virtue.

Budsiszewski further references the Angelic Doctor in discussing how sin is a misdirected good. But the saint supplies us with an implicit rebuke of Romantic sentimentalism:

Evil is never loved except under the aspect of good, that is to say, in so far as it is good in some respect, and is considered as being good simply. And thus a certain love is evil, in so far as it tends to that which is not simply a true good. It is in this way that man "loves iniquity," inasmuch as, by means of iniquity, some good is gained; pleasure, for instance, or money, or such like.

(S.T. I-II, Q. 27, ad 1.)

No one can, without hinting at tragedy, say "Love conquers all" after reading this description of an "evil love."

(via diogenes)