Denver-area pro-lifers, take note

The 2013 Denver March for Life will take place Sunday, Jan. 20 outside the capitol building.

Mass begins at the cathedral at 10:30, while speeches begin at the capitol at 12:30.

Good things are happening in Denver, whether it is the Lighthouse Women's Center helping pregnant women in need or the Regis University Students for Life conference for college and high school students, held in October.

This blog has declined in part because I've found more productive uses for my time.

Thanks to my friends in the Knights of Columbus, I've helped that Regis University group raise funds to go to the March for Life in Washington, D.C. in hopes that they'll become a strong pro-life presence at Regis. Students for Life of America is hoping to expand into Colorado, with a field agent dedicated to organizing pro-life student groups.

In July the Knights of Columbus raised funds for Mary's Maternity of Motherhood Home, a maternity home in Arvada. Just a bit of extra e-mailing and word-of-mouth advertising on Facebook helped draw 20 more attendees at $20 per ticket.

There are so many small organizations whose leadership has done pioneering work, but they just don't have the skills for a social media world or a few thousand dollars to seed their future growth. If you're good at blogging or rallying friends on Facebook, or if you have connections with a broad network of charitable organizations, consider yourself a volunteer.

Activist media monitors Archbishop Chaput's Theology on Tap session

Last Friday Archbishop Chaput told a gathering of the Religion Newswriters’ Association (RNA) he thinks many of them view religion as a backward social force. He observes a “seeming collusion – or at least an active sympathy – between some media organizations and journalists, and political and sexual agendas hostile to traditional Christian beliefs.”

He sure knew what he was talking about!

Major media focused on the dispute following the speech between the archbishop and N.Y. Times reporter Laurie Goodstein, who was angry the prelate did not return her calls. At GetReligon.org, we can read Archdiocese of Denver Chancellor Fran Maier say he was “intrigued” by “how little attention the attendees seemed to have paid to the actual text” of the archbishop’s speech.

The archbishop's full remarks are indeed newsworthy. And there is also news enough in a duel between authorities of the New York Times and of the Catholic Church.

But for Colorado observers, other big news is hiding in the lightweight commentary on the speech by John Tomasic of The Colorado Independent.

Writing as if it is odd that Catholics are obliged to be politically aware and active, Tomasic cites Archbishop Chaput’s words at Denver’s September Theology on Tap: “Politics is the embodiment of the Second Commandment: Love your neighbors as you love yourself.”

Constructing a frail straw man, Tomasic tries to make an issue out of the archbishop’s refusal to speak to the New York Times. In a desperate search for hypocrisy, he notes Chaput’s declared reading habits:

Chaput told the Theology on Tap crowd he stayed informed by reading the Denver-based Catholic News Agency website every day, four or five monthly magazines, that he listens to National Public Radio and to Fox News. He also reads two newspapers every day: The Denver Post and the Wall Street Journal. Unabashed right-wing Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, gets the lion’s share of the Archbishop’s attention. Because that’s how you find out what’s going on, kids!

Besides the obvious childishness of pretending that someone who listens to both NPR and Fox News is a Murdoch puppet, what’s so notable about this report?

The writer quotes Theology on Tap, but there is no written account of the event online.

The cited Theology on Tap session took place Sept. 10, while Chaput’s RNA address took place two weeks later. Tomasic links to the archdiocese’s recording of the event. The comments he quotes do not first begin until 46 minutes into the session, well into the “Q&A” section of the event. The final comments Tomasic cites take place at the 58:30 mark.

As a Theology on Tap attendee, this is astonishing to me. What kind of obsessive listens to the whole of an informal youth event like this to compile an information dossier?

A paid obsessive, perhaps. The Colorado Independent is part of the American Independent News Network, formerly known as the Center for Independent Media.[1] Under the former name, 2009 records show, the organization reported $2.1 million in assets and $4.1 million in revenue across its donor base and its half-dozen plus publications.

It's possible that The Colorado Independent had a writer in attendance. It is more likely that a staffer, even State Editor Tomasic himself, is assigned to listen to recordings of Chaput's political comments[2] and to summarize them for the purposes of intelligence gathering. These dossiers are then fodder for potential stories written in the style of a maiden aunt shocked that anyone could say such horrible things.

Now in a way it's good to know somebody is paying so close attention. Many a speaker wishes more people listened to his talks. The Archbishop of Denver is certainly a public figure so coverage of his public events can be legitimate.

But Theology on Tap is a young adult event where lips are supposed to be loose and candor is supposed to be prized. Only the most unflappable public figure will be unafraid to interact with the public when he knows his informal remarks are being monitored for "gotcha" quotes, while his real gems are thrown aside.

What kind of killjoy hears of an event like Theology on Tap and thinks “I can use this…”? Oh yes: a paid one.

The Independent’s Tomasic has written on Catholic topics in the past, reporting upon a men's conference in the Springs (with a non sequitur about the health care debate), repeating the attempted hatchet job on the Pope, and ranting about Chaput's recent comments on anti-Christian sentiment. Tomasic muddies the waters on the last piece by citing anti-Muslim activism. (Journalism 101: discuss what your subject said, not what you wish he said.)

In Tomasic’s latest piece, the writer examines the Colorado Catholic Conference through the lens of homosexual political causes. Considering that Colorado's richest gay activist Tim Gill’s Gill Foundation donated $150,000 to the Center for Independent Media in 2009, it’s clear why The Colorado Independent is watching Chaput.

Who else are they watching? And how many Catholics will side with the activist press when they decide to release their full fury against a Catholic archbishop?



(Comments follow these endnotes. ToT attendees, let me know if you noticed a reporter there. Photo taken from ArchDen.org)

[1] Adam Schrager and Rob Witwer’s book _The Blueprint_ suggest that the Center for Independent Media is likely linked to the Colorado Democracy Alliance, who often are the worst members of the present influential faction in the Democratic Party. As a young seminarian and then as a priest Chaput worked on the Bobby Kennedy and Jimmy Carter campaigns and is still friends with former Democratic state legislator Polly Baca. Present Democrat-leaning activists ran Chaput’s kind out of power -- and want to keep them out.

[2]One worrisome possibility is that The Colorado Independent is monitoring all the Archbishop's homilies, but I doubt it has that many people on staff. Its writing fellow Joseph Boven is a former researcher for Colorado Media Matters, an affiliate of an organization whose M.O. is listening to long recordings in hopes of finding something to type about with feigned outrage.

See also: other highlights of the Theology on Tap event

Archbishop Chaput’s Denver 2010 Theology on Tap: additional highlights

Various selections from the Sept. 10 Theology on Tap featuring the Archbishop of Denver, which was monitored by activist media:

“Anyone here who hasn’t noticed the despair in the world should go back to sleep, because you’ve been asleep until now,” Chaput commented.

“The Church in the United States has done a poor job, a genuinely bad job, of forming the faith and conscience of Catholics for more than 40 years. And that responsibility begins with the bishops.”

The clergy can be just as comfortable, self-satisfied, and lukewarm as anyone, he continued.

“I think that’s true about your bishop,” he told his Denver flock.

“Archbishop Chaput proclaims self comfortable, self-satisfied and lukewarm” is one of those headlines you should see at The Colorado Independent, but won’t.


Near the 35:00 mark of the archdiocese’s recording, Archbishop Chaput converses with a young man who thinks the Church-State arrangement of pre-revolutionary France was pretty cool. The archbishop, a reputed descendant of St. Louis IX, disagrees. Saying he’s never met anyone else who thinks so. Another Colorado Independent headline we’ll never see: “Archbishop disagrees with theocrat”

Near the 43:00 mark, he and an intelligent young woman discuss whether Nietzsche, St. John Chrysostom or Jesus said we should hate our friends. (Answer: All of the above!)

Maggie Gallagher and Jonathan Rauch to debate same-sex 'marriage' at CU-Boulder

UPDATE: This could get interesting.* Fred Phelps' crew is heading to Boulder for the debate.

*As James Poulos has noted: "The interesting is not the good."
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On Monday, January 25, the Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought, the intellectual outreach arm of the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center, will hold the third annual “Great Debate” on the University of Colorado campus and host nationally-known speakers Jonathan Rauch and Maggie Gallagher for a debate entitled “Should the Government Approve Same-Sex Marriage?”

Last year’s “Great Debate” featured Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens [KJJ: Not that great] and drew a crowd of over 2,400 people to CU’s campus to hear the debate on “Atheism vs. Religion.” Over 2,000 people are expected to attend again this year and tickets are currently on sale. Tickets are $10 per adult, $5 per student and can be purchased at www.thomascenter.org or at any King Soopers.

Monday, January 25, 2010 at 7pm
University of Colorado-Boulder, Macky Auditorium Cristol Chemistry 140
All are welcome.

“The Roman Catholic Church has a long history of engaging in public debate on important ideas and issues of the time, even those controversial in nature. Given the growing national interest in the same-sex marriage debate, the Catholic Center has decided to provide a forum to openly discuss the merits of both sides of this issue, on the campus of Colorado’s flagship university,” said Father Kevin Augustyn, director of Campus Ministry at the St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center.

“In the tradition of the Catholic Center’s patron saint, St. Thomas Aquinas, who intelligently and fervently engaged the ideas and controversies of his day with age and grace, we hope to provide a stimulating intellectual discussion on the same-sex marriage debate.”

(Source: Jan. 12 Thomas Center Press Release)

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The first debate featured Peter Kreeft and David Boonin on the ethics of abortion. See too my personal take on the debate and the fine work of the Thomas Aquinas Catholic Center.


Twitter: NOMTweets ThomasCenter kevinjjones

Archbishop Chaput's sober reckoning of U.S. Catholicism

Today in Detroit Archbishop Chaput attacked Catholics' indifferent complacency and warned Catholics not to delude ourselves about "what we have allowed ourselves to become."

"November showed us that 40 years of American Catholic complacency and poor formation are bearing exactly the fruit we should have expected," he began, continuing:

...too many Catholics just don’t really care. That’s the truth of it. If they cared, our political environment would be different. If 65 million Catholics really cared about their faith and cared about what it teaches, neither political party could ignore what we believe about justice for the poor, or the homeless, or immigrants, or the unborn child. If 65 million American Catholics really understood their faith, we wouldn’t need to waste each other’s time arguing about whether the legalized killing of an unborn child is somehow ‘balanced out’ or excused by three other good social policies.

Comforting statistics also should not cloud our vision:

We need to stop over-counting our numbers, our influence, our institutions and our resources, because they’re not real. We can’t talk about following St. Paul and converting our culture until we sober up and get honest about what we’ve allowed ourselves to become...

Referring to St. Paul's preaching before the Sophists of the Areopagus, he added:

When Catholics start leading their daily lives without a hunger for something higher than their own ambitions or appetites, or with the idea that they can create their own truth and then baptize it with an appeal to personal conscience, they become, in practice, agnostics in their personal lives, and Sophists in their public lives.

Archbishop Chaput also broke through the dodgy descriptor "post-Christian," calling apostasy by its real name:

"If Paul felt so fiercely compelled to preach the Gospel -- whether ‘timely [or] untimely’ -- to a pagan world, then how should we feel today, preaching the Gospel to an apostate world?”

Nonetheless, he counseled courage, saying: "Fear is the disease of our age."

Bracing.

Upcoming decades are likely going to be difficult for Catholic Christianity in the U.S. They will be even more difficult without clear recognition and repudiation of the apathy found among clergy and laity both.


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In related news, American Papist reports that the Archbishop in his comments encouraged his audience "write charitably" to the President of Notre Dame University to protest its invitation of President Obama to deliver its commencement address.

D'Souza vs. Hitchens: The not-that-great debate

Monday’s Religion vs Atheism debate by Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens, summarized at Catholic News Agency, was generally uneventful. Few old arguments were punctured and few new debating points were posed.

While Hitchens brought greater charisma to the stage, neither disputant was a clear winner. By comparison, D’Souza roundly trounced evolutionary philosopher Daniel Dennett’s pathetic performance in their Tufts meeting.

D’Souza’s approach attempted to open minds of students. Rather than propose a full defense of Christianity, impossible in a short presentation, it merely urged “give Christianity a chance.”

While this method gives D’Souza less to defend, it also leaves him less to explain. His show of arguing only “on secular ground” was an unfortunate limit on the range of debate and discussion, but this limit may be the most realistic approach for addressing an unsympathetic audience.

D’Souza based too much of his argument on ethical appeal. He argued that Christianity brought to Western civilization concern about the individual and the equal dignity of women while laying the foundations necessary for scientific inquiry and the abolition of slavery.

But it is a distortion of Christianity to present it only as an ethical system or a worldview generator. D’Souza rarely mentioned the person of Jesus and his references to sin and salvation were oblique. While ethical excellence and sound worldviews are to be praised, D’Souza presented little for sinners.

Against D’Souza, Hitchens argued religion should by no means be given a chance. The prominent atheist made vigorous mention of the woes of human life, asking why God had apparently not intervened in the some hundred thousand years of pre-historic human misery.

Rather than acknowledge the problem of evil, D’Souza ventured the strange claim that Hitchens faces the difficulty of explaining why human civilization mushroomed in recent millennia, as if it were inspired by “some creature.” He mentioned the sudden sprouting of pyramids and cathedrals and iPhones.

While perhaps he was trying to indicate man’s oddness in relation to the rest of the universe, he did not elaborate this point in an enlightening way.

Conceivably, for D’Souza and many other Christians a technologically primitive but Christian society would be preferable to a technologically advanced but irreligious one. The world of early Scripture is pastoral, where cities are dubious locales and technological marvels, like the Tower of Babel, are a severe temptation to arrogance.

Christianity itself begins not with triumph, but with death and crucifixion followed by supernatural Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. D’Souza and Hitchens both focused more on the effects of Christianity rather than its content and its founder, though D’Souza tended to be worst in his priorities.

One of D’Souza’s bright spots came when explaining why Christianity should be preferred to Islam. The chasm between humanity and the divine, according to D’Souza’s one-minute sally, is attempted to be bridged in Islam or Judaism by building a “ladder” based on religious rules.

In Christian belief, this chasm is resolved by God entering the world through Jesus Christ. This Anselmian brief is exactly what many undergraduates need to hear.

Yet at this point Hitchens made an uncomprehending attempt to equate Mohammed and Jesus simply because they are both sent by God in their believers’ creeds.

Several times Hitchens tried to depict his own strawman misunderstandings of Christian theology as the fault of inconsistencies in Christianity itself. His awkward attempt to attribute to Pope Benedict XVI a strict interpretation of the doctrine “outside the Church no one is saved” met with loud objections from the audience, many of whom were less eager to damn than the Christian caricatures of primetime television are.

Other inconsistencies in Hitchens’ remarks are clear in retrospect. He loudly objected about totalitarianism being an inherent danger posed by religion and characterized divine order as the “celestial dictatorship.” Yet he also complained that the state of the universe meant a “very incompetent, very cruel” God was neglecting to intervene.

He also fretted that religion removes man’s responsibility for himself, but then complained that God did not take the place of someone sick or someone headed to jail.

While such objections are worthy of comment on their own, they easily contradict each other when presented in unison. The atheist can argue that God does too much, or that God does too little, but not both. A God more obviously active in the universe would likely draw Hitchens’ censure as an even more “dictatorial” deity.

Further, if human responsibility is so important, then God’s respect for human autonomy may be active even if it results in death and injustice across generations. The Christian doctrine of original sin, however controverted it is today, insists that our misery results from an ancestral act of sinful autonomy whose consequences are still visited upon us. Adam preferred disobedience to Paradise, and thus shattered our world.

Hitchens in various comments proposed a romantic individualism in which a person must strive to figure out morals and religion for himself. This position provides several practical problems, such as the lack of individual time, the lack of individual wisdom, and the necessity for a moral foundation on which to build. If each person must deduce morals on his own, then the overworked and the dull-witted are doomed to possess only a minimal ethic.

Some forms of individualism praise mountain-climbing while demanding each climber must invent his own tools, cobble his own boots, and discover his own mountain range. (The individualist often was born at high altitude, but acts like he is a native of the lowlands.)

Moral and intellectual dependence upon others cannot be a vice when they are such commonsense necessities.

At one point Hitchens betrayed a clear misunderstanding of narrative voice in Shakespeare. When D’Souza claimed Shakespeare’s moral universe was formed by Christianity, Hitchens recited one of the Bard’s despondent sonnets and asserted it as representative of the man himself.

During the debate D’Souza appealed to the reliability of the early Christian witnesses, arguing they would not have died for a falsehood. Hitchens mentioned Joseph Smith and Mohammed as obvious counterexamples where people died on behalf of liars or delusions.

However, pressed in the question and answer period, he clearly dodged the specifics of early Christianity, preferring to dismiss Christian reports that most of the apostles died in martyrdom. There is a notable difference between those willing to die because they trust a man who claims to be a prophet and those willing to die because they have witnessed in person the resurrected life of a man so obviously dead.

D’Souza closed by noting that he had first met Hitchens after the latter’s essay against abortion appeared in the left-wing magazine The Nation. Hitchens then explained it was “extraordinarily objectionable” to ignore our duties towards the unborn.
This small act of pro-life solidarity was a gift to observers who would otherwise never imagine anti-abortion sentiment among the non-religious.

The best part of the not-so-great debate was visible in the energy of the audience. Over 2,000 people watched the debate from the sold-out seats of CU-Boulder’s massive Macky Auditorium and they were often liberal with their laughter and applause.

Father Kevin Augustyn, pastor of the university parish St. Thomas Aquinas, provided a capable welcome to the audience and gave an overview of the Catholic synthesis of faith and reason. At the event’s close, he also noted that the campus ministry would hold three follow-up Q&A sessions on campus to continue discussion of the debate. (While the first was held Tuesday, the second will be held in Hellems 255 on Wednesday from 7-9 pm, while the third will be held in Hellems 253 on Thursday from 5-7 pm.)

Whoever proposed this follow-up program deserves much praise. So many people need an outlet for their concerns and questions after such an event.

Further speakers in the St. Thomas Aquinas Center’s Spring Lecture Series include Robert Louis Wilken who will lecture on St. Augustine on Feb. 20. Prof. Christopher Tollefsen, co-author of Embyro: a Defense of Human Life, will speak on embryo-destructive research and abortion on April 23.

The most telling phenomenon of the evening was its aftermath. Perhaps two hundred people were gathered in the auditorium’s lobby engaged in lively conversation about the event. After twenty minutes, security had to shoo the crowd into the cold winter night. While there may be a decline of intellectualism, it was not evident that night.

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(As every non-profit leader must, Fr. Augustyn has appealed for financial partners and others to assist St. Thomas Aquinas Parish’s ministry to the campus. I repeat his appeal here, giving the program my full endorsement.)

(See also: Eugene McCarraher's review of Hitchens' God is Not Great: This book is not good)

Hitchens and D'Souza to debate religion at CU-Boulder

CNA reports:

Two influential speakers will face off at the University of Colorado in a debate titled: "What’s so Great About God? – Atheism vs. Religion." The debate, organized by the school’s Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought, will feature Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchens presenting their cases for and against organized religion, its influence on world history and impact on current events.

The debate is scheduled to take place on Monday, January 26 at 7 p.m. at the University of Colorado – Boulder. Organizers are expecting a crowd of 2,000 to hear Christopher Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; and Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great About Christianity to debate the impact of religion on society.

Tickets are required and are available at Tickets West. For more information, see the sponsoring St. Thomas Aquinas Center, which hopes to fill CU-Boulder's massive Macky Auditorium.

"Atheism vs. Religion" isn't a promising subtitle. The varieties of religion are such that defining, let alone defending, the category is difficult.

These kinds of debates are best focused on specific religious traditions.


(To read my reaction to the debate, Click Here)

'Critical Thinking' is making us stupid

Back in September, Creighton University’s Prof. R.R. Reno lectured at the University of Colorado at Boulder, discussing how “critical thinking” can actually corrupt intellectual life.

Of course, this is counterintuitive on its face. What intelligent person doesn’t want to be a critic in some area of expertise?

But Reno, with depth and insight, subjected critical thinking itself to criticism.

He began his lecture by asking whether relativism is truly an affliction of academic life. Obviously not all standards are rejected. Excellence in sports and a modicum of ethical standards are widely acknowledged among all. The faculty judge and rank both students and peers by the standards of their specialty.

Yet these standards are not shared between disciplines. In part, this is because few generalists are capable of truly inter-disciplinary work. Further, the standards of one field of inquiry by nature cannot be the same in another.

This lack of communication helps to fracture intellectual life. This sometimes results in relativism, and other times in scientism.

In Reno’s telling, scientism is the order of the day. While the methods of science are fantastically powerful within its own domain, mistaken efforts at duplicating its success in other fields results in the decline of wisdom and any other integrating intellectual force.

One specialty of scientific reasoning is analysis—which we should remember literally means “breaking-up.” In applied science, nature is analyzed in order to be manipulated for the advancement of both research and economic profit.

“Critical thinking,” in Reno’s understanding, treats societies, persons and artistic works also as something to be analyzed and understood in terms of cultural, psychological, economic, and even biological processes. This places the student in a position of being a critical “master” of all cultures, rather than a participant in and beneficiary of a culture.

This position dovetails with globalist or careerist goals of emancipating people from economic poverty and common social restrictions by displacing indigenous cultures, including our own.

As Reno wrote in an earlier essay on the First Things web site:

"The basic existential thrust of postmodern cultural study is to relax the power of any particular culture over the minds of students. The goal is obvious. A Harvard man or woman is not to be a member of a culture. He or she navigates cultures. With a critical grasp of the factory of meaning, he or she sets about to oversee production...

“Will a person in a position of power who ‘reads’ his fellow man, rather than listening to what he actually says, end up manipulating rather than serving?"

(Worrisomely, this sounds like descriptions of President-elect Obama and many another politician: while appearing considerate towards an interlocutor’s objections, he will size her up and make conciliatory comments meant to please but also to silence, after which he will proceed to do what he already had planned.)

In his remarks at CU-Boulder, Reno said the poor state of critical thinking is a result of rejecting or twisting the virtue of docility, that is, the virtue of being easily taught.

If Reno’s critique is accurate, our system of education actually hinders people from being touched and enlightened by people, cultures, and works they wrongly presume already to understand.

While Churchill and Lincoln, to take two examples, are overly revered, too many students arrogantly act like the great men’s intellectual and political superiors simply because they can tell a story in which both figures are products of processes and biases beyond their own control.

This presumption extends to whole fields of academic study.

Under a malign form of critical thinking, ethics is re-envisioned as merely an evolutionary survival strategy, religion is discarded as a psychological eruption, and great art is sidelined as a product of oppressive, pre-critical societies.

For “critical thinking,” reverence is an obstacle to thinking. (Note the renaming of theology departments as departments of religious studies.)

Students of such a method, which is better called a style, find themselves sealed off from wisdom.

“Nearly two centuries ago, John Henry Newman saw that it was a conceit of the modern age that truth may be approached without homage,” Reno writes at First Things. “The mechanisms of critique destroy piety and in so doing diminish our capacity to love and obey truth once found. Moreover, as John Paul II pointed out again and again, responsible human freedom is not possible outside a more basic loyalty to the commands that can come to us only in and through culture.”

Can critical thinking be saved from itself? Perhaps not.

But the best form of inquiry begins with taking reality as a given, that is, as a gift. And as Hans Urs von Balthasar reminds us, one never receives a gift in a critical spirit.

Such an intellectual life is perhaps not an exercise in critical thinking, but so much the worse for critical thinking.

Docility in studies is far more compatible with thanksgiving, a word which some Christians will recognize in its Greek form: Eucharist.

In this confluence, we see how religion does not oppose but assists intellectual inquiry. Rightly practiced, the worshiper’s docile openness to God can reveal self, man and the world to him.

Recall Jesus’ words in John 8: “You shall know the Truth and the Truth shall make you free.”


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While Reno’s advocacy for reviving the virtue of docility is certainly necessary, there are a few curricular changes which may better instill and nourish rational capabilities in students than our present system does.

First, students should be educated in grammar and language to increase their ability to express themselves and to understand others. Second, they ought to be educated both in recognizing logical fallacies and in correcting or rejecting bad logic. Third, they should be schooled in making and analyzing arguments, instead of learning how to dissect societies which they cannot yet understand.

Students must abdicate any presumptive position as a “master of culture” and become students of an actual tradition, rather than devotees of a cultural analysis of that tradition.

By an unintended coincidence, these curricular recommendations mirror the Trivium of the early European university. But this allows us happy clarity about in which actual tradition students ought to receive their education.


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Reno’s CU-Boulder lecture was followed by some memorable interactions with the audience, a largely Catholic one which had gathered under the auspices of the Thomas Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought.

One young co-ed, self-professedly ill-equipped to wrestle with the content of his speech, asked Reno a general question about how students might bring passion to their indifferent campus.

“I think there is far too much passion as it is,” was the wry gist of Reno’s reply. “Aren’t you sick of people being in your face about everything?”

Another student question depicted the local Catholic parish as being a welcome outpost of certitude in the wilderness of college confusion. With gentle and sympathetic mockery, Reno rebuked this sentiment for its pretense.

Ridiculing the image of The Lone Torchbearer of Truth in a Cave of Darkness (while also confessing his desire to be such a torchbearer himself) Reno reminded the student questioner that he should acknowledge his own inner doubts and be wary of false certitude.

Reno brought students and others in the audience to recognize some flaws in the modern university while also guiding the youngest to shed their more naïve opinions. For an inaugural lecture, it is hard to ask more.

Stanley Hauerwas to lecture in Denver

For Denver locals:

Professor-Author Stanley Hauerwas will deliver his lecture “Discipleship as a Craft: the Church as Disciplined Community” at 7 p.m. on Monday, November 17 at Bonfils Hall at the John Paul II Center, 1300 S. Steele St.

Tim Gray, president of Denver ’s Augustine Institute, says:

“This is a rare opportunity to listen to one today’s most influential Christian thinkers!

"There is no Christian speaker more exciting, in my mind, than Stanley Hauerwas.

You won’t be disappointed!”

Weigel Summarizes Benedict on Islam, Enlightenment, Freedom

George Weigel's speech in Boulder last week was more momentous than I had expected it to be.

As Catholic News Agency reports, Weigel vigorously argued that Pope Benedict XVI has provided in his Regensberg lecture and other writings a "public grammar" for global understanding between Christianity, Western secularism and Islam. In arguments over religious freedom, secularism, Islam, and human rights, Weigel said the Pope has given the world political community “a grammar for addressing these questions, a genuinely transcultural grammar of rationality and irrationality.” He cited Pope Benedict's recommendation that Christianity's own crises and encounters involving religious freedom could be a starting point for Christian-Muslim dialogue.

Weigel's categorization of Pope Benedict's approach was rigorous, novel and, I thought, generally convincing.

However, his commentary sometimes seemed lacking. At one point Weigel described relations with Islam as a matter of reconciling the religion with "Enlightenment values" of religious freedom and human rights(he specifically excluded scientific positivism from consideration).

There seem to be deep problems in this framing of the program for religious reform. To my mind Weigel's clear contention that the path to world peace and reform lies in Muslims reconciliation with the Enlightenment is overly political. While the Pope's theological emphasis escapes merely political polemics, Weigel too quicky turns from theological controversy to Liberal political philosophy. While this makes Weigel's program appealing to Americans of various religious beliefs, I think this move both turns theology into a blunt political tool and whitewashes the ideologies of the Enlightenment.

As I observed in the post-lecture question period, the Enlightenment was not only the sweetness and illumination of religious freedom and human rights. Arguably, Islamic nations have in fact absorbed the most murderous aspects of the Enlightenment: nationalism, pan-racialism, Marxism, and so on, in methods if not necessarily in ideas. One could even argue that fundamentalism is an Enlightenment product in its quest to overturn existing tradition and authority in favor of some foundational period, as interpreted through the understanding of the individual believer.

Weigel thought this point about the influence of the West in Islam was a good one. Making sure to add that fascism had also influenced Islamic socieites, he said it was one of the "great tragedies of history" that the "worst of the West" was exported to the region. He further speculated on a great "What-If?" scenario: What if the United States had not accepted in acquiescence the Islamic revolution in Iran in favor of a liberal regime? (Weigel also called Ahmadinejad "possibly one of the most dangerous people on earth," though I tend to think Daniel Larison is correct in dismissing the man)

All praise must be selective, but Weigel's advocacy of "Enlightenment values" was perhaps more selective than consistency can bear. He took care to exclude scientific positivism from the list of worthy Enlightenment ideals, but like scientific inquiry, human rights and religious freedom are also tragically double-edged.

Rights-language often generates simplistic, fanatical politics. The same regime that composed the Declaration on the Rights of Man ended in the Terror and the first modern genocide. "Human rights" rhetoric is seen in some circles as American cant cynically used to justify control of other countries. The same rhetoric is appropriated by advocacy programs of which Weigel would not approve.

Let us note that even respect for religious freedom could unduly hinder nations' abilities to suppress Islamic radicals in the United States, Europe, and in the Muslim world.

Further, one can argue that even the beneficient aspects of the Enlightement spirit have demoralized Europe and rendered it more vulnerable to Islamic radicalism. If "Enlightenment values" really end in decadence after only two centuries of influence, a culture would have to be suicidal to embrace them willingly.

Weigel at one point underscored the Regensberg address' distinction between rationalist and voluntarist views of God. The former, more characteristic of Christian thought, sees God as a reasonable Being to be freely loved, while the latter view, prominent among Islamic radicals, sees God primarily as a willful Being to be obeyed.

Perhaps rationalist theology does engender religious freedom. But judging from the period of time it took to emerge in its present form, this freedom is likely an end result of other more foundational characteristics.

Other features of Western life that have produced religious liberty, such as reverent trust in providence or simple political prudence, could be the more fruitful habits in the development of religious freedom. These habits are, I think, far less obviously polemical topics than Liberal categories explicitly involving freedom, oppression, and slavery. As such, they are congenial to interreligious dialogue without eliminating controversy altogether.

While the concepts of providence and prudence are obviously shaped by the relative rationalism of the predominant theology, seriously examining them can clarify and shift that theology in a positive manner.

Can one leave to Providence the punishment of apostate believers, infidels, and political enemies? Is the expansion of God's religion prudently served by political coercion?

These are some of the questions that helped the West. Perhaps these are the questions that can help Islam.

God willing.

Catholic Renewal Comes to Boulder

The Kreeft-Boonin debate reported below was sponsored by the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought, a ministry of the campus parish which deserves further words and accolades.

Father Kevin Augustyn, pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish, closed the debate with an appeal to John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio

. In Father Augustyn’s words:

"Reason can lead to the threshold of faith, and once across that threshold of faith, then reason still has a role for us to understand God's word and God's ways in our lives. The Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought exists for that reason, for the search for truth."

How little, I wondered, had Pope John Paul II’s words been mentioned in a University of Colorado Auditorium. That night, it was referenced before an audience of hundreds.

Father Augustyn later talked to me about the institute’s mission:

“The Aquinas Institute for Catholic Thought is basically our arm for outreach to both Catholic students that come to us, and the university at large. We're trying to engage an important secular university with the Catholic faith. How do you do that? You begin with dialogue, and what we have in common, and we believe reason is on our side.”

Father Augustyn described the lecture series, of which the debate was a part, as a first phase in expanding the campus parish mission. He mentioned the institute aspired eventually to issue certificates, though I am unsure of their subjects.

The January issue of First Things examined the mission of such institutes in Robert Louis Wilken’s essay Catholic Scholars, Secular Schools. Describing his visit to the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago, he outlined the ideal to which the Thomas Aquinas Institute doubtless aspires:

In that setting, I sensed a freedom about what could be said. It was possible to deal with the topic in an explicitly Catholic way and from a Catholic perspective. Yet it was still a university lecture, and the audience certainly expected it to be as scholarly as other lectures given in that same room under different auspices. In fact, I knew that there would be persons in the audience who were experts on the topic and would most surely have different views than my own. A Catholic institute is no less a forum for debate and argument than is the rest of the university. Catholic tradition is a living thing to be contested as well as upheld, not a genteel legacy to be perfumed and powdered.

Father Augustyn mentioned as his models the St. Lawrence Catholic Center at the University of Kansas and the Institute for Catholic Thought at the University of Illinois, the latter of which is mentioned in Wilken’s essay.

Some Christians only speak of higher education with harping disdain. At the same time, some of these contemners wistfully pine for academic respectability without effort.

While God’s gifts are unmerited graces, men give respect only when earned. I saw that respect last Friday in the closing remarks of Dr. Boonin, the head of the philosophy department.

“There is something quite extraordinary about the fact that the Aquinas Institute invited me to speak this weekend, giving me equal time with a national representative of the views that obviously they are passionately committed to,” he said.

A post-debate reception took place at the St. Thomas Aquinas Center, in operation for only a few years(if that). A former Nazarene church two blocks from the campus Catholic parish, the center is quite spacious. A respectable library occupies the former worship space, while a kitchen and dining area provides a good venue for gatherings. I discovered a door saying that the room it served had been donated by a generous man named Carrigan. I wondered if he was related to Michael Carrigan, the only notable CU regent. To my supreme envy, I entered the Carrigan room to discover a recreation room featuring several leather couches, a movie poster of The Passion, and a large flat-screen television.

The center itself is on “The Hill,” a neighborhood of fraternities and sororities that was briefly famous for its drunken riots around 2000. The center’s furnishings can certainly compete with the average frat house. As a simulacrum of a distinguished alumnus, I made sure to lecture students about how spoiled they were.

The best contents of the Aquinas Center that night were its people. At least 75 students, alumni, and interested parties had accepted the invitation to the reception, where for a modest fundraising fee they could more informally speak with the two professors who had talked that evening. Two of my alumni friends and I spoke with amazement at the energetic life that had invigorated Boulder Catholicism. Comparison to the tenure of the laid-back Paulist Fathers, who left a few years ago, was not favorable to the Paulists. We all wished we could have enjoyed such facilities, events, and staff during our undergraduate years.

Wilken, writing about the low profile of Catholic academics, says, “On university campuses, Catholic faculty are largely invisible. They are seldom known to students, and, though many are accomplished scholars in their academic disciplines, few have the formation in Catholic culture or history to serve as mentors to students.”

Hoping the center had some friends among the faculty, I asked a senior whether she knew whether any Catholic professors were involved with the parish. Her answer was an embarrased “no.” We got to talking about the sad ignorance of Western religion that blights the campus, and we laughed as she recounted how a history professor in her class on Spanish colonialism in the New World taught that Paul was the first pope.

When I walked to the campus parish around the turn of the millennium, I often passed through “The Hill” feeling its spiritual emptiness, and my own. It was a despondent time for me, and that sadness has tainted many memories.

Leaving the St. Thomas Aquinas Center that night felt quite different.

Reflecting upon the debate and its after-party, I realized I had just witnessed that hopeful confidence which the “first pope” took to Mars Hill.

The Peter Kreeft v. David Boonin CU-Boulder Abortion Debate

Judging from the turnout, the debate last Friday was a great success. The 288-seat basement auditorium was filled past capacity. The audience overflowed into the hall, where about forty chairs were set up. I’m told that spectators even crowded the stairs leading up from the basement. Not having left the auditorium until well after the debate had ended, I didn’t see the overflow. I conservatively estimated the turnout at over 400, others estimated it at 600. One fellow estimated 1,000, but that seems on the far side to me. More people arrived, but left because of the crowd.

Not bad for a cold Friday night in a college town.

The event was well-publicized. As I noted earlier, the event’s Facebook page numbered 95 RSVPs and over forty possibles. The archdiocese plugged the debate in the last Denver Catholic Register, and also posted a notice at its website.

Since Thursday, at least 25 people have come to this blog searching for information on the Kreeft-Boonin debates, which are a traveling show. Many of those visitors were local. The debate has certainly energized interest.

Peter Kreeft answered the debate question “Is abortion ever morally justifed?” in the negative, taking the pro-life side. He argued that for personhood is coextensive with human nature, enjoying all the rights thereof. He also argued that people cannot rationally deny the right to life of the unborn without denying the right to life of newborns.
Catholic News Agency summarizes:

He recounted how he once discussed abortion with "some very intelligent feminists," claiming that they had no argument justifying abortion that would not also justify infanticide. "After the argument they came up to me and said 'Congratulations, professor, you changed our mind. We didn't think you could do that'"

"'Oh, good,' I said, 'you're pro-life now?'"

"'No, we're pro-infanticide'," Kreeft finished, prompting surprised laughter from the audience. "So logical consistency can be a two-edged sword," he noted.

Kreeft presented a version of his argument that those who are uncertain about the personal state of the unborn child must refrain from abortion. Again, from the CNA summary:

Even someone unsure if the unborn child were a person, Kreeft argued, would in the absence of certainty have to refrain from an abortion. To kill someone without knowing if they are human is still homicide. To act in a rash manner that could kill someone, such as poisonously fumigating a room without being sure it was empty of people, would amount to criminal negligence. Barring certain knowledge that an unborn human is not a person, abortion similarly would be blameworthy even if the human fetus were not a person with the right to life.

Boonin noted that Kreeft's argument that any moral uncertainty about moral status of the unborn child meant all abortions were at minimum morally blameworthy could have radical implications if applied consistently. This "appeal to uncertainty," as he called it, could require one or more controversial stands: pacifism, since some soldiers are innocent conscripts and other innocents are killed in collateral damage in war; vegetarianism, since there can be doubt about whether killing an animal is blameworthy; opposition to capital punishment, because there was a possibility innocents would be executed; and finally it could require people to give all of their excess income to charity, since there was uncertainty whether spending money on luxuries deprived hungry or sick people from necessary resources.

I thought this was one of Boonin’s stronger points. Elsewhere he characterized some of Kreeft’s arguments as the often-fallacious slippery slope arguments. I believe he meant Kreeft’s allusions to the dehumanization of slaves or Jews in recent centuries. However, I think he dodged Kreeft’s postulate that justifying abortion also justified infanticide, which arguably is also a slippery slope argument.

Boonin himself proposed a thought experiment, a modified version of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist needs a blood transfusion” scenario: “Suppose you walked out in the park yesterday and a doctor caught you and conked you on the head and knocked you unconscious. You wake up, and the doctor has hooked you up to a bone marrow extraction device. The bone marrow is extracted from you and pumped into me. You ask 'What's going on?' The doctor says 'Don't worry, stay hooked into Professor Boonin for the next nine months, he'll be fine. Disconnect yourself now, because of a bone marrow disease, he's going to die.'”

Boonin thought most people agreed disconnecting oneself from the ill person was morally justified.

To the objection that this situation only applies to victims of rape, and that a woman consents to a pregnancy by consenting to sexual relations, Boonin modified his example: "Before you went walking in the park yesterday, you knew for a fact that my doctor was going to come looking in the park for a bone marrow donor. Your friends warn you 'Don't go in the park, lock your door! If you go into the park, there's a chance you're going to end up getting hooked up to this crazy philosopher, and you'll have to stick around for nine months." Escaping from this modified situation, Boonin thought, was similarly morally blameless.

But here I think he exposed the flaws of this thought experiment. It entails treating all pregnancies as kidnap-rescue scenarios. I don’t know about you, but no woman I know says “Bob and I are trying to force myself to carry a fetus for nine months.” Something so ordinary and universal as pregnancy, from which all men originated, cannot find a good analogy in such an extravagant hypothetical.

The thought experiment’s treatment of pregnancy as a disease, while certainly appealing to college students, also cannot form a consistent ethic. Think of the performance contradictions involved in an obstetrics ward that delivers babies, performs lifesaving surgeries in utero, and also commits abortions.

I also wonder: What would Boonin say are the duties of the father to a fetus considered parasitic?

Further, there is rhetorical manipulation latent in Boonin’s example.

In Thomson’s version of the scenario, a “famous violinist” suffers from some unspecified fatal ailment, the treatment of which requires someone to hook up to him for nine months. Boonin replaces the unspecified treatment with a bone marrow transfer, which is invasive and very uncomfortable.

Boonin also puts himself in the place of the ailing violinist. Whatever his other physical endowments, Boonin is not the handsomest of men. Further, both he and the hypothetical violinist are a few decades removed from their fetal stage.

Describe the person needing treatment as a gurgling infant, a cute four-year-old, or an ugly autistic teenager, and I think the audience reaction, and the philosopher’s intuitional response, would change depending on their sympathies with such persons. Make the ailing patient a blood relation, a pedophile, or a doctor nearly done with the cure for that bone marrow cancer from which he suffers, and our conflicted emotions cloud the argument that is meant to dissolve pro-life objections with revulsion towards imprisonment.

Boonin made some concessions to the pro-life cause, saying that if pregnancy were less burdensome an abortion could be an immoral act. I believe I heard him after the debate endorse the typical “viability” pro-choice criterion. I wished he had included this position in his public remarks, because it means that in his ethic, at the time when pregnancy is most burdensome upon the woman, it is least permissible.

Kreeft’s response to Boonin’s arguments seemed passive. A friend in attendance called his performance “understated,” which is perhaps the better word. Since I was more interested in recording the debate than in considering its truth, I initially thought Boonin did well against Kreeft. Only upon reflection, Kreeft’s position endured while Boonin’s shrank in stature.

At one point Kreeft suggested shifting the ground from “rights” to “responsibilities.” This was a bit inconsistent, since Kreeft’s arguments from the beginning used rights-language.

However, I think that shedding “rights talk” is the correct path to take. Rights-language is often antagonistic and conflict-based. Nobody talks about a right to be hugged, or a right to hug, because those actions have not been politicized. The conflict between mother(and father) and child is precisely what needs to be abated. Rights disputes suppose human equality, rather than human unity as the more important consideration.

In an egalitarian climate, the right to life must be universalized in distortive fashion. That is why Boonin can try to separate the right to life from the right to life support. While everybody can in theory live(insofar as anyone can theoretically live), the ability to sustain that life varies from person to person. Often such variety cannot be described in terms of equality.

“Rights-talk” is a political shorthand, a second-order description of the good in question. When talking about the right to life distracts from talking about life, something has gone awry.

The aftermath of the debate, and my excitement over what is happening in Boulder’s Catholic campus ministry, will have to fill another post.

For now a few references:
Update: I have published the detailed account made from my audio recording at Google Docs, it's ~2,000 words.

A recording of the debate is available on the ArchDen website

Francis Beckwith on Boonin’s book, “A Defense of Abortion,” a review excerpted at Mirror of Justice

Peter Kreeft's essay Human Personhood begins at Conception

Ivy Catholic reports a Kreeft-Boonin debate at Yale, the video of which is viewable at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Peter Kreeft to debate abortion ethics in Boulder

For local readers:

Two of the nations’ most well-known philosophers in the abortion controversy will go head-to-head in a debate, “Is abortion morally justifiable?” The debate is scheduled for 7pm on Friday, January 18 on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

Dr. Peter Kreeft, a pro-life professor of philosophy at Boston College, will debate CU-Boulder professor and pro-choice voice Dr. David Boonin.

The debate will take place in Room 1B50, the auditorium in the basement of the Humanities building, which is just to the west of Norlin Library on the north side of the quadrangle.

It looks like the event will be very crowded. 86 people have RSVPd to the event's facebook page alone, and I think the room only has a capacity of 150.

A meet-and-greet with Kreeft will take place afterwards at the Catholic parish center. It is a fundraiser, so students will be charged $10 and adults/families should pay $20.

For a preview of Kreeft's argument, his essay Human Personhood Begins at Conception will likely suffice. I haven't read that essay in years, though I hope to revisit it soon.

More information on the lecture here.

UPDATE: See My report on the debate

Picking Up the Pieces

Children of illegal aliens deported by recent immigration raids are being reunited with their parents only with great difficulty, at private expense:

Eight-month-old Christian Daniel Ortiz will be in his mother’s arms again for Christmas.

He’s a ray of hope in light of the many families separated by recent immigration raids who can’t say the same for their children.

“I know that there are at least 15 to 20 families in Greeley that had children separated from them in similar cases,” said Sister Molly Muñoz, C.H.M., who worked with local English teacher Pablo Castellanos and Denver Spanish radio station (La Buena ONDA) KNRV 1150-AM to reunite the infant with his mother this holiday season.

[...]

United States-born Ortiz was flown on Dec. 6 — the feast of St. Nicholas — to his mother in El Salvador, who was arrested in Rifle five months ago in an immigration raid.

[...]

After her July arrest, Anna Delme, 26, was held in a detention center for three months where she was not able to have contact with her son, whom she had been breastfeeding, Sister Muñoz said.
Denver Catholic Register

This looks like a significant lapse in government policy. If the ICE swoops in and ships parents thousands of miles away from their kids, they shouldn't just dump the poor semi-orphans on the local community. The children of convicted felons would receive better treatment.

I can't find any trace of this story in the local Anglophone papers.

Francis Beckwith on Secular Reason

Francis Beckwith, professor and Right Reason blogger, lectured at CU-Boulder to a surprisingly large Friday night audience. His speech, "Bioethics and the Pluralist Game," examined the failings of some of the commonplace arguments used to shut down ethical and legal objections to secular liberal policies. Though his inaugurating speech was more academic than the typical undergradate could handle, it bodes well for the new lecture series sponsored by the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute.

Beckwith's arguments were solid, and I particularly enjoyed his analysis of the oft-claimed need for political reasoning to be secular:

[Robert] Audi offers another principle that may be employed, the "secular reason requirement." It goes like this: one has a prima facie obligation not to advocate or support any law or public policy that restricts conduct unless one has and is willing to offer adequate secular reasons for advocacy or support.

...this principle requires, without argument, that the citizen's reason be secular. But "secular" is not a relevant property of a reason that is offered in support of a conclusion that an advocate is advancing. For instance, the terms "true, false, plausible, implausible" are adjectives that we apply to reasons to test the property relevant to its purpose as part of an argument. A property is characteristic had by something. So for example one can say "the dog is brown," which means the dog has the property of brownness. However, if one were to say "the set of all even numbers is brown," one would be saying nonsense. Numerical sense cannot have the property of color.

But reasons, like dogs or numerical sets, are things that can only have certain types of properties. Just as a dog cannot have the property of a rational number, and a numerical set cannot have the property of "blue," "valid," or "tall," a reason cannot be secular. For "secular," like "tall," "fast," "stinky," or "sexy," has no bearing on the quality of the reason one may offer in an argument to advance a particular public policy or point of view.

Suppose one believes the conclusion that unjust killing is morally wrong, and offers two reasons for it. The first reason is "the Bible prohibits unjust killing," and the second reason is "the philosopher Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative prohibits unjust killing." Most people would call the first a religious reason and the second a secular reason, because the first contains the name of a religious book, the Bible, and the second contains a non-religious principle, the Categorical Imperative. But how do the terms religious and secular add or subtract to our assessment of the quality of the reasoning?

If one, for example, has good reason to reject the authority of the Bible, then that good reason about the nature of the Bible is the good reason for rejecting that reason. On the other hand, if one has good reasons to believe the Bible is a better guide to moral philosophy than Kant's Categorical Imperative, in that case one ought to conclude that the first is a better reason than the second.

But again, how do the properties of "religious" and "secular" affect such a judgement? At the end of the day, reasons are weak, strong, true, or false, but "religious" and "secular" are not relevant properties when assessing the qualities of reasons a person may offer as part of her argument.

In practice, this requirement of secular reason functions as a hindrance for properly understanding the bioethical issues addressed and the positions held by Christian citizens.

To label an argument "religious" or "secular" is not to speak the language of logic but the language of anthropology or sociology. This tactic, widespread and often unconscious in use, tries to change the topic of the discussion from the argument itself to the category of person who is making the argument.

When this rhetorical shift takes place in jurisprudence, it suggests an implicit assumption that a certain type of people is in charge. Arguments are judged not on their merits but on whether they cater to this ruling type. The need to justify the rule of the secular tribe doubtless partially motivates the fervid insistence that the United States is a secular state.

Cardinal Arinze to visit Arvada Parish

To my surprise, he will be speaking at a conference at my home parish. From the Denver Catholic Register:

Cardinal Francis Arinze is coming to Denver. The cardinal, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in Vatican City, will celebrate Mass and deliver the keynote address at a stewardship conference next month.

Spirit of Christ Church in Arvada will host the Sept. 20 conference titled, “Eucharist, Nourishment for the Christian Steward.” In addition to Mass and the cardinal’s keynote address, the conference will include breakout sessions and a roundtable discussion. Opening remarks to the conference will be delivered by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

The Streaking Cleric

I can't say I have much to say about the local priest caught doing some nudist jogging, but Diogenes noticed the timeline. It seems disciplinary action followed quickly not after the deed was made known to the chancery, but after the deed was made known to the public five weeks later. It tempts one to cynicism.

A Lamentable Anniversary for Colorado

This is the Fortieth Anniversary of the law which 'liberalized' abortion restrictions. The Rocky article is surprisingly focused on Catholics, revealing some of the chicanery that got this law passed:

[Governor] Lamm's measure passed easily in the House. But Bermingham said he and other Senate sponsors knew that Lt. Gov. Mark Hogan, a Catholic, would assign the bill to the State Affairs Committee - chaired by another Catholic - "and that would be the end of it."

So the bill's supporters arranged to have the measure waylaid by a sympathetic woman at the statute revision office in the Capitol basement - a required stop for bills moving from one chamber to the other - until a day when Hogan was absent. Then it was hustled up and quickly assigned to the Health and Welfare Committee, which Bermingham chaired.

Catholics in the state legislature are now the most predictable pro-abortionists in local politics. It's no wonder Archbishop Chaput's pro-life rumblings have sparked such outrage.

The article also focuses on the contemporary Catholic reactions to this bill. I find this interesting, since as I heard the story the archbishop at the time of this bill's passage was back east justifying his and others' dissent on contraception.

A Local Myspace Clone for Catholics and Other Christians

GodSpace is a Denver-based social networking site that has been developing nicely, though it has had its growing pains. Any of my fellow locals might profit by it, as it has been heavily advertised among young Catholics in the area. There are only so many viable social networks, though I wish them the best.

Defrocked Colorado Priest Convicted of Abuse

A Larimer County District Court jury today found former Catholic priest Timothy Evans guilty of sexual assault on a child.

Evans, 44, is the first Colorado Catholic priest to be convicted since sweeping allegations of clergy abuse surfaced nationwide in 2002, leading to broad reforms within the church.

[...]

Jurors found Evans guilty of two counts of sexual assault on a child by one in a position of trust. They also found him guilty of behaving in a pattern of abuse.

I have previously written of this convict's connection to my home parish. My grandmother was quite taken with him. Indeed, he was asked to say her requiem mass per her request. being preferred to the charismatic yet oleaginous Italian-American pastor. I particularly recall a story about Evans complaining about his playing second-fiddle to the man: "Everybody thinks he's so holy, but that's not true." Probably so, but such back-biting of his own superior evidenced Evans' own pride and vanity even then.

Though it is something of a cheap shot, I wonder how much the parish culture might have encouraged the unnatural liberties Evans took. For reasons unknown to me, Spirit of Christ has ended up on a list of gay-friendly churches. Before the last election, a pro-gay marriage editorial was smuggled into the bulletin by the JustFaith group, landing my parish on a list of churches supportive of gay marriage despite her orthodox priests. Lacking any consistency, the piece managed to invoke the words of then-Cardinal Ratzinger's letter Concerning Care of Homosexual Persons to support the latest liberation fad. This stunt successfully burdened the new pastor with the duty of reviewing the bulletin in addition to his other responsibilities. So much for the reputed maturity of the modern laity.

For a time, the daughter of a deacon parishoner who was a founding member of the parish was local contact for Call to Action. At present, there is a group for parents of gays and lesbians at the parish, though by itself that presents no reason to suspect untoward activity on their part. (In my parish's defense, it also hosts a Support Group for Sexual Abuse Victims)

As for Father Evans: what happens to child molesters in prisons is widely acknowledged and, at times, celebrated. I pray Evans will escape the violations he has inflicted on others, and that the just consequences he faces will aid his penance.