The Catholic Populist

Catholic HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius & Catholic Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski

In today’s (Wednesday’s) Gospel reading, Jesus said:

“They will seize and persecute you, they will hand over to the synagogues and to prisons, and they will have you led before kings and governors because of my name.  It will lead to your giving testimony.  Remember, you are not to prepare your defense beforehand, for I myself shall give you a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist and refute.  You will be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death.  You will be hated by all because of my name, but not a hair on your head will be destroyed.  By your perseverance you will secure your lives.”

What a powerful message!

Jesus is saying that we will have the opportunity to follow in his footsteps.

Jesus was handed over to men who did not believe in him.

But he was first betrayed by Judas Iscariat — a Christian and an Apostle.

In the United States, Catholics have a great voice through the democratic process.  For several decades now, the Catholic vote has swung the United States Presidential elections.

It will do so again in 2012.

As I have previously discussed, contraception is a violation of the Populist principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence as well as the Catholic faith.

Fundamental to both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is the free exercise of religion.  The reason is simple.  In Populist thought, the State forswears a profound understanding of Natural Law, confining itself to (in those cases dictated by prudence) preventing one person from treating another human being as a means rather than an end in themselves.  The State understands itself as having no insight into the deeper aspects of Natural Law, Theology, and the moral life.  Thus, the State by virtue of its inaction and lack of expertise, defers to the Church in high matters of Natural Law.

The Church and State thus work in harmony in their respective spheres.

A new level has been reached to attack this harmony, violate Populist principles, and particularly persecute Catholics.

Health and Human Services has issued a mandate under the authority of Obamacare to tell every employer that they must provide coverage for every employee for contraception or face immense and possibly debilitating fines (up to $100 per employee per day).

How could this have happened?

How could a program have been set up that violates the principles of Populism and, additionally, persecutes Catholics who believe contraception is intrinsically evil.

Catholics.  Catholics.  Catholics.

Catholic Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski passed an amendment to Obamacare in committee to give Health and Human Services the authority to define which women’s health issues can be defined in the “essential health benefits package” that need to be covered without any copay to the patient at all.  Catholic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi got the bill passed.  Catholic Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that all FDA-approved contraceptives (even those which are undisputed abortifacients like Ella) should be included in the essential health benefits package.

All three of these Catholic women have been endorsed by EMILY’s List, a powerhouse fundraising organization that only endorses female Democrats who oppose conscience protections, support partial birth abortion, and taxpayer funded abortions.

The issue has been addressed legislatively in the Protect Life Act, which passed the House of Representatives.  It has been attacked legally by the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty.

Nancy Pelosi attacked such efforts, accusing Catholics of having this “conscience thing.”

It is sad that the concept seems so alien to her.

American Catholics can well understand the words of Christ: “You will be handed over by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends, and they will put some of you to death.”

Mrs. Pelosi in the same statement, said: “I’m a devout Catholic and I honor my faith and love it.”

Would you really betray your fellow American Catholics with the verbal equivalent of a kiss?

Unconditional Love is a High Calling and a Greater Joy

In writing about Theology of the Body, John Paul the Great often wrote that the procreative act is the second most sacred action undertaken by humankind after only the consecration of the Eucharist.  John Paul’s Theology of the Body is not merely Theology.  Much of his understanding of human intimacy and love stemmed from Natural Law philosophy.  It built upon the Natural Law foundations that the Pope shares with Aristotle to climax with unique insights into the Trinitarian theology bound up with the sexual act.

Natural Law gives man a profound directive with far-reaching implications:

Treat every human being as an end in himself or herself.

The sexual act is a powerful and beautiful gift.  In order for it to be celebrated fully, five criteria have to be met:

1) It must be a full and exclusive self-gift (Monogamous)

2) It must entail a choice of the will (Free)

3) It must be based on knowledge of the dignity of the spouse (Understood)

4) It must be be under the auspices of a life-long commitment (Permanent)

5) It must be open to life (Generative)

The deprivation of each one of these actions out of the Natural Order strips the act of sex of its full meaning thereby denigrating the second-greatest power we have on this Earth.

1) Polygamy deprives each person of the full and unconditional love that creates a unique bond between the lovers that they share with no other person, allowing the partner with multiple spouses to withhold their full affection from one or both spouses.

2) Shotgun marriages and their historical precedents set the will of another person in between the spouses as the cause of their union, depriving them of the complete surrender that is only possible by the relinquishment of someone’s own will to the good of another.

3) Undervaluing the dignity of the other person creates a darkness that blinds each person to the truth in a way that makes path to unconditional love shrouded in darkness.

4) Non-commitment means that one person is merely using the other person to fulfill the needs of the moment rather than a full gift to the other person.

5) Contraception or some other closed-off attitude towards life causes one spouse to withhold their fertility from the other, creating a barrier that seals off the natural fruit of love, and using the act of sex for pleasure to the exclusion of surrendering love.

The entire purpose of sex is to give of oneself utterly unconditionally.  Holding back commitment, fertility, exclusivity, appreciation, or full consent violates the integrity of the act.  Any such action cheapens and minimizes the gift of sex itself.

The only place to find all these blessings is marriage between one man and one woman.

The entire purpose of sex is to an unconditional love — not to seek some other end. Even an end as noble as the creation of new life is not to be sought, according to Natural Law.

The spouse should be loved for their own sake and should never be viewed as a baby-making machine.  This view of the spouse were it to be adopted dehumanizes the spouse.  The wonder of the Natural Order is that sexual love for a spouse can result in the creation of a new life.  But this is the result of the sexual love not the purpose of the sexual love.

On the other hand, the spouse is also never to be viewed as a pleasure-seeking device.  That is also dehumanizing.  This sort of mentality develops with the use of contraception.  By eliminating the full meaning of sex and holding back fertility, the spouse reduces the act of sex to a pleasure-stimulation exercise with the other spouse doing the honors.

Natural Family Planning, however, does not violate the Natural Order.  NFP teaches spouses to give fully of themselves including their fertility.  The female fertility is cyclical so there are times when that fertility will result in a child and times when it will not.  Spouses within NFP are able to exercise prudence when to fully give themselves to each other.

However, even NFP must always be within the context of unconditional love.  If a couple has a grave reason not to conceive a child (perhaps serious financial or medical issues), then avoidance-oriented NFP is a gift to the spouse.  The spouses deny themselves for the sake of the other — to prevent an imprudent exercise of sex.  However, if there is no grave reason to avoid conception, the spouses should be generous and unconditional with their exercise of sex, come what may.

Additionally, it is never okay to view the spouse as merely a money-generating machine, a status symbol, an ego boost, a personal chef, or any other lesser good.

A spouse is an end unto themselves.

An end to love unconditionally.

Nothing captures the beauty of it better than the wedding vows:

“I take you for my lawful [spouse], to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”

Amen!

How can we be healed? How can we see?

“Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God.”

On first glance, the beatitude seems to be a promise about the afterlife.

A wise priest once told me a story that he said first revealed to him that this was not the whole truth.  I have borne this message in my heart and mind ever since.

This was the story that he told me.

This somewhat mystical priest frequently articulated the truth that suffering can be redemptive.  He had been told by his own spiritual director that, in order to be fruitful, each priest must have people willing to dedicate their suffering to the fruit of his priestly ministry.

This priest had actually recruited a number of holy, old widows from Ireland (his native country) and asked them to dedicate the sufferings of their old age to his priestly ministry.  He only asked them for this gift if he judged them to be prepared for it after serving intensively as their spiritual director.  He told the widows to consider very carefully if they would accept the serious commitment of such a dedication.  He even told them that if the Lord sought more fruit from his priestly ministry, they could have an increase in their own suffering.  One woman, the day after committing to dedicate her suffering to his priestly ministry, suffered a terrible blood rupture behind her eye which caused her immense suffering.  However, these holy women gave of their suffering.  And the priest’s ministry (I have witnessed it personally) has borne great fruit.

However, that was not the point of the story.  This priest told me that some of these holy woman were granted amazing holiness after their decision to dedicate their suffering.  One woman, in particular, he said, never ceased to amaze him.  As his spiritual director, he said he had never witnessed such purity of heart.  It amazed him.

Very late in life, she began to have visions of visitations of Jesus Christ.  She told him about these visions.  He said he would have vouched for her sanity.  He insisted she was as sane as any other human being he had ever met.  He told me that this caused him to reevaluate the way he thought about the beatitude on the pure of heart.

He reasoned, why should God confine himself to fulfilling his promises in the next life?  He believed that this woman was living proof that the beatitude can be fulfilled in this life.

Reflecting back on this arrangement with some holy widows of Ireland, I have realized that it as not as unprecedented as I had originally thought.  The Dominicans and Franciscans, to give two examples, have Second Orders of cloistered nuns that do the same thing — dedicate their lives, sufferings, and prayers to the success of their order.

It is easy to think of Chastity as a negative virtue — one that you achieve by not doing sinful things.  However, it is so much more than that.  It is accepting the great gift of God to fit human sexuality into the schema of love that God has called every one of us to.  This is true both for those called to marriage and those called to celibacy.

How much sense this makes!  When we look at another person as an object, that blinds us to their humanity.  But on an even deeper level, it blinds us to the way that Jesus Christ is manifested in them.  That blindness is a self-lie.  Of course we must be granted purity of heart to see things as they truly are — both humanity and divinity!

Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, is the greatest thinker of all time borne of the Order that created the order of building the Second Order into their structure and mission.

However, the start of his career was not so glamorous.  His parents were outraged he became a Dominican instead of a Benedictine.  At that time, the Dominicans were much less established, much less worldly, and much more zealous.  His parents locked him in a tower.  In an attempt to make him break his vow of chastity and give up his vocation due to discouragement, his brothers introduced a beautiful scantily clad prostitute into his room.

Thomas Aquinas seized a burning brand from the wall and drove the young woman out of the room.  He soon thereafter fell into a deep sleep.  He dreamed that two angels bound a cord around his waist saying: “On God’s behalf, we gird you with the girdle of chastity, a girdle which no attack will ever destroy.”  Thomas Aquinas, armed with this mighty gift, penned the Summa Theologica, a treatise besides which all other philosophical and theological treatises seem amateurish.  But in the end, he was granted a vision of God.  He cast down his pen and said that all his philosophy and theology was straw compared to the truth about God.  The beatitude came true in his own life.  He saw the face of God.

Do we want to understand humanity and the mysteries of God (such as are intelligible to our feeble minds)?  Do we wish to see our human beings as they truly are without the scales that guard our sight?  Do we wish to understand faith, history, and public policy?  Do we wish to see the face of God?

Then we must seek the virtue of Chastity with a passion.

Lord, that I may see!