Great quote from philosopher Sidney Hook

On Instapundit: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/352138/

On this day in 1902, philosopher Sidney Hook was born.  Once a Marxist himself, he became one the world’s fiercest critics of communism and totalitarianism in all its manifestations.  Of his change of heart, he wrote:  “I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.” 

Some clarifications on the automatic penalties due to pro-choice Catholic polticians

Recently, I was reading a discussion on Catholic politicians like Biden and Pelosi who support abortion, where people were disagreeing on whether they were already excommunicated by the Church.  I felt the conversation was missing some key distinctions, so I compiled the following list of what I hope are clarifying questions and answers on the topic:

1. Are you automatically excommunicated for obstinate heresy or must your bishop excommunicate you?

According to canon 1364, you are automatically excommunicated for heresy.  This applies without the need for any intervention on the part of your bishop.  *However*, automatic excommunication is different from formal excommunication. Here's a quote from Canonist Dr. Peters on this distinction:

"Most consequences of excommunication become relevant in the external forum only if the excommunication is “imposed or declared”. That short, technical phrase means that, while one who is “automatically” excommunicated labors under the personal burdens of this sanction, it is only when an excommunication is “formal” that actions performed by canonical criminals raise questions for Church life and governance." (https://canonlawblog.wordpress.com/2015/09/26/automatic-censures-should-be-eliminated-from-church-law/)

Note that Peters is a passionate opponent of automatic censures in canon law and thinks that they should be abolished (and I think he's probably right), but nonetheless, he does not deny that they exist.

2. If you are automatically excommunicated due to obstinate heresy, shouldn't priests deny communion to all heretics?

No.  As mentioned, "latae sententiae" excommunication does not carry with it "external forum" consequences.  So, those conscious of heresy should not approach Holy Communion, but until the excommunication is made formal, priests don't have the right to presuppose such an excommunication.  However, there are other reasons aside from a known excommunication for which a priest can or must deny Communion which could easily apply at the same time (see below).

3. Is denial of Church teaching on abortion heresy and thus grounds for automatic excommunication?

Yes, *I* think so, but it's very arguable.  Some people have here confused the strict theological definition of heresy (which sometimes restricts "heresy" to those errors which are opposed to historically, formally, infallibly defined doctrines) with the canonical definition of heresy, which is the denial of doctrines which "must be believed by divine and Catholic faith".  There has never been a formal definition of a doctrine on abortion by an infallible act of the extraordinary Magisterium, but not all doctrines which must be believed by divine and Catholic faith have such formal definitions.  Others might disagree here, so I don't insist on this answer.

4. Supposing you're wrong about the heretical status of support for abortion.  Is a politician nevertheless automatically excommunicated for supporting abortion politically?

No, I think just for heresy.  *But* there are non-excommunication penalties that *will* apply to them automatically.

Here I think people are confused by Canon 915 which applies the penalty of exclusion from Communion to a range of people which includes those who are "obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin."  This *does* include politicians who support abortion through lawmaking, but is *not* an excommunication.  Exclusion from Communion is also the most serious and evident penalty of an excommunication, but it is not excommunication itself.  Meanwhile, Canon 1398 *does* apply automatic excommunication for those who *procure* an abortion (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P57.HTM), but this doesn't apply to those who campaign for its legality.  (Well, I suppose you could make that argument, but I think it's weak.)

So the important distinction here is that a canonical exclusion from Holy Communion is not the same thing as excommunication, and different Canons govern when each of those things happen.

5. So maybe a politician won't be excommunicate for supporting abortion, but he will nevertheless be excluded from Holy Communion?

Yes, definitely.

6. Does exclusion from Holy Communion for politicians who support abortion happen automatically, or does a bishop have to institute a process?

It happens automatically, as specified in Canon 915.  What is necessary is grave, manifest, public sin, and political support for abortion fulfills all of those conditions.  There has been a lot of confusion on this topic, but it has been well clarified by the CDF here: https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/worthiness-to-receive-holy-communion-general-principles-2153, for example.  For much more information on this subject, Dr. Peters has an entire resource page devoted to Canon 915: http://www.canonlaw.info/canonlaw915.htm.  So, yes, absolutely Biden should be excluded from Holy Communion and no further act of a bishop is necessary for this to happen.  Again, though: not the same thing as an excommunication.

7. Since Biden has not been formally been charged with heresy or excommunicated, should we refrain from publicly calling him out as a "bad Catholic"?

This is my opinion, but I think definitely not.  A large part of the point behind "latae sententiae" penalties (and especially exclusion from Holy Communion) for figures who publicly promote grave sin is to head off scandal.  If public figures are allowed to flaunt Church teaching and yet (also publicly) receive Holy Communion, many people are going to wonder if the Church really teaches the doctrine that is being contradicted.  By having this strict and automatic penalties in the Law, the Church is making a very strong statement: "hey, whoever does this is *not* living according to the mind of the Church".  In other words, it's an ecclesiastical way of saying, "you can't be Catholic and pro-choice", without having to go through the whole legal trial process every time for every famous pro-choice Catholic.

From that perspective, Catholics calling out duplicitous politicians like Biden on this issue seem to me to be fulfulling exactly the intention of the law.

Interesting theory on desertification

I thought this was an interesting theory on the causes behind desertification and a possible way to combat it:

Quick summary: open plains develop naturally in conjunction with large herds of bunched-up, migratory herbivores.  The soil churn, grass flattening, and manure provided by these transitory herds is a key element of allowing the grasslands to retain moisture.

He's done trial runs using cattle to reclaim near-desert soils that he claims were successful.

I haven't done any research beyond watching his video to get a better idea of how plausible or not his ideas are, but I think they're interesting and worth some initial exploration.

Weakness as weapon

In my previous post, I noted that one of the guiding principles behind "chivalry" was that the strong should protect the weak.  With the selection of Greta Thunberg as Time's "Person of the Year", I am again reminded of a very anti-chivalric principle, which is that it is effective to use the weak to attack the decent.

Greta Thunberg clearly adds nothing substantial to the climate change discussion; she is too young to have any expertise worth listening to, and nothing she is saying is new anyway.  She is--quite clearly--simply a tool: a rhetorical device used by her enablers as a strategy to influence opinion.  Sincere and motivated youth inspire sympathy in adults, and since they are students and not experts, we count their effort and enthusiasm a lot more than we count their results or their actual wisdom.  And we are naturally and unreflectively protective of children; we hate people who pick on them.

And this is the whole point of the bizarre concept of the "moral authority of the victim": that if you choose someone whom it is not decent to attack to make your argument for you, then your argument will become unassailable.  It's an odd tactic: a sort of reverse implied "ad hominem".  This is not a strategy for actual reasoned argument, of course--it's a strategy for shutting down your opponent by making it indecent for him to fight back. 

The natural counterpoint to this strategy is therefore to abandon decency.  It is only to be expected that people should begin to rhetorically attack Greta in public despite the fact that she is just a child, precisely because she is being used as a tactical shield to forestall criticism.  And are we going to let people get away with this sort of a tactic?  Well, not in today's coarse internet culture, no!  And you can blame internet culture for its crudeness and its abandonment of social niceties if you like, but we have to recognize that the blame starts with people who choose to use weakness as a weapon in the first place.

So while Greta is being promoted as some sort of hero, in reality she is being used.  Her selection by Time magazine as "Person of the Year" was simply another instance of this:  Time decided it wanted to pitch in and help the group effort of using a sympathetic child to push an environmentalist agenda.   I find the whole thing distasteful, however, and destructive of the reasoned conversation I wish we were having instead.

Steyn on the damage feminism's cultural changes have wrought

Here's a post from Mark Steyn I found powerful.  It's about the "Montreal Massacre", about which I knew nothing until reading his post, in which fourteen women college students were killed after all of the men in their class simply walked away at the order of a crazed gunman.  Steyn takes this story as symptomatic of the loss of masculine spine in modern culture:

https://www.steynonline.com/9892/men-walked-away

Here's an extended quote I found particularly powerful:

When another Canadian director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him were the alleged betrayals of convention. It's supposed to be "women and children first", but he was obsessed with toffs cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In real life, First Officer William Murdoch threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship – the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron's movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer's home town in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.) Mr Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise. "An alien landed" on the deck of a luxury liner – and men had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, and watch them clamber into the lifeboats to sail off without them. The social norm of "women and children first" held up under pressure. 

Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our "gender-neutral society", there are no social norms. Eight decades after the Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived to tell the tale. But the distribution of the survivors was very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children first? No female under 15 or over 65 made it. Only five per cent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors were young men. Forty-three per cent of men aged 20-24 made it.

"There is no law that says women and children first," Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine. "That is something from the age of chivalry."

If, by "the age of chivalry", you mean the early 20th century.

 There's a lot to unpack from this comparison.  Here are my thoughts:

1. In Titanic, again we see the reinterpretation of history in the hands of filmmakers in order to fit a particular worldview, and this in one of the most watched films of all time.
2. In the "women and children first" rule, one of the first principles of "chivalry" is revealed: the point is that the strong should protect the weak.  It is, of course, very improper nowadays to say anything to imply that woman is the "weaker sex", but when reality interposes itself upon ideology, ideology always has to give way.  If you forbid all sexual discrimination as contrary to polite thought, then it really has to be "every man or woman for themselves" in a crisis--and then because of irreducible differences of biology, almost three times as many men will survive.

The whole article is worth reading.

Important discussion on China and rare earth

Good discussion on recent moves by China to leverage its dominance in rare earth production, and how this attempt may not be working.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uV5fvSZFoE&feature=em-uploademail&fbclid=IwAR2ah8YLOn9jNVW8_5nswlck_ijVHjj9nYz9QY8dym3tnbzOspsHm-qvz6k

By the way, the environmental impacts of mining rare earths is one of the best reasons to consider moving heavy industrial production into space eventually, as Jeff Bezos has advocated:

https://timesofsandiego.com/tech/2019/11/23/jeff-bezos-in-san-diego-to-save-planet-move-all-heavy-industry-into-space/

David Gibson, plaintiff in the Oberlin lawsuit, has died

This is a very good retrospective on his character and the controversy in which he became involved: https://quillette.com/2019/12/02/on-the-passing-of-oberlin-plaintiff-david-gibson/

I think this story is important for a few reasons:

1. I think it's important that many people know what a decent person David Gibson actually was.  Part of the damage that echo-chamber, ideology driven culture does is that we reduce people to caricatures that fit our narratives.  David Gibson was clearly wronged by this impulse.  He was  a White Man who Called the Cops on Young Black Men--and therefore subjected to all the race-war social justice theories Oberlin incubates.  In cases where the narrative takes precedence over reality and smears a decent person (Covington Catholic kid is yet another example), I think it's important to loudly correct the record.  This article does so.
2. David Gibson's actions strike me as an example of a very American sort of virtue: anybody shoplifting gets the police called on them, because nobody's above the law and everybody gets treated equally.  BUT, he'll work with you and the police: get a lecture, promise to try to be good, the charge will be reduced.  It's a small-town, do-it-yourself, personal-communication-based approach to crime and recidivism.  I like this a lot, because ultimately it's people and not programs who make a difference in troubled lives.  People who think in terms of grand social schemes to reduce inequality and crime overlook this type of approach at their peril.
3. It's still really mind-boggling how Oberlin could have gotten itself into this situation.  It would have been so easy for them to have apologized as requested, and it should have been easy for it to see that it was the right thing to do.  How a collection of supposedly elite intellects could have been so ridiculously wrong and blind about it is a question that demands to be answered.  Sadly, I don't see any impulse among the people who matter to ask this question of themselves.  The universities marinate in absurd ideology and have long lost the ability to honestly grapple with reality outside of it.

What's wrong with most Catholic statuary

We've recently gotten a new family altar, which in turn has prompted me to look around for some new statuary that would be a better size for the new altar.  My impression from this search, alas, has been of a sea of crap with very few stand-out good items and nothing that I really want to buy.

So I thought that I would analyze and describe what it is about all the Catholic statuary that I don't like.  Maybe someone who reads this can then point me in the direction of truly good items?

My dislike of what I'm seeing on the marketplace can be boiled down to a few distinct kinds of problems:

Cheapness

I'm lumping several defects together into this category that might not seem related at first.  In my mind, what they all have in common is that they offend the primary status that sacred objects should have.  Holiness is how we are related to our first end: that which is, or should be, of primary and utmost importance in our lives.  To be satisfied with that which is badly done or second rate is incongruous with this fact.

I'd like to identify three separate types of "cheapness" here that all offend me:

Cheapness of Craft, aka poor quality art:

This is the most obvious kind and easy to find.  Here's an example:

Made with all the care and attention of a G.I. Joe action figure!  Comes with bonus pious superstition!  Crappy crayola paint job sold separately.

It's just a really cheap, plasticky . . . thing.  Granted, it's meant to be buried head-down, but still, it's not unrepresentative of so much that's out there.

Also very common to find are very sloppy coloring jobs.  I think I can say that *most* sacred statuary looks like it just stepped out of a child's coloring book.

Cheapness of Color

I put this in a separate category because it afflicts even expensive or very carefully made items.  What do I mean here by "cheapness" with respect to color?  Objectively, what I mean is colors that do not convey a sense of solidity, reverence, transcendence, royalty, or divinity.  Subjectively, for me this means mostly pastels.  I love blood reds, deep midnight blues, solid mahogany browns, and so forth.  Most of the "antique" statues I run into, unfortunately, as well as pretty much all of the old holy cards I see run into the "pastel" problem.

Cheapness of Emotion

All statues are supposed to raise our hearts and mind to God.  So many of them, though, try to do so via the cheapest of emotions: evoking sentimentality, not serenity or solemnity.

When I will need the emotional aid of Catholic art on my family altar the most is in the difficult times.  When my wife dies, or if I lose my job, or for whatever reason my life is falling apart and I'm on my knees and begging for help, I don't want to look up into the face of an image of Our Lady with some Pollyanna, sweet, girlish smile.  I will want the face of the Woman who fought alongside her Son against Satan at the foot of the Cross, who crushed his head beneath her feet when she held her broken and bloodied Son in her arms on Calvary and then laid Him in His tomb, and who now beholds the face of God in unsullied glory for all eternity.  That is the woman for whom no burden I might now or ever bring to her would be too much.  Not . . . whatever this is:

"Poor sweetie . . . here, have an Immaculate Heart-shaped lollipop, it will cheer you up!"

Excessive Humanism

Now we come to a different type of criticism, because what I'm criticizing here isn't something I dislike per se; it's something I dislike in the specific context of an altar piece.  There are different ways to portray saints that are along an axis (call it the historical/theological axis), where one end of the axis emphasizes the humanity of the saint as a real historical person and the other end of the axis emphasizes the royalty and divinity of the internal grace within the saint.  The books of the Bible themselves can also be categorized along this axis.

For an altar piece, I think a theological image is more appropriate.  I don't have anything against more humanistic pieces, such as this:

Actually not the best thing Fontanini has done, but you get the idea.  The poses are what really convey the sense of ordinary reality and the "precious moments" of daily life. Nice.  Not sacred.

In fact I like the Fontanini stuff and I think it's very appropriate for a Nativity set, which is why in fact we have a Fontanini Nativity.  It is, however, not my idea of sacred statuary, whereas many statues of this style are being sold as such.

In contrast, I would ask of my statuary that they portray the saints as being otherworldly.  On a fundamental level, grace is not natural to human beings, and receiving grace elevates us beyond the level of this world.  Something about a statue that portrays a saint as an individual in whom the Blessed Trinity dwells should reflect that; it should evoke the supernatural or at least the heroic.

Excess Wealth

Here I am going to depart from many of my Catholic contemporaries.  I think a lot of other Catholics could read the above criticisms and nod their heads in agreement.  And I think a lot of them might say something like, "Icons!  You're describing icons as what you like.  Rich colors, gold trim, faces intentionally imbued with profundity, and aimed at deep theological contemplation."

Yeah, but . . . unfortunately, I dislike pretty much all Eastern iconography.

Why?  Well, partially this is just a preference thing that may not completely explainable. But I do have some reasons as well that I think are objective and that I can articulate.

First of all, I dislike what I consider to be an objective lack of skill in Eastern iconography.  I know that the flat, two-dimensional style in Eastern icons is defended as having an intrinsic theological meaning of some sort, deeply steeped in tradition, etc.  The problem is that I think what is really the truth is that Byzantine icons retain a painting method from a particular time period (secular paintings from that period, after all, have basically the same style of human portrayal, thus disproving the idea that this style was somehow intentionally theological originally).  Furthermore, this style of painting is objectively less skilled at portraying humans than the levels to which Baroque and Renaissance artists attained in the West.  So I cannot see these styles of paintings as anything other than second rate in some sense, thus subjecting them all to my first criticism.

But I think a reason that impacts me even more than this is what I perceive of as the fussiness of the Byzantine style.  You can get icons that have only a face or a scene, but they are rare to find.  Instead, what you frequently get is a face, plus text, plus some corner scenes, plus a very elaborate gold gild of some sort, etc.  I feel that aesthetically, most Byzantine art falls into the opposite error compared to the "cheap" art I complained about above.  It's not at all cheap, but it is wealthy.  It overflows with bits and bobs intending to convey value and status.  Pretty much every collection of icons I've ever seen with more than, say, two icons in it has deserved to be called "sacred bling".

This sort of thing culminates in such scenes as this, the iconostasis of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem:

Also known as the "Basilica of Holy Sensory Overload", I believe.

which some people think is wonderful, but I find hideous.  I can't help but look at that image and think of Mr. T--but of the two, I find Mr. T more tasteful.

"Be attentive to THIS, fool!"

Conclusion

So there you go: those are my problems with Catholic sacred art that's available for the home.  Have I found anything good, given all these problems?  Well, really not much at all.  What good I have found has been bedeviled by other problems, such as sizes not matching my needs or the style of a Mary not matching that of a Joseph.  I want to include at least one statue that does meet my criteria, at least to a certain extent.  Here's a statue of St. Michael I think is quite nice actually: not perfect, but good.  If I could find a whole set of statues in that style, I would get it:

"But what about the cartoonish Satan?"  "Yeah, maybe not the best, but it's being *stabbed by a sword*, so it's symbolic of my frustration with bad art. Win, win."